The Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin

3.2.0 The Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin

It has become commonplace in cultural studies for some time to view cultural consumption as a central agency for popular social empowerment, and thus as a locus for questions of agency and practice (Berland 1992: 42). It is arguable, however, that some highly valuable work in reception studies nevertheless tends to neglect the specificity of reception contexts, and the “spatio-temporal dimensionality” (ibid, p. 42) of the process of consumption. Sonia Livingstone (1999) has addressed this very issue, by seeking to bring to audience or reception studies the wider perspective of “writers in the phenomenological tradition” – in this case, Goffman (1969), Meyrowitz (1986) and Thompson (1995) - who have combined an awareness of the social context of interpersonal communication with an interest in how media affect space-time relations and create forms of co-presence. Livingstone finds that their work offers an “audience-centred framework” which “fits the widespread recognition that audiences crucially mediate media knowledge processes” (Livingstone 1999: 101-2). This is because both “time and space (and the power to access otherwise sequestered domains) are measured in terms of distance from the audience, the knowing subject” (Livingstone, ibid.). Livingstone has interpreted Carey’s (Innis-inspired) model of “communication as ritual” (Carey 1988, see Chapter 5), as an intervention within media studies to foreground questions and issues of meaning, performance, tradition and interpretative community:⁹⁸

The Bulletin is often considered to be the most popular radio programme in Newfoundland’s broadcasting history (Narváez 1986: 49), as well as having attained the status of the longest-running continually sponsored broadcast in Canadian radio history (it ran between 1932 and 1966 with the same sponsor) (Callahan 1981: 20). The ultimate reason for this popularity and longevity was the effectiveness of the Bulletin in connecting Newfoundland’s many disparate coastal settlements within a communicative feedback loop, instantly bridging transmission distances that had previously taken days or weeks to traverse. With limited means of access between communities, the programme represented an indirect greeting channel, providing links of contact among individuals who belonged to a residually oral culture, but who nonetheless had restricted opportunities for face-to-face encounters outside of their own local communities.

The programme was first broadcast on VONF on November 14th 1932. It remained on VONF through commercial ownership by the Dominion Broadcasting Company (or DBC, a subsidiary of the Avalon Telephone Company), through government control when the Broadcasting Corporation of Newfoundland (BCN) absorbed the DBC in 1939 during the Commission of Government period, and, after the subsequent takeover of BCN by the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) upon Confederation with Canada in 1949. The programme was thus symbolic of the maintenance of continuity in the character of Newfoundland radio, despite tumultuous political and social changes that saw Newfoundland’s responsible government being suspended and replaced by a non-elected and predominantly British Commission of Government between 1934 and 1949, and Newfoundland’s eventual confederation with Canada in 1949.

The Bulletin, as a programme essentially designed to service the communication needs of a regional working-class audience, was, in fact, already an anomaly at its outset, in comparison to the other programming on VONF. Programming policy was influenced by manager William F. Galgay’s Reithian views that the station should not cater for the ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’ taste or seek to reflect local and regional culture, but should instead seek to instruct and uplift its audience (McCarthy, Galgay et al. 1994: 171). As Philip Hiscock has noted, for the most part VONF’s listening audience tended to hold a world-view that looked beyond the local scene to foreign “high” culture for inspiration (Hiscock 1991).

The programme gave a great deal of publicity to humanitarian and philanthropic organizations (as the free air-time it gave to charities such as the Red Cross alone would attest), yet it was also a highly effective medium for advertisements, many of which Doyle wrote himself, for his cod liver oil and patent medicines. It was rare for a commercial programme to be founded so integrally upon a public service ethos; indeed, the particularity and importance of the Bulletin was such that it was no longer regarded as a “straight commercial programme”, as it placed emphasis on “service to people rather than the selling of products” (Young 1947: 22). Like Doyle’s free-distribution ‘songsters’ (paperback folk song collections), which combined song sheets with advertisements for medicinal products in one package, and like the early private radio stations in St. John’s, the Bulletin was an entrepreneurial expression of both community sympathies and commercial savvy.

The Bulletin listening audience could therefore claim more than a symbolic ownership of the programme, as they contributed a sizeable proportion of its content, as message senders or ‘stringers’ (freelance providers of news). A magazine article dating from 1947 relates that (an average of) “300 correspondents [both paid and unpaid] throughout the country contribute to the Bulletin,” (Young 1947: 28) mostly through the medium of the telegraph, but also via telephone and the postal service, and it has been estimated that between 80 and 120 messages were read during each broadcast at this time (Morris 1990: 33).

As Philip Hiscock has noted, the use of the Bulletin for non-urgent personal messages, and as an alternative or substitute for the wire service, was a cause for consternation at the Newfoundland Department of Posts and Telegraph, as it cut into the Telegraph’s monopoly (Hiscock 1988: 52). Thus a mere radio programme was a serious rival to official communications services within the province. In creating a union between telegraphic communication and radio broadcasting, the Bulletin effectively created a situation in which there was no longer a single conduit for telegraphic communications, which were no longer solely in the control of a bureaucratic institution.

