1948 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

The Smith-Mundt Act (U.S. Information and Education Act) adopted by Congress January 27 funds Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts to foreign countries on a permanent basis as part of an overseas information program to coordinate State Department propaganda under the Office of International Information (see 1942; 1943). The VOA added Russian language programming last year, will add Ukrainian next year, and beginning in 1951 will add Azerbaijan, Estonian, Georgian, Hakka, Hebrew, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, and Tatar. Sponsored by Sen. H. (Howard) Alexander Smith, 67, (R. N.J.) and Sen. Karl E. (Earl) Mundt, 47, (R. S.D.), the new law expressly prohibits any domestic dissemination of government propaganda (see Radio Free Europe, 1949; USIA, 1953).

A Greek boatman discovers the body of CBS foreign correspondent George W. Polk floating in the bay of Salonika May 16. Shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, the 34-year-old journalist has been missing for a week, having come to northern Greece for an interview with Menkos Vafiades, head of a communist-led insurgent group in the country's ongoing civil war. Polk has criticized both sides in the conflict, calling the communist guerillas "thugs," accusing the Greek government of greed and corruption, and questioning U.S. government support of a repressive, right-wing regime that is receiving $1 million per day in aid from Washington. An Athens court will convict Greek journalist Gregoris Staktopoulus, now 34, of Polk's murder in April of next year and sentence him to life imprisonment, Long Island University will establish the George Polk Award for outstanding journalism next year, and although many will condemn the investigation by Greek security police as a whitewash and say that Staktopoulus "confessed" after 2 months of torture its finding will be endorsed by Polk's CBS colleagues Winston Burdett and John Secondari, CBS chairman William Paley, and publisher Eugene Meyer, as well as by columnists Walter Lippmann and James Reston.

Cybernetics by Columbia, Mo.-born MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, 53, summarizes results of studies in communication and information control. Derived from the Greek word for steersman, Wiener's title will come into common use to cover the whole field of information control by automated machines such as computers while Wiener works over the next 16 years to elaborate on the possibilities of cybernetics and warn of its dangers (see 1950).

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Michigan-born mathematician Claude (Elwood) Shannon, 32, shows that radios, telegraph keys, human conversation, and all other information sources have a rate at which they produce information, a rate that can be measured (in bits per second) like density, mass, or any other measurable physical quantity. Shannon worked with Vannevar Bush at MIT on Bush's differential analyzer and used Boolean algebra to establish the theoretical underpinnings of digital circuits in his 1940 master's thesis "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits." His new paper builds on seminal work on information theory done at Bell Laboratories in the 1920s by physicist Harry Nyquist, now 59, and R. V. L. Hartley (see Nyquist, 1928).

One million U.S. homes have television sets, up from 5,000 in 1945; the sets are still large cabinets with small screens but programming begins to improve and more TV stations go into operation.

Earl "Madman" Muntz enters the embryonic TV-set business at Los Angeles after a meteoric career as used-car dealer and promoter of Kaiser-Frazer automobiles. The 33-year-old Muntz will pay 400 disk jockeys to plug Muntz TV on radio, print slogans such as "Stop Staring at Your Radio" on the backs of Chicago streetcar transfers, sell as many as 4,500 sets in a single weekend, gross as much as $55 million per year, but be forced into bankruptcy in 1955.

The Electronic Secretary telephone answering machine invented by Milwaukee-born engineer Joseph J. (James) Zimmermann Jr., 36, is an 80-pound device designed to circumvent telephone company rules against letting outsiders install such devices (see Peterson, 1945). American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (AT&T) persuaded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the 1930s to outlaw answering machines on grounds that they could damage the system, but Zimmermann's machine mechanically lifts the receiver off the hook, whereupon a phonograph record plays a message that is sent through the air rather than through wires connected to the phone; the device then records the incoming message onto a strand of wire, shutting down after 30 seconds and returning the receiver to the hook. Illinois Bell buys rights to the machine and leases it to customers (see Ansaphone, 1960).

The Chinese newspaper People's Daily (Renmin Ribao) begins publication in Hebei (Hopei) Province. It will be the Communist Party organ for more than half a century.

The weekly general interest magazine Stern begins publication in West Germany with journalist Henri Nannen, 34, as editor.

U.S. News and World Report begins publication to compete with Time and Newsweek. Editor-columnist David Lawrence, now 59, turned his 7-year-old United States Daily into a weekly United States News in 1933, adopted a magazine format in 1940, has limited editorial comment to a single piece signed by him each week, merges United States News with the World Report that he founded 2 years ago, has an initial circulation base of 378,776, and will edit the periodical until his death in 1973.

"Pogo" makes its debut in the New York Star, successor to the Marshall Field tabloid PM. Philadelphia-born cartoonist Walt (Walter Crawford) Kelly, 35, is a former Walt Disney animator whose Okefenokee Swamp opossum will move to the New York Post upon the demise of the Star next year, and be in 450 papers worldwide by the late 1960s. Commenting on the ecological crisis, Pogo will say, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Publisher James H. McGraw of McGraw-Hill dies of bronchial pneumonia at San Francisco February 21 at age 87; shorthand inventor John R. Gregg at New York February 23 at age 80; journalist-author Will Irwin of a cerebral occlusion at his Greenwich Village, N.Y., apartment February 24 at age 73; Washington Times-Herald publisher Eleanor Medill "Cissy" Patterson of an apparent heart attack while in bed at her Maryland estate outside Marlboro July 24 at age 67.

The Hudson Review begins publication at New York, where it will continue into the 21st century without any academic affiliation or political ideology. Financial backing has come from Princeton graduates Frederick Morgan, Joseph Bennett, and William Arrowsmith, and their literary journal covers news of theater, dance, music, and the visual arts as well as book reviews, essays, and poetry by prominent and little-known writers.

President Truman confounds poll-takers by winning the November election. Both George Gallup and Elmo Roper have followed scholar Paul Lazarsfeld's advice that elections are decided by Labor Day and canceled their polls in the final 2 weeks of the race; the election results also embarrass LIFE magazine (whose November 1 issue has had a cover showing Dewey with a caption identifying him as "the next president"), the Washington Post (whose November 2 issue has run a banner headline saying, "Dewey Deemed Sure Winner Today"), and the Chicago Tribune, which has hit the streets with a front-page headline proclaiming Dewey the winner.