Today I offer four quotes about the decline of narrative audio. With apologies to Sesame Street, see if you can tell which quote is not like the others.

1. “Requiring months (and sometimes years) of reporting and an exhaustive writing and editing process, they were expensive to produce and struggled to attract enough advertising to pay for their budgets.”

2. “A celebrity talk show has kept me company on walks, but it has never shocked me out of hazy malaise and made me feel more curious about the world, less alone, or in awe. I have never listened to one and been surprised.”

3. “The golden age need not have ended when it did. It did not die of natural causes… It was manipulated to a halt. It was sedated, and it was sent into exile.”

4. “This is not because new and astonishing things aren’t possible in this medium, but because the people with the money and the ability to make decisions have lost interest in doing that work.”

Here, you can even vote for a winner!

And the winner is…

The first quote above is from Who Killed the Narrative Podcast? by Eric Benson, host and reporter of Project Unabom, among other great projects. Benson’s new piece in Rolling Stone is a post-mortem for the brief era when journalistic reportage and money shacked up in the world of audio.

Unfortunately The Future of Podcasting is Here, and It Sucks, as producer Alex Sujong Laughlin of Defector laments in both the second and fourth quotes above. Laughlin noticed that a lot innovative work seems to be behind us, a conclusion that seemed unavoidable after this survey of GOAT podcasts pointed to many shows that now reside in dead feeds, made by companies that no longer exist. 

But spicy quote #3, the one about the golden age, is our winner. It’s not like the others because it goes all the way back to 1974. The man who said it was Norman Corwin. I cheated a little above; here’s what he actually said in full:

I’ve written about Corwin elsewhere — he was a giant in the age of live broadcast drama, someone often called “the poet laureate of radio.” And I hope my little guessing game doesn’t offend anyone. Both Benson and Laughlin have written trenchant pieces on what’s happened to the podcasting business, and I’m not wedging Corwin into the conversation in order to make some kind of point that our current hype-to-bankruptcy cycle was inevitable. 

Rather, I think Corwin, despite being dead and all, adds something more. He was a poet, arguably one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, although he’s rarely credited that way. And because he was a poet, he had no choice but to write his way through the worst era of his life, when his successful run was cut short by the pressures of commercialism, video and political conformism.

“I didn’t leave radio; radio left me,” Corwin often said. But the whole time it was leaving him, he took extensive notes. There’s a lot we can learn from what he noticed.

A poet and mogul on a train

The moment Corwin felt things unravel happened on a train in July 1948. He was on board the eastbound Santa Fe Chief, a favored cross-country shuttle for the entertainment set. 

Corwin was by then well-known for his incredible, audio-phonic verse and range of work. Actors adored his scripts, and he won prestigious awards and rare prizes. Corwin radio plays bookended US involvement in World War II: We Hold These Truths, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, ran on four radio networks simultaneously and ended with a live speech by President Roosevelt; On a Note of Triumph ran on VE Day, May 8, 1945, and created such a powerful response from listeners that it was published as a book and commemorative album, both of which sold out immediately.

But that evening three years later on the Santa Fe Express, Corwin was not feeling triumphant any more:

Paley was William “Bill” Paley, the head of CBS. Corwin had run into him, along with Paley’s new wife, on the platform in California. It turned out they were all heading to New York on the same train. Paley invited Corwin to lunch in the dining car the following day. 

Bill Paley was a big deal, but not yet the famous head of CBS TV later depicted in countless books, lightly fictionalized exposés, and Broadway plays. Back in 1948, Norman Corwin would have seemed more famous than Bill Paley to most members of the public. And Bill Paley was not exactly his boss — Corwin was an independent writer who’d brought a ton of prestige and goodwill to the network for a decade. Still, Corwin wasn’t getting commissions like he used to. He sensed that Paley, for all his charm, was jilting him.

Over a salad in the dining car the next day, Paley confirmed his fears. “You know,” he said (according to Corwin, the only source for this conversation), “you’ve done big things that are appreciated by us and by a special audience, but couldn’t you write for a broader public? That’s what we’re going to need more and more. We’ve simply got to face up to the fact that we’re in a commercial business, and it’s getting tougher all the time.”

