the murrow legacy: integrity or activism?

Transcription

THE MURROW LEGACY:
INTEGRITY OR ACTIVISM?
By David Demers*1
Copyright © 2013 Balios Books
S
weat was dripping from the chin of Edward R. Murrow.
It was March 9, 1954.
He was just minutes away from telling his national television
audience of 12 million See It Now viewers that U.S. Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) was a bully and rumor monger.
McCarthy first garnered national attention on February 9, 1950, when
he told a Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that “the
State Department is infested with communists” and that he had a list of 205
of them.1
Although McCarthy never produced the names — a pattern of
behavior he would repeat often over the next four years when making
allegations — the news media gave his speech a lot of attention. He was,
after all, a powerful U.S. senator, and powerful people make news.2
But Murrow was not impressed.
For four years he had watched McCarthy level false or misleading
allegations against hundreds of U.S. citizens, including some of his
colleagues at CBS. On several occasions, Murrow helped save the careers
of these colleagues.3
Some journalists and politicians had drawn attention to McCarthy’s
baneful tactics. But the criticism seemed to have no impact on his
*Demers is director of the not-for-profit American Center for Civil Liberties. Prior to that
he taught journalism and media theory courses at Washington State University for 16 years
and worked as a newspaper reporter. He is author of more than a dozen books on mass
communication, including The Lonely Activist: A Personal History of How Conservatives
and Communitarians Threaten Your Civil Rights, Vol. 1 (Phoenix, AZ: Balios Books, 2012;
available free of charge at www.acfcl.org/). This article is adapted from Volume 2 of The
Lonely Activist series, A Personal History of How Bureaucracies Threaten your Civil Rights,
which is scheduled for publication in 2014.
2
Edward R. Murrow with reporters in 1956
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Joseph R. McCarthy in 1954
popularity. In fact, polls showed that McCarthy’s ratings had steadily risen
since 1951. In January 1954, just two months before the Murrow’s
broadcast, a poll found that one-half of American adults had a favorable
opinion of McCarthy.
Murrow was sweating partly because he knew McCarthy would go
after him after the broadcast. Murrow was an easy target. Even though he
had rejected radical politics all his life, he had associated with many known
Communists. Some were even friends.
Murrow had a lot to lose. At CBS, he was earning more than $1
million a year (in today’s dollars) and he and Janet, his spouse, owned two
homes. They also had a 10-year-old son.
A make-up assistant wiped sweat from Murrow’s chin and face.
Then the on-air cue.
“Good Evening,” he said. “Tonight, See It Now devotes its entire half
hour to a report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, told mainly in his own
words and pictures.”
After a commercial break, Murrow said See It Now would offer
McCarthy equal time if “he believes we have done violence to his words or
pictures.”
Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower then is shown
The Lonely Activist - Volume 2
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after having a meeting with McCarthy. Eisenhower comments on how he
would deal with subversives: “This is America’s principle: trial by jury of
the innocent, until proved guilty.”
McCarthy’s response to Eisenhower’s comments is odd, even
“chilling,” according to Joseph E. Persico, who wrote a biography of
Murrow in 1988. McCarthy repeatedly giggles and ends up simply saying
that he thinks Eisenhower will make a “great president.”
Murrow then comes on camera and says McCarthy often “operates as
a one-man committee. He has traveled far, interviewed many, terrorized
some, accused civilian and military leaders of the past administration of a
great conspiracy to turn the country over to Communism, investigated and
substantially demoralized the present State Department, made varying
charges of espionage at Fort Monmouth. The Army says it has been unable
to find anything relating to espionage there.”
The rest of the half-hour slot is filled mainly with film clips of
McCarthy making outrageous accusations against mainstream politicians
and organizations, none of which has ties to Communism. They include
Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson III, a U.S. Army
general, the mainstream press, the Voice of America, the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Institute of Pacific Relations.
McCarthy is incriminating himself. That’s what Murrow and his See
It Now co-producer Fred Friendly had intended when putting the clips
together.
As the show comes to a close, Murrow adds perspective.
[T]he line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one
and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly.
...
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. ... We will not walk
in fear, one of another.
We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig
deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not
descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to
speak, to associate and to defend causes which were for the moment
unpopular. ...
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused
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alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable
comfort to our enemies, and whose fault is that? Not really his. He
didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather
successfully.
Cassius was right: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but
in ourselves. ... Good night, and good luck.”4
Impact of the McCarthy Show
The See It Now show about McCarthy is often heralded as one of the
greatest examples of broadcast journalism in history.5
New York Times TV writer Jack Gould called the show “crusading
journalism of high responsibility and genuine courage.”
John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune wrote that Murrow “put
his finger squarely on the root of the true evil of McCarthyism, which is its
corrosive effect on the souls of hitherto honest men.”
Variety said Murrow was “practically ... a national hero.”
Alistair Cooke, writing for the British Guardian Weekly, said “Mr.
Murrow may yet make bravery fashionable.”
And I. F. Stone’s Weekly: “Hats off to Ed Murrow.”6
CBS and its affiliates received more than 75,000 calls, telegrams and
letters after the show — the highest number of responses for a TV show to
date. By a 10-to-1 margin, they supported Murrow.
Murrow was mobbed the following day by well-wishers when he left
the CBS building and was given a standing ovation a week later from 1,500
journalists attending the Oversea Press Club at the Waldorf.
“Murrow did not kill off McCarthy or McCarthyism,” Joseph
Wershba, who helped produce the McCarthy segment, said years after the
broadcast. “But he helped halt America’s incredible slide toward a native
brand of fascism.”7
The McCarthy broadcast remains one of the greatest examples of
broadcast journalism in history.
But the episode also is one of the greatest examples of a journalist
breaking the rules of conventional journalism.8
“Is it right in principle for television to take a clear stand on one side
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of a great issue?” Newsweek magazine asked its readers in a cover story
soon after the McCarthy show.9
“The McCarthy broadcast was not objective reporting,” biographer
Persico pointed out. “It was subjective polemicizing. To those who would
insist on purist rules governing even a fight with a barroom brawler,
Murrow was wrong. But to millions, it had been satisfying to see the bully
thrashed at last.”10
The ethic of objectivity in journalism admonishes journalists to keep
personal biases and opinions out of stories, to cover all sides to a story, and
to give roughly equal amounts of coverage and space to all sides.11 The
assumption is that readers and viewers can sift through the information
presented and find the truth.
