Radio Under Fire

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 5

Radio Under Fire

T is nearly always beneficial for a public service to come under fire; especially if the shooting is straight and the bullets are clean. This has happened to the National Broadcasting Service in a booklet written by Ormond Wilson. Mr. Wilson has had experience of broadcasting from the inside in London and (mainly) from the outside in Wellington, and a comparison of policies in the BBC and NBS has left him unhappy and critical. So he has exercised his right as a free New Zealander, and accepted his responsibility as a leisured one, by putting his complaints on paper. What's Wrong with Broadcasting?* is a series of sharp but not unreasonable questions to which he is fair enough to give his own answers. It is well written and well argued and will do a great deal of good. In the NBS in particular it will be felt as a contribution to the consideration of several difficult problems and as a relief from the ill-informed, irrational, and usually pointless criticism that fills so many letters of complaint, But Mr. Wilson should have given a little more thought to his title. It can hardly have been his purpose to suggest that there is nothing right with broadcasting in New Zealand, or even that it is seldom right, but the effect of such a title on most people is to suggest just that. It is a blanket question which either means nothing at all, since there is no answer to it except from omniscience, or it means far too much to the ill-informed and illdisposed. What is wrong with broadcasting in New Zealand is what is wrong with it everywhere, fundamentally: it is a new technique which the world does not yet know how to use wisely. We have done one or two things with it, in New Zealand which are new, and broadly successful; but we have also made some pretty bad blunders. It is certainly not true, however, as Mr. Wilson’s title will encourage the foolish to think, that broadcasting in New Zealand is doing nothing right or even reasonably well, or that broadcasting in other countries has no problems or critics. *WHAT’S WRONG WITH BROADCASTING? A Plan for Radio in New Zealand. By Ormond Wilson. Paul’s Book Arcade Litd., Hamilton.