Corwin had always written what the network called “sustaining programs” — programs in time slots that couldn’t find sponsors, programs that served the “public interest” requirement that the FCC haphazardly enforced against the networks. Paley was clearly proud of sustaining programs like the innovative Columbia Workshop and the wartime plays that Corwin wrote and directed.

But now he was changing his whole business model. Prestige was out, raw competition was in. Paley had been in LA to persuade NBC’s top star, comedian Jack Benny, to leave NBC. The head of CBS was determined to acquire all the stars — Bing Crosby, the Blackface minstrel show Amos’n’Andy, game shows — anything with proven appeal to a broad public. Money was no object, and Corwin was being asked to join this new and improved CBS — on its terms.

Paley’s new look did succeed. Within a few years, after his “talent raids,” CBS became the number one US radio network. It took that momentum into television, pumping out hit shows for decades and building a new form of prestige around its news and documentary divisions. But it didn’t include dramas built upon the kind of poetic sensibility Corwin brought to radio.

All hollow tokens

Paley was gracious to Corwin on that train trip — he trusted him with a great deal of insider information and also invited him on a yacht trip on Lake Michigan during a layover in Chicago (Corwin found it extremely boring). Speaking decades later to oral historian Douglas Bell, Corwin had to admit that he understood the kind of pressures Paley was facing. 

Corwin first recorded this story of the train encounter in an oral history with his old friend Erik Barnouw at Columbia University. When Douglas Bell asked Corwin about it much later, he revealed that he’d started an autobiography with the anecdote. Most of what I’ve quoted here are bits of writing that Corwin gave to Bell to include in his book Years of the Electric Ear. In the end, Corwin never did publish an autobiography. And maybe it’s for the best, because he was really hard on himself that day on the train. The whole thing would have been a strange and self-pitying place to start a life story, especially given the life he’d had.

What I value about all this, especially in our NDA-suppressed era, is Corwin’s honesty. He had been an outsider who had, through a combination of immense talent, hard work, and luck, become an insider for an incredible run.

But now the feeling of being an outsider returned in force. Most of Corwin’s account of the train ride is just a brutal internal monologue.

For a decade, Corwin had been killing himself, metaphorically and almost actually, for the CBS that Bill Paley ran, because he loved the work and the network had given him free rein to do it. Now that it no longer wanted his kind of work, Corwin experienced a huge wave of insecurity, one that I think by now resonates with almost everyone in media. When we are told to stop making good, successful things; when we are laid off, or fed the kind of praise-insult sandwich that Corwin got from Paley, our first natural reaction is to turn on ourselves. At least that feels like something we can control.

But insecurity also came for Bill Paley in the end — or at least, his type of insecurity became too obvious to ignore in later years, as he clung to his post well past his prime, creating succession and sometimes PR nightmares for the company.

“Lear-like, Mr. Paley ultimately subverted and ruined CBS, the thing he loved above all else — besides himself,” Christopher Buckley wrote in 1990, the year Paley died. When you look now at what’s become of the network, it’s hard not to think that he could have left it in a better place.

Norman Corwin outlived his former boss by 21 years. After refusing to renew his contract with CBS, he worked for the United Nations. He wrote a screenplay about Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life. He mentored writers like Norman Lear and Ray Bradbury, and actors like William Shatner. He taught at USC Annenberg for decades. He was the subject of an Oscar-winning short film. He even got a Lifetime Achievement award from independent radio producers at the Third Coast festival in 2005. He did not come in person to accept it. He was 95, after all. He would live to the age 101, fiery to the end, just as the word “podcast” had started to become louder than a whisper.

Corwin wrote and spoke about his encounter with Bill Paley in 1948 not because it ruined his life. But it was emblematic, and meaningful emblems were his stock in trade. He never stopped urging media to embrace the poetic power of the spoken word. He believed the way radio could use words had the potential for reverence, and people deserved that, to participate in making meaning together with the voices they heard.

Like many who came after, Bill Paley sat atop an empire of electrons and turned them into cash. But Norman Corwin knew what they were worth. And so, he teaches us, can we.

🔥🔥🔥

News you’re not getting—until now.

Join 4M+ professionals who start their day with Morning Brew—the free newsletter that makes business news quick, clear, and actually enjoyable.

Each morning, it breaks down the biggest stories in business, tech, and finance with a touch of wit to keep things smart and interesting.

Check it out