Edward R. Murrow

Edward Roscoe Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow, (April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American journalist, whose radio news broadcasts during World War II were eagerly followed by millions of radio listeners. Mainstream historians consider him among journalism's greatest figures; Murrow hired a top-flight cadre of war correspondents, and was noted for honesty and integrity in delivering the news. A pioneer of TV news journalism, Murrow produced a series of TV news reports that countered the Cold-War hysteria of the 1950s, and led to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Though seen as a controversial figure by many, Murrow left a legacy that stands as one of the cornerstones of broadcast journalism.

Contents

1 Career 1.1 Radio 1.2 Television 2 Quotes 3 External links and references

Career

He was born near Polecat Creek near Greensboro in Guilford County, North Carolina, the youngest son of Quaker abolitionists. His home was a log cabin without electricity or plumbing, on a farm bringing in only a few hundred dollars a year from corn and hay. When Murrow was five, his family moved to Washington, homesteading thirty miles from the Canadian border, in Blanchard, on Samish Bay. He attended high school in nearby Edison, becoming president of the student body in his senior year and excelled on the debating team and was on the Skagit County championship basketball team. By that time, the teenage Egbert was going by the nickname "Ed".

In 1926, he enrolled in Washington State College in Pullman, Washington, eventually majoring in speech. He was active in college politics and in 1929, while attending the annual convention of the National Student Federation of America, his speech urging college students to become more interested in national and world affairs led to his election as president of the federation, which led him to move to New York.

He worked as assistant director of the Institute of International Education from 1932 to 1935, during which time (1934) he married Janet Huntington Brewster.

Murrow joined CBS as director of talks in 1935, and would remain with the network for his entire broadcast journalism career. At that time, CBS did not have a news staff. Murrow's job was to persuade European figures to broadcast over the CBS network, in direct competition with RCA's NBC network. The job turned Murrow, along with his colleague William L. Shirer, into one of the inventors of broadcast journalism.

Radio

During the 1938 Czechoslovakian crisis, Murrow broadcast directly from Prague to the United States via shortwave radio, making history in the process by covering a breaking foreign news story via radio. Murrow and Shirer went on to organize a European News Roundup, which brought together correspondents from various European cities together for a single broadcast. The March 13, 1938 broadcast was considered revolutionary at the time. (The CBS special became the basis for the daily CBS World News Roundup, which runs each weekday on the CBS Radio Network and is broadcasting's oldest news series.)

Murrow was sent to London before the outbreak of World War II, while Shirer stayed on the European continent, stationed in Berlin. When war broke out Murrow provided live radio broadcasts from the height of the London Blitz. His signature open "This -- is London" electrified radio audiences as news programming never had before. Previously, war coverage had been mostly provided by newspaper reports, and earlier radio news programs had usually been an announcer reading wireservice reports in a studio.

Shirer's coverage from Berlin also brought him national acclaim, and a commentator's position with CBS News upon his return in December 1940. Shirer went on to write a best-selling book, Berlin Diary, based upon his experiences.

But Murrow had achieved the greater celebrity than Shirer as a result of his war reports. He went on to fly on Allied bombing raids in Europe during the war, providing additional reports from the planes as they flew over Europe (but recorded for delayed broadcast). Murrow's skill in improvising vivid verbal descriptions of visual images, based in part on his college degree in speech, aided the effectiveness of his radio broadcasts.

Murrow's report from the liberation of the Buchenwald extermination camp in Germany provides an example of his uncompromising style of journalism, something that caused a great deal of controversy and won him a number of critics and enemies. He described the exhausted physical state of the concentration camp prisoners who had survived, mentioned "rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood", and he refused to apologize for the harsh tone of his words:

"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry." — April 15, 1945

The relationship between Murrow and Shirer ended in 1947, in one of the great confrontations of American broadcast journalism, when Murrow fired Shirer following an editorial dispute over the Truman Doctrine, a doctrine Shirer was critical of. This foreshadowed Murrow's problems to come with CBS founder and CEO William S. Paley.

Murrow continued to present daily radio news reports on the CBS Radio network. He also recorded a series called Hear It Now, where he began to work with producer Fred Friendly.

Television

As the 1950s began, he was assigned to CBS' new TV news team, to adapt to the new medium of television. His weekly TV news show See It Now began with a segment that is credited with a footnote of its own in television history: it gave the first live simultaneous TV transmission from both the East Coast and the West Coast, as reporters on both sides of the North American continent gave live reports to Murrow, who was sitting in the CBS control room. One of the most popular of these reports was a 1952 broadcast entitled Christmas in Korea, when Murrow spoke with American soldiers assigned to the United Nations peacekeeping force at the time.