What the Bulletin achieved within Newfoundland was essentially to reinstate the early community uses of telegraphic communication that had prompted McLuhan referred to telegraphy as ‘the social hormone’ (quoted in Blondheim 1995: 82); to restore its status as a social utility accessible to all users and free from the possibility of abuse for pecuniary gain. This latter point is important, as this was never the case with telegraphic communication – in this way the intermediary editorial role of production staff in compiling scripts can be seen as necessary and benign. Philip Hiscock has cited the Bulletin as an example of a type of programme “so flexible and responsive to the needs of the audience that it becomes a medium of folk expression” (Hiscock 1988: 41). Anticipating phone-in programmes on Newfoundland’s contemporary commercial radio stations (Martin 2004) and the participatory ethos of community radio, the Bulletin was built around listener inclusion and point-to-point communications technology, providing “a horizontal means of communication, communication among the listeners” (Hiscock 1988: 48).

3.2.1 The Bulletin’s Creation of an Imagined Community

It is not difficult to imagine, for the listener, the thrill or surprise at hearing your name announced before a message is directed to you on air. Likewise it is not difficult to imagine the element of intrigue in hearing messages delivered to people you knew. Even when you didn’t know somebody, you could imagine who they were, or learn that they lived in the same area, or had shared a similar experience. Thus an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) was created through the integration of telegraphic communication and radio broadcasting.

The use of the Bulletin in both solitary and group contexts highlights the Bulletin’s status as a species of “folk media”, “used for personal as well as group information sharing”, and “to communicate…news, announcements…and social exchanges of all types” (Panford, Nyaney et al. 2001: 1560). A parallel can be drawn, in fact, between the Bulletin and the contemporary use of local FM radio stations to convey personal messages in Mali, where the medium of radio is an essential and indispensable component of everyday living. Craig Tower’s anthropological account of communications in Koutiala, Mali bears some striking resemblances to the use of the Bulletin in Newfoundland:

3.2.2 Humour, Folklore and Vernacular Usage

‘Purposefully obscure language’ was allegedly a significant feature of the messages broadcast on the Gerald S. Doyle Bulletin, and certain unique or humorous personal messages purportedly broadcast on the Bulletin have entered into Newfoundland oral tradition, and are repeated and shared like jokes and legends during reminiscences about outport life. As Philip Hiscock has observed,

For over thirty years [the Bulletin] retained a large audience and injected into the folklore of Newfoundland a rich and varied corpus of verbal play. In a manner similar to the collection and telling of jokes, excerpts from remembered message programmes are passed on for entertainment, and enlightenment about Newfoundland’s past culture (Hiscock 1988: 53).
Here the channelling of telegraphic into radiophonic communication, private into public, scatters the grains (the original meaning of the term ‘broadcast’) of lore. This ‘publication’ of messages means that they ‘belong’ to a wider community that can then relate and repeat them freely, and adapt them, if they choose. The humour of the remembered, repeated (and, perhaps, in the process of oral transmission, refined) messages resides in the various ways in which they deviated from the conventional formula. The unconventional and figurative language of some messages can be attributed to a sense of humour on the part of the sender, or the necessity for economy in phrasing a telegram. Some allowed all kinds of possible interpretations of what the sender really meant. For example, one message was sent by a man to his wife, letting her know that he could not return home that day because he had to wait to complete their purchase of a household item: “Won’t be home tonight, hung up on stove” (quoted in Hiscock 1988: 56). Some of the humorous messages can be attributed to mistakes made during the scripting or relaying of the messages,¹⁰⁴ which sheds light on the ‘cherishing’ of ‘amateur’ standards in local or regional radio. Wayne Schmalz, in his history of radio in Saskatchewan, has highlighted the popularity of amateur hours and local interaction in the programming of the small private stations in that (Canadian) province in the 1930s:
As imperfect as [the] announcers were, they nevertheless served to remind listeners that those who spoke to them over the air were one of them. Less than proficient renderings of the news or announcements of local events reinforced the notion that announcers were members of the community, doing the best they could through a medium that reflected the community and was responsive to its needs and wishes. If people felt close to their flawed announcers and error-prone stations – and there is abundant evidence that they did – then it was because they saw both as an extension, an integral part, of themselves. That is why they believed they had a legitimate say in programming… (quoted in Vipond 2004: 96-7).

It has been noted that listeners to riddles, jokes and other folkloric forms become not merely participants but even creators of meaning when the message is not explicit; “to project themselves into the text in order to invest the empty spaces with meaning” (Levine 1992: 1386). Each and every Bulletin listener had had his or her interest piqued, and imagination fired, by “interstices that need connecting, ambiguities that need resolution, imprecisions that need clarity…” (Levine 1992: 1384). Thus the interpretation of the Bulletin was in many instances a collective process, as has typically been the case with the small group exchange of folklore, and this is entirely congruent with the way in which the programme contravened what we might term the normative model of broadcasting, which is typically unidirectional in flow and often private in its domestic mode of ‘consumption’.