The New York Times at the time reinforced this ethic, declaring that
even if McCarthy’s charges “are usually proved false,” he was still news,
because separating innuendo from truth and accusation from guilt “lies with
the readers,” not the newspaper.12
But how can the public discern the truth if sources are lying and
journalists are unable to get all of the facts?
This is the fundamental flaw in the ethic of objectivity.
A massive amount of research in mass communication over the next
five decades eventually would clarify the paradox. The ethic of objectivity
produces its own bias, but it is neither radical nor aligned with a particular
ideology. The bias is mainstream. It favors the status quo — the powerful
and their ideas.13
Some “objective” reporters in Murrow’s time could see the
shortcomings of their approach.
“It [Murrow’s show] speaks for scores of us who must stifle our
opinion even when it hurts,” John Scali of the Associate Press cabled
Murrow.14
“When you sailed into McCarthy,” the news personnel at an affiliate
wrote, “we in this business who are arbitrarily confined to straight reporting
... raised our voices to shout, ‘at last.’”15
Murrow “did not possess the cardinal virtues of the journalist,
objectivity and balance,” according to Persico. “His power lay rather in his
subjectivity, in the passionate moral biases, however coolly concealed, that
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he brought to his work.”16
Murrow believed the news needed to be interpreted, not just
presented. Stenography was not good journalism.
But Murrow’s brand of subjective journalism was not unbounded. It
eschewed speculation and hyperbole, unlike some editorials and
commentaries. Murrow’s journalism was grounded in facts and logic, like
academic scholarship. And although Murrow held a liberal perspective on
many issues, he did not define his journalism through his personal ideology.
In fact, when a reporter from Look magazine asked him to explain his
motives for going after McCarthy, Murrow replied: “I wouldn’t say it was
liberalism. ... I think it stems from my feeling about the sacredness of due
process of law. I saw in Germany and Czechoslovakia that the law is
destroyed first and then, after the law is gone, the freedom of the people is
destroyed. The thing about McCarthy that bothers me is his disrespect for
the due process of law.”17
When I read this comment in Persico’s book, I realized then that
Murrow’s most significant contribution to broadcast journalism wasn’t the
McCarthy broadcast, even though it helped turn the tide against McCarthy;
nor was it his integrity, as he had a number of personal and professional
lapses during his lifetime; nor was it his sensate coverage of World War II,
which turned him into a household name.
Murrow’s most significant contribution to broadcast journalism was
his activist brand of journalism. Murrow was an indefatigable advocate of
democracy, free speech, due process, egalitarianism, transparent
government, education, rule of law and civil liberties.
Murrow was, in other words, a civil liberties activist, a devotee of the
ideals that came from philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment and their
descendants: John Locke on democracy; Voltaire on free speech;
Montesqueue on limiting government power; Diderot on knowledge; John
Dewey on education as the engine of democracy.
And Murrow’s activism, I propose, played as big a role as corporate
greed in explaining why corporate executives eventually would push him
out of CBS.
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Murrow’s Activist Beginnings
Persico and Ann M. Sperber’s biographies of Murrow both show that
Murrow’s activist journalism philosophy was heavily influenced by his
experiences at home, in college, and during World War II.
He was born in 1908, the third of three boys. His father, Roscoe, was
a poor farmer in North Carolina. His mother, Ethel, was a Quaker who
converted to Methodism.
Roscoe was a physically strong, hard-working, easy-going man. But
Ethel had a stronger influence on the moral and intellectual development of
the boys.
Ethel was not overly affectionate. In fact, Persico says Murrow was
raised in an “emotionally penurious home.”18
But Ethel instilled the Protestant Ethic in her boys.
She required them to read out loud from the Bible before going to
bed19 and raised them to be “God-fearing and honest, generous to friends
and helpful to each other. She also made clear that she expected them to
amount to something.”20
“I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t work,” Murrow
once said.21
Persico writes that “Ethel’s legacy to her sons was the commandment
to achieve, to subordinate pleasure to duty. Indeed, she bred in them a
certain guilt over pleasure. ... Ed Murrow loved his mother; he revered
her.”22
The Murrow family moved to Washington state when Murrow was
6. His father worked in the lumber camps. So did Murrow when he became
a teenager.
The lumberjacks, who were members of the Industrial Workers of the
World labor union, introduced Murrow to Socialism and criticism of
capitalism.
Outside of the lumber camps, the “Wobblies” were often viewed as
radicals.
“But in the camps, they were respected if not blindly followed ... . Ed
Murrow heard the Wobblies’ message with a mixture of sympathy and
amusement,” Persico writes. “All their talk about the exploited masses did
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not square with what he had witnessed in his own life. His family lived in
reasonable comfort, as long as Roscoe held his job.”
Murrow never joined the union. But he loved the Wobblies and sang
songs with them. And they liked Murrow.
“In the struggle between the haves and the have-nots, the Wobblies
stood with the have-nots,” Persico says. “And that, emotionally, was where
he stood, too.”23
Educating an Activist
Murrow enrolled in Washington State College in 1926, which had about
900 students. The population of Pullman was 3,000.
He originally wanted to enroll in a law school on the east coast, but
he and his family couldn’t afford it. He chose WSC partly because his two
older brothers had gone there.
Murrow was a bright and capable student. His memory was so good
that he rarely took notes and was able to pass most of his classes with an A
or B.
Murrow was active in school politics, becoming president of the
student body as well as president of a national organization representing
students. Most of the people who knew him then knew he would become
successful. He was ambitious and, some say, a bit self-centered.
He also suffered, at times, from an inferiority complex and from
depression and mood swings. Those closest to him throughout his life said
that they never felt they understood Murrow, who would often withdraw
emotionally for extended periods of time.
Murrow took a wide variety of classes in the liberals arts, including
history, literature and political science. This is, no doubt, where he picked
up much of his knowledge of the Enlightenment philosophers and their
ideals.
Later, when a director of college journalism program asked Murrow
what aspiring reporters should be taught, he replied: the classics. Murrow
valued erudition more than diction when he made hiring decisions.24
Murrow never took a course in journalism. It was not a major in the
late 1920s. He eventually majored in speech, after one professor told him
9
Students walk to classes at Washington State College in the early 1920s. Thompson Hall
(left) was the administration building and Bryan Hall (clock tower) contained classrooms
and a concert hall. Both buildings have been preserved. The Murrow Communication
Addition building is now housed on the site where the students are walking.
it was good fit with law school.
