RadioActive wrote:

 
 
The First Presidential Broadcast Nobody Heard 1943
 
Imagine being the very first president of the U.S. to give a speech on radio – and almost nobody heard it. It happened in the early 40s, when crews were afraid Woodrow Wilson would be scared off by all the remote equipment needed to get him on the air as he toured a Navy ship. So they hid it all, which didn’t exactly work out well.
 
"Woodrow Wilson said in part : "We told our fellow men throughout the world, when we set up the free state of America, that we wanted to serve liberty everywhere and be friends of men. . . ." No one but those within earshot heard more than an occasional word. No one had told Woodrow Wilson about the hookup.

He had spoken, not from the stand, but from a hatchway 20 feet away." 

The article may be from early 1940s but the event it describes would have been sometime before Wilson left office in 1921 - likely before his stroke in 1919. Wilson was long dead by the early 1940s and FDR had been on the radio plenty of times in the 1930s with his Fireside chats (as had presidents preceding him. 

CBC’s Politically Correct Language, 1939

 Turns out, being politically correct isn’t just for the modern era. And leave it to the CBC to bring it up way back in 1939.
 
“No longer, for instance, should Canadian announcers refer to singers as silver, golden, or velvet-voiced; no longer should they use such hard-worked adjectives as magnificent, superb or famous; to be shunned are Hollywoodisms like genius, glamor.” 

That doesn't sound like political correctness as much as avoiding cliches - something both broadcasters and print journalists are prone to if they're not careful. 
 

Last edited by Hansa (February 27, 2024 1:08 pm)

Hansa wrote:

RadioActive wrote:

 
 
The First Presidential Broadcast Nobody Heard 1943
 
Imagine being the very first president of the U.S. to give a speech on radio – and almost nobody heard it. It happened in the early 40s, when crews were afraid Woodrow Wilson would be scared off by all the remote equipment needed to get him on the air as he toured a Navy ship. So they hid it all, which didn’t exactly work out well.
 
"Woodrow Wilson said in part : "We told our fellow men throughout the world, when we set up the free state of America, that we wanted to serve liberty everywhere and be friends of men. . . ." No one but those within earshot heard more than an occasional word. No one had told Woodrow Wilson about the hookup.

He had spoken, not from the stand, but from a hatchway 20 feet away." 

The article may be from early 1940s but the event it describes would have been sometime before Wilson left office in 1921 - likely before his stroke in 1919. Wilson was long dead by the early 1940s and FDR had been on the radio plenty of times in the 1930s with his Fireside chats (as had presidents preceding him. 

You're right, but I was going by the date of the article and missed that. I'm unsure why it was misdated. What's really weird, as I reconsider this, is that Wilson was out of office by 1921 - two years before Time was first published. So how this got into their archives in an article written in the present tense is another mystery. 

BowmanvilleBob wrote:

Wilson, who died in 1924, made the brief radio address on the eve of what was known as Armistice Day (now known in Canada as Remembrance Day or Veterans Day in the U.S.) in 1923 to lament the fact that the U.S. was unwilling to join the League of Nations, which was the precursor to the current United Nations. Ironic that more than 100 years later, certain right wing factions in the United States are pushing for the country to back away from international organizations like NATO. It's a classic case of what goes around comes around. 
 

Interestingly, that's not actually the broadcast TIME was referring to. The article was published Monday, May 10, 1943 but the incident occurred in 1919:

 Radio: The Voice That Failed
The little-known story of the first U.S. Presidential radio broadcast was told last week in Movie-Radio Guide.

President Wilson was aboard the liner George Washington, returning from the Versailles Peace Conference. It had been announced that on the Fourth of July (1919) he would address the crews of all the convoying ships. The significance of this communication was noted by only a handful of newfangled thinkers — radio men. Most U.S. newspaper editors, buried the news among their gall bladder ads.

Engineers John H. Payne and Harold H. Beverage (now of General Electric and RCA respectively) rigged up the equipment. President Wilson's advisers insisted that the microphone be concealed: they were afraid it would make the President nervous. The engineers therefore hid the device in a cluster of flags.

Woodrow Wilson said in part : "We told our fellow men throughout the world, when we set up the free state of America, that we wanted to serve liberty everywhere and be friends of men. . . ." No one but those within earshot heard more than an occasional word.

No one had told Woodrow Wilson about the hookup.He had spoken, not from the stand, but from a hatchway 20 feet away.

The Presidential radio debut had been a flop. But four days later Woodrow Wilson used the contraption to talk to his Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Washington — a gentleman who was to become the most celebrated radio figure in history.

Last edited by Hansa (February 27, 2024 3:15 pm)

There aren't too many stations that are daytime only anymore, but this story from back when there were a lot of them, is brilliant. It, too, is from Time's archives. 

Call it: How to make money when you're signing off the air. Seriously, I love this idea. 

RadioActive wrote:

One more from the archives and it's something I'm pretty sure most of us never knew. The American Broadcasting Company used to be known as The Blue Network in its early radio days, an offshoot of NBC. But when it decided to go on its own, it changed the name to ABC.

Problem? There already were two radio networks using those letters and they didn't want to give them up. One of them, The Associated Broadcasting Company, sued. And the network now known as ABC bought those now famous three letter rights for $25,000. Considering what a giant they are now and how iconic those letters have become, that's getting off pretty cheap!

Not So Simple As ABC

A similar situation happened in 1976 to NBC when the network replaced its snake logo with an abstract "N" consisting of a red and blue trapezoid. Nebraska ETV filed a trademark infringement lawsuit. They had been using the virtually identical logos since June 1975. The only cosmetic difference between the two designs was the right trapezoid of the NBC logo had blue colouring. An out of court settlement was reached in which NBC gave Nebraska ETV $800,000 worth of new equipment plus $55,000 to cover the cost of designing a new logo. Only three years later, the now white "N" was combined with an 11 feathered, six colour, peacock.