Edward R. Murrow, (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow), (April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American journalist, whose radio news broadcasts during World War II were followed by millions of listeners in the United States and Canada. 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 television news broadcasting, 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.
Murrow in current context
Though seen as a controversial figure by many, Murrow left a legacy that stands as one of the cornerstones of broadcast journalism. Murrow's status as broadcasting's greatest journalist has not waned in the decades since his death. Colleague Walter Cronkite said in a 1990s retrospective produced by CBS: "He's the head of the parade, he's the pinnacle of the pyramid. He led the way."
In 1964, Murrow was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was made an honorary knight of Great Britain and received similar honors from the governments of Belgium, France, and Sweden.
Recently, George Clooney directed a film about Murrow taking on McCarthy, using as its title Murrow's broadcast-closing line — Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).
Early life
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 excelling on the debating team. He 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. He then moved 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.
Career at CBS
Murrow joined CBS as director of talks in 1935 and remained with the network for his entire broadcast journalism career. At that time, CBS — or the Columbia Broadcasting System, to use its official name of those days — did not have a news staff.
In 1937, Murrow went to London as director of CBS's European operation. His job was to persuade European figures to broadcast over the CBS network, in direct competition with RCA's NBC network (the National Broadcasting Company). In this role, he recruited journalist William L. Shirer to hold a similar post on the Continent. The two would become the progenitors of broadcast journalism.
Radio
Murrow gained his first fame at the outbreak of the 1938 Anschluss, in which Adolf Hitler's Germany annexed Austria. Then CBS director of operations in Europe and not allowed to broadcast, Murrow got word of the annexation and tried reaching Shirer in Vienna, who could not get the story out via Austrian shortwave. Murrow sent Shirer to London, where he could deliver an uncensored eyewitness account and then chartered a plane to Vienna to cover for Shirer.
At the request of CBS New York (most reference books say it was either chief executive William S. Paley or news director Paul White), Murrow and Shirer put together a European News Roundup of reaction to the Anschluss, which brought correspondents from various European cities together for a single broadcast. The March 13, 1938, special, hosted by Bob Trout in New York, included Shirer in London (with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson), reporter Edgar Ansel Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News in Paris, reporter Pierre J. Huss of International News Service in Berlin, and Senator Lewis B. Schwellenbach in Washington, DC. Murrow himself reported live from Vienna, in the first on-the-scene news report of his career.
The special, featuring multi-point live reports in the days before modern technology (and without each of the parties necessarily being able to hear each other), came off almost flawlessly. The broadcast was considered revolutionary at the time. The CBS special became the basis for the CBS World News Roundup, which still runs each weekday morning and evening on CBS Radio and is broadcasting's oldest news series.
Murrow and Shirer were also regular participants in CBS's coverage that September of the crisis over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, which Hitler coveted for Germany and eventually won in the Munich agreement. Their coverage only heightened the American appetite for radio news, with listeners waiting regularly for Murrow's shortwave reports as analyst H.V. Kaltenborn in New York would announce, "Calling Ed Murrow; come in Ed Murrow."
Murrow was based in 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 during the height of the London Blitz. Those broadcasts, beginning with what became his signature opening "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 wire-service 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.
Murrow achieved greater celebrity than did Shirer as a result of his war reports. He flew on Allied bombing raids in Europe during the war, providing additional reports from the planes as they droned on over Europe (recorded for delayed broadcast). Murrow's skill in vividly improvising descriptions of what was going on around or below him, based in part on his college degree in speech, aided the effectiveness of his radio broadcasts.
Murrow also took advantage of hostilities to expand the CBS news staff beyond himself and Shirer. The result was a group of reporters acclaimed for their intellect and descriptive power — including Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Mary Marvin Breckenridge, Cecil Brown, and Richard C. Hottelet. They were later dubbed Murrow's Boys — even Breckenridge, who was a woman. After the war, he recruited journalists such as Alexander Kendrick, David Schoenbrun, Daniel Schorr and Robert Pierpoint into the circle of the Boys, as a virtual "second generation," though the track record of the original wartime crew set it apart. (Schorr remains an active journalist for National Public Radio.)
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
Postwar broadcasting career
Radio
The relationship between Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer ended in 1947, in one of the great confrontations of American broadcast journalism, when Shirer resigned from CBS. The dispute started when J.B. Williams, maker of shaving soap, withdrew its sponsorship of Shirer's Sunday news show. CBS, of which Murrow was then vice president for public affairs, did not find Shirer another sponsor and allowed the show to keep running on a "sustaining" (non-sponsored) basis, which resulted in a loss of income for its moderator.
Shirer contended that the root of his troubles was the network and sponsor not standing by him because of his comments critical of the Truman Doctrine.
The episode hastened Murrow's desire to give up his network vice presidency and return to newscasting, and foreshadowed Murrow's own problems to come with his friend and CBS boss, Bill Paley. Murrow returned to the air in September 1947, taking over the nightly newscast sponsored by Campbell's Soup and anchored by his old friend and announcing coach Bob Trout. (Trout left for NBC but returned to CBS in 1952.)
Murrow continued to present daily radio news reports on the CBS Radio Network until 1959. He also recorded a series of spoken-word historical albums called I Can Hear It Now, which inaugurated his partnership with producer Fred W. Friendly. In 1950, the records evolved into the weekly CBS Radio show Hear It Now, co-produced by Murrow and Friendly.
Television
As the 1950s began, Murrow began appearing on CBS Television, in editorial "tailpieces" on the CBS Evening News and coverage of special events. This came despite his own misgivings about the new medium and its emphasis on pictures rather than ideas.