A more important factor luring him into speech, though, was a close
friendship he developed with Ida Lou Anderson, a speech and drama
professor ten years his senior who suffered from polio.
Anderson was an intellectual, a poet, an accomplished actress, a
debater, and a devotee of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. She took an
interest in bright students like Murrow. She taught him not only to how to
express himself but how to think and interpret the world.
“She had him memorize aphorisms from the Meditations,” Persico
writes. “She urged him to make the Stoic philosophy his personal creed.”
If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason
seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to
distract thee, but keeping the divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be
bound to give it back immediately, if thou holdest to this, expecting
nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity,
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according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound
which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is
able to prevent this.25
Anderson had one maxim that Murrow never forgot: “God will not
look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.”26
Murrow kept a copy of Meditations on his desk at CBS. For the rest
of his life, he credited Anderson for giving him the confidence, skills and
much of the intellectual training he needed to become a good broadcaster.
Murrow eventually abandoned religion. In the Stoic philosophy, there
is no afterlife, even for those who lead exemplary lives. Rather, the purpose
of life is “to contribute to the evolution of humanity. In doing this we are
fulfilled; we are happy in fulfilling this role; and then will die.”27
In his sophomore year, Murrow was inducted into a secret fraternity
society called Tau Nu Epsilon, which controlled who was elected or
appointed to major student offices on campus, including editors of the
student newspaper and yearbook. The society was composed of
representatives from each of the fraternities, who would dictate the society’s
selections to the rank-and-file.
“What TNE counted on — and the lesson that it taught him [Murrow]
— was a political truth applicable to a campus, a city hall, or world capital,”
Persico writes. “Where the mass of the electorate is apathetic, a tiny,
energetic handful can exercise power by manipulating the very machinery
that has been created to ensure democratic rule.”
Although TNE helped elect Murrow to the position of student body
president, Murrow, as a journalist, was repulsed by such machinations and
strongly believed that journalism could create a more democratic society,
according to Sperber and Persico.
Murrow was handsome and many women were attracted to him, but
he only had one long-term relationship while in college. Willma Dudley
was the daughter of a mayor from the west side of the state. Just before
Thanksgiving 1928, she wrote and told him that she was pregnant with his
baby. Murrow paid for an abortion. They broke up shortly after and he
never saw her again.
In 1929, during his senior year, Murrow attended the annual
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convention of the National Student Federation of America, where he gave
a speech urging college students to become more involved in national and
world affairs. He was elected president of the group.
Murrow graduated in spring 1930.
Paul Coie, Murrow’s classmate and the son of a professor at WSC,
said “Ed and I were just anxious to get as far as possible from Pullman.”
Asked why, he said: “Have you ever been to Pullman?”28
Murrow Lies to Get Job
After college, Murrow moved to New York City. He was offered a job at
NBC radio, but he turned it down for a low-paying job at the National
Student Federation of America because it offered an opportunity for him to
travel around the world.
He visited England in the summer of 1930 and told a friend that he
was offended by the “class consciousness” of the country.
From 1932 to 1935, he worked as assistant director of the Institute of
International Education. He, philosopher John Dewey and other prominent
scholars helped prominent, mostly Jewish, German scholars who had been
dismissed from academic positions emigrate to the United States. They
included Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist who would eventually write a
controversial book criticizing modern capitalism.
At the IIE, Murrow also helped develop and implement a program
that allowed American teachers to take summer seminars at various
universities around the world, including Moscow University in the Soviet
Union.
Murrow married Janet Huntington Brewster in 1935.
That year he also applied for a job at CBS broadcasting. On his
resume, Murrow lied about his age, his major and where he attended school.
He added five years to his age, changed his college major to political
science and international relations, and said he had earned a master’s degree
from Stanford University.
According to National Public Radio host Bob Edwards, who decades
later would write a short biography of Murrow, “Ed Murrow still lacked
confidence. Born in a rustic cabin, the product of working-class parents,
12
acculturated by lumberjacks, and educated at a ‘cow college’ in the far
West, Ed believed he needed to invent a bit more for himself.”29
Murrow got the job, which involved lining up news makers as guests
on radio. Bob Trout, the only on-air journalist working for CBS at the time,
gave Murrow tips for communicating effectively on the radio.
In 1937, CBS sent Murrow to London to direct its European
operations. His job was to persuade European politicians and public figures
to talk on CBS radio.
He also recruited journalists to cover European events for CBS.
Murrow eventually began on-air broadcasts from various cities in Europe
and London, as Adolf Hitler’s power expanded.
Murrow as an Agent of Democracy
Murrow stood on the roof of a building near the British Broadcasting
Corporation in London as a German bomber passed overhead. The year was
1940, and Adolf Hitler’s Luftwaffe was bombing the city night after night
in what came to be known as the “Battle for Britain.”
“Off on my left, I can see the faint-red angry snap of anti-aircraft
bursts,” Murrow said, speaking into a microphone that transmitted his live
radio report to millions of people back in the United States, which was not
yet fighting in World War II. “Four searchlights are swinging over in this
general direction. The plane’s still very high. ... Just overhead now the burst
of the antiaircraft fire. Still the nearby guns are not working. The
searchlights now are feeling almost directly overhead. Now you’ll hear two
bursts a little nearer in a moment. ... There they are. That hard, stony
sound.”30
On one occasion, the BBC Broadcasting House suffered a direct hit.
The bomb smashed through an upper story window and came to rest on the
floor. The bomb squad attempted to defuse the bomb, but it went off, killing
seven people and injuring several others. Murrow knew most of them. He
was on the radio as the wounded and killed were taken out of the studio. He
described the scene and the smell of iodine that permeated the studio.
Murrow was not merely describing events. He was interpreting them
from the perspective of a man who believed he was witnessing the greatest
13
A view from the rooftops of London, where Murrow broadcast his reports of the Battle of
Britain. St. Paul's Cathedral is shown in the background. (Photo courtesy of the National
Archives and Records Administration).
conflict between democracy and totalitarianism the world had ever seen. He
was irritated that U.S. politicians did not seem to understand that.
On December 25, 1940, he reported, “This is not a merry Christmas
in London. I heard that phrase only twice in the last three days.”
