Senate Begins Test of Radio Broadcasts

Radio broadcasts from the Senate floor began Wednesday, marking what proponents hailed as a new era in openness after decades of complaints that going on the air would shatter tradition and decorum.

“There’s no turning back,” Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd, (D-W.Va.) told an opening ceremony. “The Senate is crossing the bridge, and it’s being burned behind us.”

The experimental broadcast coverage, beginning with the prayer that traditionally opens Senate proceedings, runs through July 15 and includes a test of gavel-to-gavel television broadcasts of floor action, starting June 1. The lawmakers vote on July 29 on whether to make the broadcasts permanent.

Flurry of Speeches

After a flurry of initial speeches to mark the occasion, the Senate began to debate a proposed balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

Many radio networks picked up the Senate-supplied radio signal, which became available when Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (R-Md.), a longtime proponent of the broadcasts, threw the switch in a ceremony in the cramped radio and TV gallery adjacent to the chamber.

The only daily gavel-to-gavel broadcast of debate, however, is planned by the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, which already televises House floor action. It will supply audio over its cable television hookup until June 1, when it plans to add the picture to the words.

Mathias told the opening ceremony that “the debate over some kind of electronic coverage of the Senate began in 1924 . . . . We’re finally taking action.”

‘Long Time in Coming’

“This has been a long time in coming,” Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said.

Critics of broadcasts say the Senate’s role as a brake on hasty legislation--which often involves filibusters intended to talk such measures to death--is not suitable fare for the nation’s airwaves. They say the change is bound to bring rules alterations designed to tidy up the proceedings, which the critics contend will end the Senate’s longstanding traditions.

But senators with lingering doubts about the wisdom of live broadcast coverage made no attempt Wednesday to press their point of view during the opening ceremony.

Although the doors of the Senate have generally been closed to the electronic media until now, radio did broadcast vice presidential oath takings in 1924 and 1976, as well as the 1978 Panama Canal treaties debate.