Millions If We Listen

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 270, 25 August 1944, Page 5

Millions If We Listen

‘AST year the people of New Zealand were asked to lend 35 million pounds for war purposes and subscribed 41 mil-lions-a great deal of it in response to appeals by radio. This year they are being asked for 40 millions, and whether they give more or less than that, radio will again play a big part in the result. We explain on another page how the radio campaign will begin, but if it is to be as successful as the cause’ requires listeners will have to do more than listen. They will have to dip into their pockets and then dip again, if there is any lingering doubt in their minds about their capacity to give a little more. They will have to organise themselves into collecting groups, and they will have to co-operate both as employers and as employees in plans for combined giving. They will have to do many other things if the millions are to mount as they should out of our relatively great abundance. But listening is the beginning of the story. Unless people tune in to this campaign they will be shirking their responsibilities as definitely as if they were service shirkers or fakers of income-tax returns. For if radio has its disadvantages as an agent of culture it is quite indispensable as a medium of publicity. The problem in culture is to know whose needs and standards come first; but in publicity (of the kind we are now discussing) the same message goes to all and is believed by all whom it reaches, and the problem begins and ends with reducing those who ‘are not reached to the smallest possible proportion of the population. It is a mass appeal, and radio’s is the best mass voice civilisation has so — far discovered. It may not be the > most persuasive voice .sometimes, or the most convincing, but it is the loudest and the most penetrating, and where all hold the same opinion, carrying capacity is all that is required. That, and some receptiveness. Radio can’t speak to us through switched-off sets. We must be willing to listen or we shall hear nothing at all; and in that case the name for us is not conscientious objectors but conscienceless evaders.