He spent many more evenings reporting from rooftops as the bombs
burst around him and ignited numerous fires that imposed massive damage
to London and other English cities from June 1940 to April 1941. More
than 40,000 civilians and several hundred British fighter pilots were killed.
Many historians argue that Murrow’s live radio reports from London
played the crucial role in swaying American public opinion against Nazi
Germany and totalitarianism.
Of course, this was not the first time mass media was used to
influence public opinion during a war. In the late 1890s, New York
newspapers played a major role in drumming up support for U.S.
involvement in the Spanish American War.31
14
But never before had a major war been reported “live,” as it
happened. Murrow was the pioneer.
Champion of the Underdog and Lust
In fall 1941, Murrow returned to America for a brief speaking tour to
promote CBS. He was 33 and, to his surprise, he discovered that he was the
most famous journalist in America.
At a banquet honoring him, the poet Archibald MacLeish said, “You
burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned
it.32 You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were
our dad — were all mean’s dead — we mankind’s dead — and ours.
Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be,
you destroyed the superstition of distance and of time.”33
Murrow modestly responded that he knew the work of other war
correspondents was being honored through him. Then Murrow began
speaking like a child of Enlightenment, criticizing Britain’s class structure
and emphasizing the importance of democracy.
“The women of Britain are well on their way to winning economic
equality as they won political equality in the last war. The class-conscious
educational system, which has failed in its principle task of providing
leaders, will not survive this war. ... If Britain survives this war, it will be
a simpler, more democratic place to live.”
Murrow emerged during the war as a “new kind of star, a news
celebrity,” according to Persico. But even more important, Murrow revealed
his philosophy of journalism.
“[T]he Murrow that he chose to unveil publicly on this night was ...
a stinging critic of unearned privilege, a champion of the underdog, an
advocate of a new social order. The war to Murrow was not solely against
the Nazis, but against the stacked world that had prevailed before war broke
out. He had not abandoned his proletarian roots for fortune and fame, he
made clear. He was employing his new power in the service of his
democratic convictions.”
Murrow returned to London and ended up flying more than 40
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combat missions aboard Allied bombers and paratrooper planes.
For five years Murrow reported the war. He began his broadcasts with
the simple declaration: “This [pause] is London.” His quiet, monotone voice
— nurtured by Ida Lou Anderson at Washington State College — enhanced
his credibility. He eventually closed his reports with “good night and good
luck,” a catchphrase Londoners often used with each other each evening
during the Blitz.
During the war, Murrow met and socialized with many powerful
cabinet ministers and leaders in England and Europe. They included
Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister, and Harold Laski, a brilliant
scholar and Socialist who also was influential in the British Labour Party.
Right after the war, he visited a recently liberated concentration camp
and reported: “I pray you believe what I have said about Buchenwald
(concentration camp). I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it.
For most of it, I have no words.”
Although Murrow’s journalistic philosophy was solidly grounded in
the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment, he enjoyed hobnobbing with
high society in England and would, himself, become a wealthy man. Those
who knew him said he was comfortable in the company of both the working
and ruling classes.
In 1943, he met Pamela Churchill, a member of the latter group. She
was Winston’s attractive socialite daughter-in-law. Pamela was in her
twenties and her marriage to Winston’s son was falling apart. Murrow fell
in love with her. The affair progressed to a point where Pamela asked
Murrow to marry her.
However, Murrow ended the affair after Janet became pregnant early
in 1945. In the mid-1950s, Murrow had another affair with an unidentified
woman, according to Persico. He also may have had other affairs.
Failing a Friend?
The war in Europe ended in spring 1945. On November 6, Ed and Janet
became the proud parents of Charles Casey Murrow, who was born in west
London.
After the war, Murrow returned to New York City and worked as a
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public relations official for CBS. He was not happy but did not tell his boss,
Bill Paley, the No. 2 executive at CBS.
One of Murrow’s jobs was firing employees. He hated that the most.
He told a friend that he “couldn’t sleep for days” after firing someone.34
In spring 1947, CBS executives wanted to fire Bill Shirer, a
prominent radio news commentator who had his own show on Sundays.
The sponsor of the program, a soap company, had complained because the
ratings were down.
Shirer and Murrow were good friends. Shirer said the effort was
politically motivated. He was a liberal and his show often reflected that
bias.
Shirer’s supporters began picketing CBS. Murrow brokered a
compromise with Shirer, whereby Shirer would take another position at the
network. However, Paley rejected the deal and told Shirer: “As far as I’m
concerned, your usefulness to CBS has ended. You’re out.”
Shirer later said Murrow told Paley that he and Shirer “had an
agreement. But if you don’t like it, Bill, you’re the boss.”
Shirer was angry that Murrow had put ambition above loyalty to a
friend, according to Persico.35 Murrow bristled at suggestions that the
network was firing Shirer because of his politics.
But three months earlier a New York Times columnist pointed out that
CBS and other networks had been dismissing liberal broadcasters. Jack
Gould also criticized the practice of allowing sponsors the power over who
was to report the news.
Murrow, as head of news for CBS, wrote a rebuttal.
“Under no circumstances will we sell time for news and permit the
sponsors to select a broadcaster who is not wholly acceptable to us.”36
However, the soap company rejected Murrow’s choice of a
replacement for Shirer and canceled its contract for the show.
Before he died, Murrow invited Shirer and his wife to his cabin for
lunch. Murrow apparently was seeking absolution from Shirer. The visit
was cordial, but Shirer did not want to talk about the past.
“Shirer had tried to cut the memory out of his heart,” Persico writes,
“and forgiveness had gone with it.”37
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High Society and Censorship
When Murrow went back on the air in 1947, CBS tripled his salary. He was
now making more than $100,000 a year, which is the equivalent of more
than $1 million in today’s dollars. The show was called Edward R. Murrow
with the News.
Murrow announced on his first show that personal opinion would not
be mixed up with facts, but he devoted the last six minutes of his show to
his “tailpiece,” which essentially was his subjective news analysis.
The extra income allowed the Murrows to purchase an expensive
rustic home on an exclusive island, where they joined a posh, country club
crowd.
In 1948, Murrow met Fred Friendly, a producer, and they teamed up
to produce a 45-minute record of famous radio recordings, titled I Can Hear
It Now: 1933-1945. It was a big success. They followed that with two more
recordings, 1945-1949 and 1919-1932.