Folklore was created both despite and because the vernacular was channelled, and in the process shaped by communications media such as the telegraph and the radio, which are conventionally associated with heavily standardised varieties of speech. It can be observed that the communicative network created by the Bulletin is an excellent example of what Walter Ong has referred to as ‘secondary orality’ in the age of electronic technology; “This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, and even its use of formulas” (Ong 1988: 136). To help to illustrate this point, I will include some more examples of exceptional messages of various kinds, which I have tabulated with my own categorising ‘labels’ and explication (Table 1).

Category	Message	Explanation
The habitual act as evocative ritual	“Bring father’s skin boots to the edge of the ice, coming by Kyle.” (Swain 1991: 103)	This message requests a relative to walk over harbour ice, near open water, to deposit sealskin boots for the journey home (the Kyle was a steamer ship). This message is suggestive of the traversal of the ‘threshold’ from a relatively urban environment (i.e. a hospital or the St. John’s harbour) back to the rural outport in order to return to family and community; the sealskin boots might thus be seen as a badge of identity. This is an explicit, although apocryphal, example of a message steeped in folk rhetoric.
The esoteric message	“Come quick. Nobody sick. All around shore.” (Payne 2005)	This perplexing message was supposedly sent by a woman to prompt her husband, who was working at a lumber-camp, to return home. A freight ship had run aground at the coastal community of Cow Head, spilling barrels of various foodstuffs, and the whole community was involved in a salvage operation. The woman knew that her husband wouldn’t want to miss this, but she didn’t want to alarm him, and she also didn’t want the whole coast to know about it, so she made the message both imperative and vague. Despite being transmitted publicly, this message is esoteric, in that it conveys a meaning that is understood ‘within the family’ or privately.
The art of condensation	“Teeth out, fish out, coming home tomorrow.” (Hiscock 1986: 86)105	This message was said to have been sent by a woman from one of the outports who came to St. John’s on a schooner that brought in a load of fish. Her main reason for coming was to visit the dentist for teeth extraction. After she had visited the dentist and the schooner was unloaded, she sent a message to her husband back home. This message is an example of the intentionally funny message, one that utilises the economy of telegraphic communication to humorous effect.

Table 1.
There exists no ‘proof’ that any of these messages were actually sent. What is known is that VONF station manager William F. Galgay strongly objected to the unconventional language of many of the personal messages, which Galgay felt did not conform to acceptable ‘broadcast English’. He complained; “many items involving persons and institutions are written in such a manner as to leave several constructions open to the listener with the possibility of interpretations which border on the libellous…” (Galgay 1943: 55; Hiscock 1988). Galgay’s objections highlight the way in which he was influenced by BBC-style policy protocols regarding the misuse of Standard English.¹⁰⁶

The issue at stake was the recurrence of dialect differences, which made clear and unquestionable readings of the messages difficult. Doyle clashed with Galgay over this issue, insisting that the programme remain “intimate and informal” (Young 1947), thus defending its divergence from conventional ‘official’ news broadcasts. As Hiscock has noted, “the power of the programme was [such] that despite the gatekeeping of the popular medium, and of Galgay’s elitist sensibilities in particular, folk communication was maintained” (Hiscock 1988: 56-57). We can see evidence here of the recurring tension that arises between vernacular input and editorial control, when institutional practices in broadcasting must be adapted to accommodate the flexibility or fluidity of folk culture.

The communication channelled through the Bulletin can be said to have been caught up in what Jill Brody has termed “the intertextual gap” (Brody 2000), in that the oral statement or directive undergoes a conversion into writing and/or a telegraphic (typographic and electronic) form before it can be re-spoken, and that there are both oral and written links in the chain of transmission. Given the disadvantages that many outport inhabitants faced in their relative isolation and illiteracy, the maintenance of ‘folk speech’ on the Broadcast had both symbolic and political importance. Any vernacular that ‘leaked through’ the medium of radio, which was otherwise dominated by Standard English (spoken in what in Newfoundland would be referred to as ‘townie’ accents), was cherished, as we will see in later discussion of The Fishermen’s Broadcast. During this early period in which the Bulletin provided an invaluable public service, those people who were most isolated and most deeply rooted in the oral tradition were those who were beholden to literate intermediaries in order to communicate across distances.

Many of the Bulletin’s ‘joke messages’ can, therefore, be seen as subversive of censorship, both in terms of their incorporation of vernacular usages, and in terms of embodying creative responses to, or negotiations of, serious, taboo or mundane subjects. ¹⁰⁷ Arguably (the cherishing of) the unusual content of some of these purported messages can also be seen as redolent of the particular character of Newfoundlanders, who, in the face of hardships, have been said to opt for “the clever retort rather than the self-pitying complaint” (Earle 1998: 90). This may help to explain why the programme is remembered for humorous messages despite the fact that the few extant recordings of the Bulletin provide evidence that the personal messages often bore urgent or serious news, and that the programme otherwise consisted of local news, survival information (‘dry’ reports of shipping), medical updates, obituaries and employment vacancies.

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