BROADCASTS TO SCHOOLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 5

BROADCASTS TO SCHOOLS

Sir,-One would expect special care to be taken over the preparation of a broadcast to schools, I happened to hear such a broadcast on June 8, and heard the name of Peer (Gynt) pronounced "pier’-.as if he was a member of the British House of Lords, or perhaps one of the paladins of Charlemagne. (You will agree that he lacked qualification for either position.) A little later somebody called Thule "Thool." Then Sir Edmund Hillary was mentioned without his prefix, although his knighthood had been announced by the same station the day before. Possibly the last error was because the programme had been "canned" two days or more earlier, but the indication was that it had not; it was announced as coming "from the studios of 2YA." (This, come to think of it, is an equivocal statement. Do the ethics of broadcasting require any distinction in announcing to be made between broadcasts transmitted from a voice or instrument present in the transmitting station, and those transmitted from discs or tapes previously prepared? Or is any such question thought to arise only when considerations of copyright apply?) If the programme was recorded the third lapse is explained, but the opportunity for monitoring afforded by pre-recording makes the first and second the more reprehensible. .

AGED LISTENER

(Paekakariki).

(There was a Norwegian programme in the schools’ broadcast on June 5, not June 8; throughout, Peer or Per was pronounced Pare, not Pier. The word did not recur in the programme broadcast on June 8, when Thule was indeed mispronounced Thool. io orge care is taken, yes; and for the lapses that will occur in a of it there is only the excuse pleaded in Johnson’s Preface to his Dictionary.-Ed. )