Murrow hired Friendly in 1949.
In July 1950, Murrow went to South Korea, where war had just
broken out. The North Koreans invaded the South, which was protected by
a small United Nations force composed mostly of American soldiers.
Murrow interviewed military personnel and traveled with the troops.
He produced a news analysis which suggested that the war would not end
quickly and that American involvement was futile.
CBS management killed the story, saying it violated military
censorship rules. Murrow was furious. He appealed to Paley, who for eight
years had never censored Murrow’s reports. This time Paley sided with
management.
According to a CBS internal memorandum, Paley said Murrow “was
hurt. Very hurt. He, Ed Murrow, the great man who could never do
anything unfair or unjust, was being made out to look like a guy who didn’t
live up to his word. The hurt just stood out on his face.”38
A short time later, Campbell’s Soup complained about the low
audience ratings for Edward R. Murrow with the News and asked whether
it could dump the show and use the 7:45 p.m. slot for alternative
programming. Paley redeemed himself by rejecting the request. He told
18
Murrow he could continue in the slot even if there were no sponsors.
Murrow also proposed a half-hour weekly show that he and Friendly
were calling Hear It Now. Paley approved but suggested the program be
expanded to a full hour. Murrow was delighted.
Hear It Now was given the 9 p.m. Friday slot and first aired in
December 1950. The program typically consisted of a half dozen segments
on various issues, including national and international news, sports, drama,
movies and the media. Murrow anchored the news and commentary
segments.
On November 18, 1951, Murrow and Friendly adapted Hear It Now
to television and called it See It Now.
Although television had been around since the late 1930s, it didn’t
emerge as a commercial medium until the late 1940s. Within a decade,
more than 90 percent of American households owned a TV.
Murrow was wary of television, but his cool and collected
presentation style and good looks contributed to a successful transition.
The show initially appeared in the 3:30 p.m. Sunday time slot, which
Murrow called the “intellectual ghetto.”
Many critics said See It Now was the best show on television.
Over the next four years, the show would win four Emmy’s and one
Peabody award. As viewership increased, the time slot was changed to 6:30
p.m., which attracted even more viewers.
The half-hour show contained three to a half-dozen stories, often
controversial. The ethic of objectivity wasn’t always followed. This rankled
some sources who demanded “equal time” to respond. CBS executives
usually gave in, which perturbed Murrow.
Paley respected Murrow but was increasingly irritated by Murrow’s
style of journalism.
In 1953, Murrow and two of his associates created Person to Person,
a television show in which Murrow interviewed prominent politicians and
Hollywood or literary personalities.
The cameras were taken to the guest’s homes and Murrow
interviewed them from New York. The guests included Senator John F. And
Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando,
Humphrey Bogart, Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr., Margaret Mead, Harry
19
Truman, Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro, Bing Crosby, Kirk Douglas and
John Steinbeck.
Person to Person was popular with viewers but not with critics of
serious news. Friendly tried to convince Murrow that he was undermining
his good reputation. Persico called Person to Person “insipid froth.”39
Many friends and colleagues disliked the show and asked Murrow
why he continued doing it. Murrow often replied that he reluctantly hosted
the show in order to justify keeping the lower-rated See It Now on the air.
There probably was some truth to that.
However, personal gain may have been a factor. Murrow was the
major stockholder in Person to Person and became rich from the show. In
1958, he sold it to CBS, which paid him more than $10 million in today’s
dollars.40
Due Process or Self-Interest?
In late 1953 and 1954, some of Murrow’s friends were wondering whether
the big money Murrow was making explained in part why he had not done
more during the past four years to expose McCarthy’s pernicious tactics.
“You’d better do something about that guy,” warned Bill Downs, who
Murrow had hired during World War II.
According to Persico: “Murrow hedged. ‘Fred Friendly says it isn’t
time yet,’ he said, referring to the co-producer of See It Now. ‘It is time,’
Down’s insisted. ‘The effect that McCarthy is having is nothing short of
devastating.’”41
“Another friend taunted Murrow,” Persico wrote, “that he [Murrow]
was avoiding a confrontation with McCarthy because he had too much to
lose: his programs, his sponsors, the Park Avenue apartment, the new
country estate. Murrow answered with the stock dodge that he used to
conceal his private thoughts: ‘You may be right.’”
Murrow might have done something sooner had he not been so
vulnerable to a McCarthy attack.
In addition to past associations with the Wobblies, Moscow
University, neo-Marxist German scholars, John Dewey (whose books were
being banned at U.S. government libraries overseas) and British neo-
20
Marxist Harold Laski, Murrow worked with and defended one American
journalist who had spied for the Soviet Union before the war. Several years
after the war, a close friend of Murrow’s also committed suicide after FBI
agents interrogated him about his role in spying for the Soviet Union when
he worked at the State Department.
If self-interest was the reason Murrow avoided doing a major story
about McCarthy in the early 1950s, he set it aside in fall 1953.
That’s when Murrow decided to broadcast a story about a U.S. Air
Force reservist who was being forced to resign his commission because of
alleged associations with communists.
Murrow had read about the story in The Detroit News, which stated
that the U.S. Air Force was seeking the resignation of Lt. Milo Radulovich,
a meteorologist in the reserves, because his sister and father allegedly had
close associations with Communists or Communist sympathizers.
“The case reeked of McCarthyism,” Persico writes. “The plight of this
obscure Air Force Reserve lieutenant revealed to Ed how deeply the cancer
of fear and suspicion had eaten into the marrow of everyday life in America.
Paranoia was becoming institutionalized. Due process, the right of the
accused, the presumption of innocence, could be denied without
explanation.”42
See It Now broadcast the story on October 20, 1953.
“Anybody that is labeled with a security risk in these days, especially
in physics or meteorology, simply won’t be able to find employment,”
Radulovich told America on the show. “In other words, I believe that if I am
labeled a security risk — if the Air Force won’t have me, I ask the question,
who will? ... If I’m being judged by my relatives, are my children going to
be asked to denounce me?’ Are they going to be asked what their father was
labeled? Are they going to be asked why their father is a security risk? ...
I see a chain reaction that has no end.”
Radulovich’s elderly father is shown on camera reading a letter he
sent to the President, pleading to help his son. Radulovich’s sister, some
neighbors and a former commander of the local American Legion post all
speak highly of Radulovich.