See It Now focused on a number of controversial issues in the 1950s, but it is best remembered as the show that criticized the Red Scare and contributed to the political downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Murrow produced a number of episodes of the show that dealt with the Communist witch hunt hysteria (one of the more notable episodes resulted in a U.S. military officer being acquitted, after being charged with supporting Communism), before embarking on a broadcast on March 9, 1954 that has often been referred to as television's finest hour.

Murrow, Friendly, and their news team produced a 30-minute special entitled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy." Murrow used excerpts from McCarthy's own speeches and proclamations to criticize the senator and point out episodes where he had contradicted himself. Murrow knew full well that he was using the medium of television to attack a single man and expose him to nationwide scrutiny, and he was often quoted as having doubts about the method he used for this news report. Nonetheless, this 30-minute TV episode sparked off a nationwide backlash against McCarthy and against the Red Scare in general, and it is seen as a turning point in the history of television. McCarthy provided his own televised response to Murrow two weeks later on See It Now (Murrow had publicly offered the senator a chance to defend himself against his charges), and his own televised appearances contributed nearly as much to his own downfall as Murrow. Murrow had learned how to use the medium of television, but McCarthy had not.

However, Murrow's hard-hitting approach to the news cost him influence in the world of television. See It Now occasionally scored high ratings (usually when it was approaching a particularly controversial subject), but in general it did not score well on prime-time television. When the quiz show phenomenon began and took the world of TV by storm in the late 1950s, Murrow realized the days of See It Now were numbered. In response to repeated calls to provide more "entertaining" news (and thus score better ratings), Murrow launched a series of celebrity interviews entitled Person to Person with Edward R. Murrow. Just as Murrow had nearly single-handedly pioneered TV news journalism, with Person to Person he also set the standard for celebrity interviews, producing a format that is still followed by such adherents as Barbara Walters.

See It Now was indeed cancelled — with CBS founder Paley complaining the program "gave me a stomachache" — but Murrow felt that the show had run its course. Now freed from the rigors of having to produce a 30-minute TV show every week, he produced a series of occasional TV special news reports that defined documentary news coverage. Beginning in 1958, he also hosted a talk show entitled Small World that brought together political figures for one-on-one debates. As a further example of Murrow's effect on TV journalism, this form of TV debate continues today with Sunday morning political talk shows such as This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Murrow's reporting brought him into repeated conflicts with CBS and founder Paley, which Fred Friendly summarized in his book Due to Circumstances Beyond our Control. After his last documentary Harvest of Shame, a report on the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States, he resigned to accept a position as head of the United States Information Agency in 1961. President John F. Kennedy offered Murrow the position, which he viewed as "a timely gift".

Murrow was a heavy smoker all his life, and he was rarely seen without a cigarette. His chain smoking resulted in his developing lung cancer, and he died at his home in 1965. He is interred in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Quotes

• "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 our 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 that were for the moment unpopular.
  This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused 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."

– See it Now broadcast, March 9 1954

• "No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."

– Speech to staff, March 9 1954

• "If we confuse dissent with disloyalty - if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox - if we deny the essence of ratial equality (sic) then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the ... confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought."

– Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show, CBS and NBC, June 1953, "Conclusion." Murrow: His Life and Times, A.M. Sperber, Freundlich Books, 1986

• "Dissension is not disloyalty." (In response to McCarthy's attempt to include him as a communist sympathizer in his show trials.)

– attributed; may be a variant of the above quote.

External links and references

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• "Murrow, Edward R." in Current Biography, 1942.
• "Murrow, Edward R." in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University press, 1999), Vol. 16.
• Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism (ISBN 0471477532), by Bob Edwards
• Wikisource: Transcript of "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy" (http://wikisource.org/wiki/A_Report_on_Senator_Joseph_R._McCarthy)
• Museum of Broadcast Communications website on Murrow (http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/M/htmlM/murrowedwar/murrowedwar.htm)
• Old Time Radio (http://www.otr.com/murrow.html) contains sound clips of Murrow reporting from the Blitz, Buchenwald, the McCarthy hearings, and others.
• Brief biography (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/murrow_e.html) at American Masters (PBS)
• Murrow (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1872668) at NPR
  • This I Believe (http://www.npr.org/thisibelieve/murrow_transcript.html) (1951) at NPR
• RTNDA Convention Speech (http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/hiddenagenda/murrow.html) (1958)
• "Edward R. Murrow and the Time of His Time" (http://www.evesmag.com/murrow.htm) by Joseph Wershba, CBS News writer, editor and correspondent, beginning in 1944; producer of 60 Minutes (1968-1988)

On their 2003 album Say you will, the band Fleetwood Mac recorded a song called Murrow turning over in his grave (written by Lindsey Buckingham), referring to Edward R. Murrow as an icon of respectable journalism.de:Edward R. Murrow