The honor of this invitation to write an editorial foreword to this issue of the Journal of Radio Studies led me to invent two debates between Paul Lazarsfeld, the empiricist and functionalist, and Marshall McLuhan, the technological theorist. The first debate has to do with the beginnings of radio; the second with radio in an age dominated by television. Lazarsfeld and his troops at Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research did their work in the 1940s and 1950s. McLuhan erupted in the 1960s.