Murrow tells his viewers:”We believe that the son shall not bear the
iniquity of the father, even though that iniquity be proved; and in this case
21
it was not. ... Whatever happens in the whole area of the relationship
between the individual and the state, we do it ourselves ... it seems to Fred
Friendly and myself ... that this is a subject that should be argued about
endlessly.”
More than 8,000 viewers sent letters and telegrams to CBS and its
sponsor — a hundred-to-one in favor Radulovich.
“Television journalism had achieved influence, like a great
newspaper, like The New York Times,” Friendly said later. “We found that
night that we could make a difference.”43
Indeed, a month later, See It Now broadcast a short statement from the
Harold E. Talbott, secretary of the Air Force: “I have decided that it is
consistent with the interests of national security to retain Lt. Radulovich in
the United States Air Force. He is not, in my opinion, a security risk.”
On the same program, See It Now contained a segment on a
controversy in Indianapolis, in which the local American Legion refused to
rent its hall to some people who wanted to start up a local chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union. Some of the Legionnaires thought the
ACLU was front for Communist causes.
The program gave equal time to both sides.
But a local priest, who offered his parish hall to the ACLU, stole the
show. “When the climate is such that so many people are so quick to take
the law into their own hands, or rather ... to ignore the law and to deny to
others the right to peaceful assembly and free speech — then somebody
certainly has to take a stand.”44
Reviewers gave Murrow and See It Now another standing ovation.
“What he was talking about,” ACLU spokesman Alan Reitman told
Murrow biographer Sperber in 1983, “was the moral question and the
fundamental concepts of this country. Not just as a newsman looking at a
story which was interesting, but as someone fighting to get the public to
understand the intrinsic values of free speech, and free association, and due
process of law, as the fabric — the central fabric of the whole American
democracy.”45
Decades later, scholar Thomas Rosteck would write that “it now
seemed clear to most [newspaper, radio and magazine] reviewers that, with
the Radulovich telecast and then ‘An Argument in Indianapolis,’ the See It
22
Now makers were engaged in a campaign to counter assaults on basic
freedoms.”46
But not everyone was happy with the pro-civil rights approach.47
Just before the “Argument in Indianapolis” segment, McCarthy and
his staff dug out a 1935 newspaper story about Murrow’s role in helping
develop that educational program which allowed Americans to study at
Moscow University.
The news story, which appeared in Hearst newspapers, said the
program taught participants how to be “adept Communist propagandists.”
Not true.
But one of McCarthy’s aids told See It Now journalist Joseph
Wershba that the story was “proof” that “Murrow was on the Soviet payroll
in 1934,”48 because the seminars were conducted by a Soviet espionage
agency.49
McCarthy had destroyed people on far less evidence, Persico points
out.
“And it was at this point that Murrow made the decision to use this newfound power of television to go after McCarthy, before McCarthy went
after him.”50
McCarthy’s Response
On March 30, 1954, three weeks after See It Now’s broadcast of “A Report
on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” McCarthy was given air time to respond.
CBS paid the costs.
McCarthy looked terrible on camera, according to Persico. His makeup was caked and an attempt to hide his receding hairline was a “botched
mixture of false hair and eye brow pencil.”51
McCarthy called Murrow “a symbol, the leader and the cleverest of
the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to
expose individual Communists and traitors.”52
As expected, McCarthy said Murrow sponsored a Communist school
in Moscow that was part of a Russian espionage and propaganda
organization. McCarthy accused Murrow of being a member of the
Industrial Workers of the World, “a terrorist organization cited as
23
subversive by an attorney general of the United States.”
McCarthy also accused Murrow of defending on his TV show in 1950
a professor at John Hopkins University whom McCarthy called “a
conscious, articulate instrument of Communist conspiracy.”
Murrow actually didn’t defend the professor, who was indeed a
leftist. But Murrow did tell his audience that “to the best of his [Murrow’s]
knowledge, it was not a crime to hold such views in a democracy.”
McCarthy also pointed out that socialist Harold Laski had dedicated
one of his books to Murrow.
Unbeknownst to McCarthy, Murrow already had seen McCarthy’s
taped response and had already prepared a written seven-page rebuttal,
point-by-point. CBS distributed the rebuttal to the journalists in a nearby
hotel immediately after the broadcast.
In response to the charge that he had promoted communist
educational seminars, Murrow pointed out that Republican President
Dwight Eisenhower had endorsed the work of his organization.
Murrow denied membership in the Wobblies and said he had only
known them in lumber camps.
And Murrow said “Laski was a friend of mine. ... He is a Socialist. I
am not.”
The next day, Eisenhower, who reluctantly had tolerated McCarthy’s
antics, held a news conference, at which he was asked whether he thought
of Murrow as a “loyal and patriotic American.”
“I have known this man [Murrow] for many years,” Eisenhower
responded. “He has been one of the men I consider my friend among your
profession.”53
Murrow survived the McCarthy attack. But Murrow never
acknowledged the political advantage he had in getting a copy of the
McCarthy broadcast in advance. After all, Murrow never let McCarthy see
his show that was critical of McCarthy before it was broadcast.
In June, Murrow was given the Freedom House Award, which stated:
“Free men were heartened by his courage in exposing those who would
divide us by exploiting our fears.”54
On December 2, 1954, after a 36-day hearing on McCarthy’s charges
of subversion against U.S. Army officials, the Senate condemned McCarthy
24
on a vote of 67 to 22 for conduct “contrary to Senate traditions.”
McCarthy died in 1957 of hepatitis, caused by alcoholism.
The End of See It Now
In 1955, “The $64,000 Question” premiered on CBS. The show drew large
audiences during prime time and cost little to produce. CBS and other
networks were making lots of money from game shows.
Murrow rhetorically asked Friendly how long See It Now would
remain in its prime time Sunday night slot. The answer from CBS
management came quickly, immediately after the 1955 season ended: See
It Now lost its prime time slot and its regular schedule. Only six to eight
shows per season were produced after that.
Critics allege that CBS canceled the program because it was not
generating enough profits. CBS executives countered that Murrow’s
journalism was too liberal and one-sided. Paley was tired of giving air time
to those who felt Murrow had slighted them.55
Paley pulled the plug on See It Now in 1958.
