Robert Lewis (Bob) Shayon spent 14 years writing, directing, and producing programs for WOR-Mutual in New Your and for the CBS Radio Network (where he worked closely in the 1940s with Edward R. Murrow). He pioneered television shows promoting grass-roots democracy, such as The Whole Town's Talking (similar to today's town meetings on television). He was the first television critic for The Christian Science Monitor, and spent more than 20 years as media critic for Saturday Review magazine. His book Television and our Children in the early 1950s was the first analysis of the subject. For 25 years he taught graduate students at the Annenberg school for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

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Recently, he talked with us about his multilayered careers in the media, and about some of his toughest challenges—challenges he got through by finding God's everavailable guidance. "God the divine Mind, was my mentor and inspirer," says Mr. Shayon, "guiding and directing me through every twist and turn.

"What sustained me was my awareness that Mind would never fail to meet creative deadlines, to sustain harmonious relationships, and to overcome any of the obstacles I was meeting in my work. I was especially helped by this passage from Mary Baker Eddy's book Science and Health: 'God expresses in man the infinite idea forever developing itself, broadening and rising higher and higher from a boundless basis' " [p. 258].

On one occasion in the early days of radio, Shayon had to face fierce opposition from one of the stars of a soap opera he was directing for WOR-Mutual in New York. He decided to include stage actors in his cast; and the radio star demanded that Shayon be fired for employing actors who, he thought, over-projected and failed to grasp the nuances of the radio medium.

"I prayed earnestly about this," said Shayon, "striving to see him as a child of God and not as an obstreperous actor; to know that we are all in the presence of the same loving God, who gives us the spirit of cooperation. The actor and I had to work together five days a week, and every day I treated him with calculated equanimity. I remained calm and didn't react to his disruptive behavior. After five weeks, he went to my employer and retracted his demands for my dismissal, commenting instead that I was the best director he had ever worked with. You can imagine how grateful I was!"

In 1947, Shayon won a Peabody Award for The Eagle's Brood, an hour-long radio documentary on juvenile delinquency, which was broadcast nationally by CBS. He insisted then, and still believes, that healing for juvenile delinquency lies in community organization, which all of us can help support through prayer.

"Youth crime," he says, "is just a symptom and not the root of the problem, which lies in our antipathies to each other in social groupings. When we have cleaned out the swamps of this challenge—poverty, hunger, and social injustice—crime by young people will diminish."

Shayon told the Sentinel that at the height of his career in broadcasting he was unjustly blacklisted and barred from work in network radio for five years during the anti-Communist McCarthy period.

"The nation was gripped by an almost irrational fear of Communism," he said. "At the same time, God seemed to be leading me away from a growing commercialism in the media. Family and close friends supported me during the blacklist, eventually helping to clear my name so that I was able to work in network television.

"I produced and directed the last shows in a long-running NBC series, The Big Story, about reporters who became personally involved in their stories. Although I had achieved my goal in broadcasting as a producer-director, an inner conflict arose about my being active in a medium dominated by materialistic thinking. This resulted in a serious inflammation on my neck, and I had to withdraw from my job. With the help of prayer, during which I called a Christian Science practitioner, I saw the emptiness of personal pride and egotism, and saw more clearly that God is the only creator, and that those traits were not really part of what God made. This led to a healing, and I was able to resume work, this time as media critic."

We asked Shayon how he would like to see television audiences around the world approach their viewing.

"I would ask them to try to acquaint themselves with the classics and with history before they even switch on their sets. Too many people in this country have a view of history that goes back no more than 200 years, to the birth of the United States. They know nothing of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, or the great civilizations of India and China. They are missing the great thinkers, the wise people of antiquity, who can provide a higher perspective than many of us have today. They could also benefit from a deeper acquaintance with the inspired prophets of the Bible.

"Then I would encourage people to watch TV as a family and use what they see together in educating their they see together in educating their children. As a professional media critic, I would watch programs at the beginning of a new season with my daughters. They quickly became aware of how programs and commercials are structured. Before they were ten, they were fully aware of the tricks and strategies that the media use to hold an audience. There was nothing passive about the way they watched, passive about the way they watched, because in Sunday School they were learning to think beyond human perspectives and to ground their responses in what they were finding out about God."

As Shayon looks back over his careers, he sees a decline in genuine public-interest broadcasting in the United States and the United Kingdom.

"Commercialism has progressively degraded the media," he says, "despite technical advances in speed of access, and in more program choices for audiences via cable, satellite, the Internet, and other forms of electronic delivery.

"The future demands the prayer of understanding citizens. I believe we are required to watch and pray with unlimited patience—understanding that we are not really 'consumers' but that God made us to be satisfied, not addicted to mindlessly acquiring more and more material things. To the extent that we allow ourselves to be mesmerized by what we watch, we delay our indiviudal and social progress.

"I think that we must see through the underlying economic motivation. We can change the focus and gain positive insights into what is really going on in God's true, honest universe.

"I feel we must hold steadfastly to the fact that because we are made to express God, our true nature is motivated by divine Love, not greed.

"Human forms of communication may vary from age to age, but as Science and Health says, 'The intercommunication is always from God to His idea, man' [Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 284]. When we acknowledge this individually and together, all good is possible.

"Whatever I did in my careers, the divine Mind guided me from one place to another and brought about healing when it was needed. I had absolute confidence in God, and I still have it. This confidence is the North Pole of my careers, to which Mind holds me with the force of everlasting spiritual attraction."

Odyssey in Prime Time: A Life in Twentieth Century Media is the title of Mr. Shayon's memoirs, to be published in the United States this month.