Babel Behaves

The 205 U.S. stations which broadcast in foreign languages (in the first 30 days after Pearl Harbor they put on 6,776 hours of programs in 29 tongues from Rumanian to Meshkwaki*), have finally been brought under one code of wartime behavior.

When the U.S. went to war it became urgent to keep all Axis propaganda and communication off the air. For the half dozen busy Government agencies-FCC, OFF, FBI, Office of Censorship, Army & Navy Intelligence-which cupped ears to the country's own linguistic babel, the question was: what were these U.S. foreign-language stations telling or hinting to their listeners?

FCC did not take the easy way out and crack down on them. It did not do so for good and sufficient reasons. The commission knew that these broadcasters were a potent means of reaching 14,000,000 foreign-born and first-generation Americans, people who might otherwise dial in short-wave programs from Europe in the languages they like to hear. FCC did not have to wait long before it got help from the stations themselves.

Last May the industry formed the Foreign Language Radio Wartime Control, which adopted a code calling for: 1) advance approval of all scripts by the stations; 2) monitoring of all programs; 3) extensive investigation and fingerprinting of personnel; 4) assumption by each station of full responsibility for program content and loyalty of employes. Last fortnight Censor Byron Price's revised code for wartime radio incorporated the rules which the foreign-language stations themselves had made.

*A dialect of the Algonquin tongue Sac and Fox Indians (in Iowa).

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