Murrow’s response borrowed a turn-of-phrase created by Karl Marx:
“If television and radio are to be used for the entertainment of all the people
all of the time, we have come perilously close to discovering the real opiate
of the people.”
New York Herald Tribune television critic John Crosby wrote that
“See It Now ... is by every criterion television’s most brilliant, most
decorated, most imaginative, most courageous and most important program.
The fact that CBS cannot afford it but can afford Beat the Clock is
shocking.”56
Murrow continued broadcasting his nightly radio news
show and appeared on television regularly on Person to Person and on CBS
Reports. Murrow went on to produce other hard-hitting news stories and
documentaries, including the famous “Harvest of Shame,” a powerful
indictment of how America’s agricultural system mistreats migrant workers.
But Murrow’s role at CBS diminished as the 1950s came to a close.
Critics say publicly owned corporations disliked news programs because
they couldn’t generate high profit margins. CBS executives placed much of
the blame on subjective journalism.
25
On October 15, 1958, Murrow criticized CBS corporate beancounters in a speech he gave to the Radio-Television News Directors
Association convention in Chicago.
“[I] can find nothing in the Bill of Rights of the Communications Act
which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the
Republic collapse. ... I would just like to see it reflect occasionally the hard,
unyielding realities of the world in which we live. ... This instrument can
teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only
to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise,
it is merely wires and lights in a box.”57
CBS executives were furious. Murrow was biting the hand that fed
him.
Murrow fell into a depression. He took sabbatical and traveled with
his family for nearly a year. After he returned, he left CBS for good,
accepting an offer from President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to head up the
United State Information Agency, the international propaganda arm of the
U.S. government.
Early on, Murrow tried to prevent the BBC from broadcasting the
“Harvest of Shame” report, fearing the Soviets would use it as an example
of the how capitalism mistreats its citizens. Murrow confronted a backlash
of criticism for this ethical lapse.
He held the position at USIA for three years.
Illness forced him to retire in 1964. Murrow, who had smoked three
packs of cigarettes a day for most of his adult life, died of lung cancer in
1965, two days before his 57 birthday.58
What Is Murrow’s Legacy?
Since his passing, Edward R. Murrow has been the subject of four booklength biographies and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and
academic papers. His name is mentioned on more than 2.2 million web
pages. Many accolades have been showered upon him.
Persico pointed out that Murrow “is conceded by those who worked
with him, and those who competed against him, and by their heirs, to be the
patron saint of the profession.”59
26
Columnist Jack Gould of The New York Times called Murrow the
“man who put a spine in broadcasting.”
Time magazine reporter Theodore White said Murrow “left behind a
tradition that the reporting of news ... was to be what its correspondents and
producers wanted it to be, not what management sought to make it.”
Broadcast news anchor Walter Cronkite echoed White’s praise.
“Murrow established the norms by which we in the profession pretty well
live today.”
Quincy Howe, a broadcast journalist and former director of the
ACLU, said Murrow’s “genius lay in the way he organized, channeled and
eventually exhausted and expended all that was in him. Nobody can say
where this spark comes from. Whenever and wherever it appears, it is a
kind of miracle.”
Broadcast journalists who worked with Murrow are even more
effusive.
Howard K. Smith called Murrow “a prince, the most impressive man
I ever met.”
Eric Sevareid said Murrow “was a shooting star” and “not a day of
my life goes by that I don’t think in some way of Ed.”
Marvin Kalb said Murrow “was a meteor in fairly empty sky.”
“He was no comet, however,” Persico clarifies. “His like would not
come back. He was sui generis, partly because of what he was and partly
because when he left broadcasting, the door closed on the kind of freedom
he had known.”60
Yet, despite all of these accolades, journalists and others still struggle
to understand the Murrow legacy.
Integrity is perhaps the most popular legacy theme.
Charles Collingwood said Murrow’s “politics were based on oldfashioned notions of morality and honor, not ideology. He had character,
and that is something you just cannot fake.”61
Washington State University’s official magazine states that Murrow
did “his idealistic utmost to maintain integrity in an industry that was
largely his creation.”62
A WSU administrator adds that “Murrow ... went on to lead our
nation in carving out the moral and ethical high ground through his
27
courageous reporting and later role as head of the U.S. Information Agency
under President John F. Kennedy.”63
But the integrity theme is strong only if one excludes the lies he made
when he applied for the job at CBS; his failure to defend Shirer to CBS
management; his unsuccessful attempt to censor one of his own stories
while at USIA; his decision to go after McCarthy only when it became clear
McCarthy was coming after him; and his lack of concern about the fairness
of watching McCarthy’s response before it was broadcast.
My point is not that Murrow didn’t have journalistic integrity — only
that integrity is perhaps not the best defining feature of his legacy.
Enlightenment activism is a better one.
Fred Friendly, in his review of the first book-length biography of
Murrow, wrote: “Often Columbia [University] students, many of whom
were only eight and nine years old when Ed was still broadcasting, ask me,
‘What made Murrow so special?’ Certainly, he couldn’t ad lib a special
event the way Cronkite and Robert Trout do, or write news analysis any
better than Sevareid or Howard K. Smith. He couldn’t create the droll
humor of a David Brinkley or a Harry Reasoner. Although he did all of
these things well, what set him apart was his sense of involvement. He was
able to engage at once not only his viewers but their consciences as well.”64
More specifically, Persico says Murrow’s “impulses were those of a
populist reformer.”
Yet he lived like an English squire. He had a congenial attraction to
underdogs — working people, Britain during the war, Israel ...