On November 18, 1951, the Hear It Now format Murrow and Friendly pioneered on radio moved to television as See It Now. It 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.
In 1953, Murrow launched a second weekly TV show — a series of celebrity interviews entitled Person to Person. 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.
On March 9, 1954, 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.
Murrow and his See It Now co-producer, Fred Friendly, paid for their own newspaper advertisement for the program; they declined to use CBS' money for the publicity campaign. Nonetheless, this 30-minute TV episode contributed to 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.
The broadcast provoked tens of thousands of letters, telegrams and phone calls to CBS headquarters, running 10 to 1 in favor of Murrow. In a Murrow retrospective produced by CBS for the A&E Network series Biography, Friendly noted how truck drivers pulled up to Murrow on the street in subsequent days and shouted "Good show, Ed. Good show, Ed."
Murrow offered McCarthy a chance to comment on the CBS show, and McCarthy provided his own televised response to Murrow two weeks later on See It Now. The senator's rebuttal contributed nearly as much to his own downfall as did Murrow or any other of McCarthy's detractors. Murrow had learned how to use the medium of television, but McCarthy had not.
Murrow's hard-hitting approach to the news, however, cost him influence in the world of television. See It Now occasionally scored high ratings (usually when it was tackling a particularly controversial subject), but in general it did not score well on prime-time television.
When a quiz show phenomenon began and took TV by storm in the mid-1950s, Murrow realized the days of See It Now as a weekly show were numbered. (Biographer Joseph Persico notes that Murrow, watching an early episode of The $64,000 Question air just before his own See It Now, is said to have turned to Friendly and asked how long they expected to keep their time slot.)
The weekly version of See It Now ended in 1955, after sponsor Alcoa withdrew its advertising, but the show remained as a series of occasional TV special news reports that defined television documentary news coverage. Despite the prestige, CBS found trouble getting a regular sponsor, since the program aired intermittently and could not develop a regular audience.
Murrow's reporting brought him into repeated conflicts with CBS and its founder, Paley, a contretemps that Friendly summarized in his book Due to Circumstances Beyond our Control. See It Now ended in summer 1958 after a clash between Murrow and Paley in Paley's office. Murrow had complained to Paley he could not continue doing the show if the network repeatedly provided (without consulting Murrow) equal time to subjects who felt wronged by the program.
According to Friendly, Murrow asked Paley if he was going to destroy See It Now, into which the CBS chief executive had poured so much. Paley replied that he didn't want a constant stomachache every time Murrow did a controversial subject.
See It Now's final broadcast, "Watch on the Ruhr" (about postwar Germany), aired July 7, 1958. Three months later, in a speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago, Murrow blasted TV's emphasis on entertainment and commercialism at the expense of public service. One passage:
- "..during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER."
Beginning in 1958, Murrow hosted a talk show entitled Small World that brought together political figures for one-to-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.
After contributing to the first episode of the documentary series CBS Reports, Murrow took a sabbatical from summer 1959 to mid-1960. Friendly, executive producer of the new series, wanted the network to allow Murrow to again be his co-producer after the sabbatical, but he was eventually turned down.
Murrow's last major TV milestone was reporting and narrating the CBS Reports installment "Harvest of Shame", a report on the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States. Directed by Friendly and produced by David Lowe, it ran in November 1960, just after Thanksgiving.
Summary of television work
- 1951-58 See It Now (host)
- 1953-59 Person to Person (host)
- 1958-60 Small World (moderator and producer)
Murrow at the US Information Agency
Murrow finally resigned to accept a position as head of the United States Information Agency, parent of the Voice of America, in 1961. President John F. Kennedy offered Murrow the position, which he viewed as "a timely gift".
A chain smoker
Murrow was a heavy smoker all his life, and he was rarely seen without a cigarette. He developed lung cancer and died at his home in 1965 two days after his 57th birthday. He is interred in the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Upon his death, Murrow's colleague and friend Eric Sevareid said of him,"He was a shooting star; we will not see his like again."
Murrow in popular culture
- In 1986, HBO broadcast the made-for-cable biographical movie, Murrow, with Daniel J. Travanti in the title role.
- In 1998, the final episode of Murphy Brown had Murphy meeting Edward R. Murrow while visiting Heaven. Computer editing was used to insert footage of the real Murrow into the show.
- On their 2003 album Say You Will, Fleetwood Mac recorded a song called Murrow Turning Over in His Grave, referring to him as an icon of responsible journalism.
- George Clooney's 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck is a fictionalized account of Murrow's conflict with Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Quotes
- About television: "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." 1
- "No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."
- "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 racial equality 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
External links and references
- Biography of Murrow from "The Murrow Center" at Tufts University
- "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"
- Museum of Broadcast Communications website on Murrow
- Old Time Radio contains sound clips of Murrow reporting from the Blitz, Buchenwald, the McCarthy hearings, and others.
- Brief biography at American Masters (PBS)
- Murrow at NPR
- This I Believe (1951) at NPR
- RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)
- "Edward R. Murrow and the Time of His Time" by Joseph Wershba, CBS News writer, editor and correspondent, beginning in 1944; producer of 60 Minutes (1968-1988)
- Murrow narrates the War Of The Worlds for Studio One television series (1957)
- Murrow, Edward R. and Ed Bliss, "In Search of Light: The News Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow"(New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
- Kendrick, Alexander "Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow"(New York).
- Sperber, A.M. "Murrow: His Life and Times"(New York:Freundlich Books 1986) reprinted by Fordham University Press.