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QUESTION: How concerned is Mr. Armstrong about his health?
RADER: It's all in the hands of God, as far
.
as that's concerned be
cause the future is His. None of us have any guarantee that we'll
see tomorrow. But Mr. Armstrong has faith that God will keep him
strong. And he works so hard now at what he's doing that .I have reach
ed the point where I now believe that travel will probably get him
working closer to a normal day, maybe something like ten hours. So
he's changed his mind on that and I've changed my mind on that, too,
that travel will probably get him away from his typewriter and the
telephone.
QUESTION: Mr. Rader, are we planning to use the old broadcast record
ings on a long term basis?
RADER: You mean radio? Well, radio's something that we're studying
very, very carefully. Radio just is not the medium that it used to
be forty years ago, thirty years ago, twenty years ago, even fifteen
years ago. The costs of radio have escalated. We're now spending
money on radio (daily radio) for 100 stations at the rate of 2� million
dollars per year, which is an enormous figure when we consider what
we used to spend on maybe 300 and 400 stations. And the radio audience
is just not the same kind of audience, particularly in the kind of
markets that we're on. We're not buying time on religious radio sta
tions where hour after hour after hour all you're getting is religious
programming. We're trying to buy time where the format is otherwise
designed to attract a normal radio audience. How much time do you
listen to the radio yourself?
QUESTIONER: Drive time.
RADER: That's right--drive time. Right. That's what it's designed
for, drive time, maybe some shaving time, beach time--that type of
thing. So it's music and it's news, that type of thing. You can
see that the market's changed. That's why we want to shift as much
money as we can ultimately from radio into television, and also the
print medium. That's also why we want to build a second program,
so we have Mr. Armstrong's sermon going out with great power, and
also the PLAIN TRUTH if it works--if that pilot gives us reason to
believe we're going to have a very uniformly good, outstanding tele
vision program which will present clearly and fully, graphically,
vividly, but in a television, electronic way, the truth that's con
tained in the PLAIN TRUTH, you see, we will register with just that
much more impact. Mr. Armstrong, if we stay on radio, will probably
begin to make new programs, at least on a weekly basis because we
would never leave radio completely. We would stay at least on a Sunday
only basis regardless, but he would make programs designed for that.
In the meantime, there's the whole public out there that's never heard
the old programs. Those people who do tune in are getting something
that they have heard for the first time. You may have heard it for
the second time, but the program isn't designed for you. It's designed
for the person who has never heard it before. But that audience has
changed quite significantly. That's why the cost of radio makes us
wonder whether we shouldn't try to spend the money to reach the audi
ence where so much of it actually is.