Word: dragnet
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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With the present holes in Hershey's draft dragnet, the armed forces had little hope of reaching the 3,000,000 men the President had ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to have under arms by next June. When the Korean war began, there were 1,400,000 men & women in the armed forces. Since then, 400,000 draftees, reserves and guardsmen have been called up. But General Omar Bradley estimated that the services would fall short of the June goal by about 10%. Pentagon pessimists thought it would be twice that...
...violated due process of law because; it was too vague, "a 'dragnet' which may enmesh anyone who agitates for a change of government"; it lacked provisions for judicial proof of individual membership in subversive groups; it set up a "presumption of (organizational) guilt"; and the law constituted 'guilt by association' with a vengeance...
Even more important than sounds in the night is the jargon of the police. Instead of the familiar "Calling all cars," Dragnet uses the duller but truer "Attention all units," making sure that it is accompanied by a rush of air through the microphone (called a "squelch"), because most police radio dispatchers' are not educated in the genteel phases of commercial broadcasting...
...Large. Because its stories are based on actual cases, Dragnet breaks a few taboos. A program dealing with sex criminals "drew not one official or unofficial protest," and the city of Detroit borrowed the recording (minus the advertising plugs for Fatima cigarettes) as the climax broadcast of a campaign against sex crimes. The most mail was pulled by a Christmas show called "The Rifle." It dealt with a small boy who found the hiding place of his Christmas-present rifle in plenty of time to kill a playmate. The National Rifle Association protested strongly. Webb turned their letter over...
Last week, as it rounded out its first year on radio, Dragnet's realism reached a new high: the criminal got away. "We don't try to punch a moral," says Webb. "If there's one in the show, the people get it. We don't even try to prove crime doesn't pay-because sometimes it does...