McCarthy’s victims. And in his romantic imagination, he saw himself
as an underdog, up from poverty. He prided himself on his capacity
to mix with cowboys, lumberjacks, and farmers, but he was honestly
more at home with an intellectual Harold Laski, a social Ronnie
Treet, a powerful Bill Paley. His character remained forever
contradictory, uncapturable. He could be, in Eric Sevareid’s phrase,
“an engaging boy one moment and an unknowable recluse the next.”65
Persico concludes that “Murrow wanted the world to be a better place
than it is, and he wanted television to serve that end. ... He wanted
television to storm the beaches of ignorance and injustice, instead of
28
wallowing in a mind-numbing sea of mediocrity and easy profits.”66
The activism theme is reinforced by Gary R. Edgerton, professor and
dean of the College of Communication at Butler University:
In words evocative of America’s original founding fathers, Murrow
frequently used the airwaves to revivify and popularize many
democratic ideals such as free speech, citizen participation, the
pursuit of truth, and the sanctification of individual liberties and
rights ... . Resurrecting these values and virtues for a mass audience
of true believers during the London Blitz was high drama — the
opposing threat of totalitarianism, made real by Nazi bombs, was ever
present ... . Ed Murrow’s persona was thus established, embodying
the political traditions of the Western democracies, and offering the
public a heroic model on which to focus their energies.67
Murrow’s embrace of civil liberties also is illustrated in an interaction
he had with his son, Casey, who wanted a new bike in 1954. Casey said his
dad told him that “he would buy it for me but that I would have to explain
the Bill of Rights. I was terrified. But I learned the Bill of Rights and got
my bike.”68
Murrow was a man who had deep convictions about democracy and
due process. But objective journalism and full-blown commentary were not
sufficient to maintain and advance those deals. His journalism captured the
middle ground — opinion solidly grounded in facts or sound logic. He was
the quintessential Enlightenment activist.
Chapter Notes
1. There is a dispute about the actual number of names on the list. There was no
recording of the event. But most reports cite 205. Historians point out that McCarthy
frequently changed the number of alleged communists on his lists.
2. The relationship between power and news is one of the most documented findings
in mass communication research. See, e.g., J. Herbert Altschull, Agents of Power (New
York: Longman, 1984) and David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media Power Politics
(New York: The Free Press, 1981);
3. Persico, Edward R. Murrow, see Chapters 22 and 25.
29
4. Edward R. Murrow, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” See It Now (aired
March 9, 1954, Columbia Broadcasting System).
5. The responses in this section are taken from A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and
Times (New York: Freundlich Books, 1986), pp. 440-443.
6. The pro-McCarthy press criticized the McCarthy show, and some of the praise in the
mainstream press was qualified. But since then journalists have elevated the show to
mythical status.
7. Joseph Werschba, “Edward R. Murrow and the Time of His Time,” (copyright 2000),
retrieved October 22, 2012 from <http://www.evesmag.com/murrow.htm>.
8. CBS had a policy requiring its reporters to be objective. But management issued a
statement after the McCarthy show saying it was making an exception in this case. Persico,
Edward R. Murrow, pp. 382-383.
9. Quoted in Persico, op. cit., p. 382.
10. Persico, Edward R. Murrow, p. 383.
11. For an in-depth treatment of the ethic of objectivity, see David Demers, History and
Future of Mass Media: An Integrated Perspective (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press), Chapter
16.
12. Quoted in Persico, p. 8. Original Source: Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959), pp. 137, 166.
13. For a discussion of the mainstream bias, see Chapter 8 in David Demers, Global
Media: Menace or Messiah? 2nd ed. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001).
14. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times, p. 442.
15. Ibid.
16. Persico, Edward R. Murrow, p. 496
17. Ibid., p. 8.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 27.
20. Ibid., p. 21.
21. Ibid., p. 27.
22. Ibid., p. 35.
23. Ibid., p. 43.
24. Ibid., pp. 218-219.
25. Ibid., p. 40.
27. Russell McNeil, “Stoic Enlightenment — The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius —
Unpublished Selections Explained, Med. XII.05,” posted online April 8, 2009, at
<http://russellmcneil.blogspot.com/2009/04/meditations-of-marcus-aurelius_08.html>.
28. Paul Coie became a lawyer in Seattle. He was a friend of Murrow.
29. Bob Edwards, Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004), p. 24. Edwards points out that Murrow also
lied about his age on other occasions.
30. Joseph E. Persico, Edward R. Murrow: An American Original (New York: Dell,
1988), p. 173.
31. During times of war especially, mass media almost always rally behind the national
interest (see, for example, Chapter 6’s discussion about filmmakers supporting the U.S.
government during World War II). This is the case even in countries whose journalists
adhere to the so-called “ethic of objectivity” (see Media Issues Box 4.1 in Chapter 4). Media
help build and maintain morale and, thus, play a social control function.
32. Erik Barnouw, The Gold Web (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 151.
30
33. Ibid., p. 192.
34. Ibid., p. 249.
35. Ibid., p. 254.
36. Ibid., p. 255.
38. Ibid., p. 292.
39. Ibid., p. 348.
40. The total amount when adjusted for inflation.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 371.
43. Ibid., p. 373.
44. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times, p. 422.
45. Quoted in A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Freundlich
Books, 1986), p. 423.
46. Thomas Rosteck, See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and
the Politics of Representation (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 102.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid, p. 374.
50. Ibid, p. 373.
51. Ibid., p. 388.
52. Ibid., p. 389.
53. Ibid., p. 391.
54. Ibid., p. 394.
55. The Fairness Doctrine was enacted in 1949 and required broadcasters to report on
controversial issues and to air contrasting views on those issues. There was no requirement
for equal time, but many broadcasting organizations feared that the Federal Communications
Commission would revoke their licenses if they failed to give equal time.
56. Crosby’s quote taken from Erik Barnouw, The Image Empire (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970), p. 116.
58. Janet Murrow kept a diary that has been an invaluable source of information to
historians about Ed. She died in 1999. Ed attended Washington State College, which is now
Washington State University and houses the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 498.
62. Hannelore Sudermann and Val E. Limburg, “Where Have You Gone, Edward R.
Murrow?” Washington State Magazine (Fall 2005), retrieved October 26, 2012, from
<http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/index.php?id=368>.
63. Lawrence Pintak, “WHY the Murrow Symposium at WSU?” retrieved November
9, 2012 from <http://murrowsymposium.wsu.edu>.
64. Fred W. Friendly, “‘This ... Is Murrow,’ An Essay Review of Prime Time: The Life
of Edward R. Murrow, by Alexander Kendrick,” pp. 21, 22, 32 in Saturday Review
(September 27, 1969), p. 32.
66. Ibid., p. 499.
31
67. Gary Edgerton, “Edward R. Murrow: U.S. Broadcast Journalist,” The Museum of
Broadcast Communications, retrieved November 3, 2012, from <http://www.museum.tv/
eotvsection.php?entrycode=murrowedwar>.
68. Christian Avard, “Students Hear Tales of TV News Legend at Springfield School,”
Rutland (Vermont) Herald (September 30, 2011), retrieved December 3, 2012, from
<http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20110930/NEWS02/709309938>.

the murrow legacy: integrity or activism?

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