Murrow is Dead
I wrote a short piece about the Edward R. Murrow mystique and asked Doug O’Brien, then a contributor to this blog, whether the heavy hand of Murrow as a “Fifth Estate Myth” still hovers over broadcast journalism. He wrote, here:
I’m not old enough to have met Edward R. Murrow. I did meet Fred Friendly once; his demeanor at least on that occasion belied his name. A few years ago I attended a theatrical reading of a play in development about Murrow & Co. In part it dealt with the politics swirling around See It Now, and I was struck with how familiar it all was 50 years after the fact. The difference is there is no Murrow-like figure today. To be sure, there have been first rate broadcast journalists in our midst – Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and Don Hewitt come to mind, among others. Standard bearers all, to be sure. But originators? I think they needed Murrow’s shoulders to stand on.
There are people at CBS and elsewhere in the broadcast world who still idolize Murrow, but not necessarily for the right reasons. One senses an “If it was good enough for Murrow, it’s good enough for me” sort of ethos sometimes. It can take the form of “If Murrow didn’t need a computer, I don’t,” or “Murrow did it this way, therefore I will.” These people miss the point.
There was and is significant internal political pressure on broadcast news people to do less – less hard reporting, less controversy, less of all those things that might upset the general public, the noisiest special interests (including government), or the sponsors. Until CNN, and unlike newspapers, broadcast organizations didn’t exist primarily to report the news. Part of Murrow’s legacy, I think, is that he proved that real journalism on radio and television worked, that people would take what he said over the likes of a McCarthy, and that it could be viable and profitable part of any broadcast operation; indeed that it could be co-equal with the entertainment aspects of broadcast.
I don’t worship Murrow. He was a product of his day and in many respects would be a dinosaur if he was still around. In his Slate review of the new film about Murrow, Jack Shafer seems to take the all too common view that you can try, but if you fail, you’re nobody to emulate. I prefer Theodore Roosevelt’s view that trying and failing is far better than not trying at all. Murrow, more than anybody else until then, explored the possibilities of spoken word journalism, experimented with taking listeners, then viewers, to a place, and tried to bring the quality of broadcast journalism to par with print. You can debate the value of any of that, if you want to. You can even debate the honesty of it, as Shafer does. But without Murrow and “Murrow’s Boys,” the power of radio and television as information sources would have remained largely hidden for a long time.
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