Nicholas Lemann: Why the life and times of the broadcast pioneer Ed Murrow still matter
... “Good Night, and Good Luck” begins and ends with another famous Murrow moment, a speech to the broadcasters’ trade-association convention in 1958 in which he blasted television for being frivolous and too timid. It was probably a conscious parting shot: the president of CBS, Frank Stanton, fired back (by telling the Times’ television critic that the questions on “Person to Person” were shown to guests in advance), and Murrow took a year’s leave of absence, returning to CBS only briefly before accepting a job from President Kennedy as director of the United States Information Agency—as, in effect, the chief propagandist for an American government he admired. We’re meant to think that Murrow’s dire predictions of television’s descent into profitable meaninglessness have come true.
But the outlines of his critique have been around since the dawn of American broadcasting. The best journalists, like Murrow, are often sentimentalists who subscribe to the great-man theory of history and see public affairs as a titanic struggle between heroes and villains. It shouldn’t be surprising that, half a century later, the standard answer among journalists to the problems Murrow saw in broadcasting is, in effect, “Bring back Murrow!”
Nostalgia has even set in about the old press barons, whom journalists took pleasure in detesting back in Murrow’s day—better to have a Paley or a Luce, or even a William Randolph Hearst or a Roy Howard, calling the shots than hedge-fund managers. The formula is a kind of romantic dream:
larger-than-life news heroes, backed by public-spirited owners whose primary consideration is not profit.
The better way to insure good results, in any realm of society, is to set up a structure that encourages them; we can’t rely on heroes coming along to rescue journalism. The structure that encouraged Murrow, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, was federal regulation of broadcasting. CBS, in Murrow’s heyday, felt that its prosperity, even its survival, depended on demonstrating to Washington its deep commitment to public affairs. The price of not doing so could be regulation, breakup, the loss of a part of the spectrum, or license revocation. Those dire possibilities would cause a corporation to err on the side of too much “See It Now” and “CBS Reports.”
In parts of the speech which aren’t in the movie, Murrow made it clear that the main pressure on broadcasting to do what he considered the right thing came from the F.C.C. The idea that, in taking on McCarthy, Murrow was “standing up to government” greatly oversimplifies the issue. He was able to stand up to a Senate committee chairman because a federal regulatory agency had pushed CBS and other broadcasters to organize themselves so that Murrow’s doing so was possible.
It isn’t possible anymore—not because timid people have risen to power in journalism but because the government, in steady increments over the past generation, has deregulated broadcasting. The Fairness Doctrine no longer exists. Regulation, license revocation, or reallocation of the spectrum are no longer meaningful possibilities. The advent of cable television brought a new round of debates over government-mandated public-affairs programming, with the result that private companies were granted valuable monopoly franchises in local markets; in return, they were required only to provide channels for public affairs, not to create programming. That’s why cable is home to super-low-cost varieties of broadcast news, such as C-SPAN, local publicaccess channels, and national cable-news shout-fests, rather than to reincarnations of the elaborately reported Murrow shows from the fifties.
The rise of public broadcasting has freed the networks to be even more commercial.
On network television, no news star would openly disavow Murrow’s legacy.
The standard today is to have smart, competent, physically magnetic people who do straight news gravely and celebrity interviews empathetically, and who occasionally, strategically, display moral passion and then retreat, as Anderson Cooper, of CNN, did during Hurricane Katrina. Everyone suspects them of being lightweights when they first ascend, and then, when they retire, wonders if we’ll ever see their like again. If being in the Murrow mold entails occasionally editorializing on the air, and letting it be known that you aren’t getting along very well with your superiors, there are only a very few Murrow legatees—Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers come to mind, and they’ve left network television.
News that makes money is alive and well; the incentive to present news that doesn’t, like all of Murrow’s great work, is gone. It is difficult for journalists to grapple with the idea that outside pressure—from government officials!—could have been responsible for the creation of the superior and memorable journalism whose passing we all mourn. But look what has happened since it went away.
Read entire article at New Yorker
But the outlines of his critique have been around since the dawn of American broadcasting. The best journalists, like Murrow, are often sentimentalists who subscribe to the great-man theory of history and see public affairs as a titanic struggle between heroes and villains. It shouldn’t be surprising that, half a century later, the standard answer among journalists to the problems Murrow saw in broadcasting is, in effect, “Bring back Murrow!”
Nostalgia has even set in about the old press barons, whom journalists took pleasure in detesting back in Murrow’s day—better to have a Paley or a Luce, or even a William Randolph Hearst or a Roy Howard, calling the shots than hedge-fund managers. The formula is a kind of romantic dream:
larger-than-life news heroes, backed by public-spirited owners whose primary consideration is not profit.
The better way to insure good results, in any realm of society, is to set up a structure that encourages them; we can’t rely on heroes coming along to rescue journalism. The structure that encouraged Murrow, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, was federal regulation of broadcasting. CBS, in Murrow’s heyday, felt that its prosperity, even its survival, depended on demonstrating to Washington its deep commitment to public affairs. The price of not doing so could be regulation, breakup, the loss of a part of the spectrum, or license revocation. Those dire possibilities would cause a corporation to err on the side of too much “See It Now” and “CBS Reports.”
In parts of the speech which aren’t in the movie, Murrow made it clear that the main pressure on broadcasting to do what he considered the right thing came from the F.C.C. The idea that, in taking on McCarthy, Murrow was “standing up to government” greatly oversimplifies the issue. He was able to stand up to a Senate committee chairman because a federal regulatory agency had pushed CBS and other broadcasters to organize themselves so that Murrow’s doing so was possible.
It isn’t possible anymore—not because timid people have risen to power in journalism but because the government, in steady increments over the past generation, has deregulated broadcasting. The Fairness Doctrine no longer exists. Regulation, license revocation, or reallocation of the spectrum are no longer meaningful possibilities. The advent of cable television brought a new round of debates over government-mandated public-affairs programming, with the result that private companies were granted valuable monopoly franchises in local markets; in return, they were required only to provide channels for public affairs, not to create programming. That’s why cable is home to super-low-cost varieties of broadcast news, such as C-SPAN, local publicaccess channels, and national cable-news shout-fests, rather than to reincarnations of the elaborately reported Murrow shows from the fifties.
The rise of public broadcasting has freed the networks to be even more commercial.
On network television, no news star would openly disavow Murrow’s legacy.
The standard today is to have smart, competent, physically magnetic people who do straight news gravely and celebrity interviews empathetically, and who occasionally, strategically, display moral passion and then retreat, as Anderson Cooper, of CNN, did during Hurricane Katrina. Everyone suspects them of being lightweights when they first ascend, and then, when they retire, wonders if we’ll ever see their like again. If being in the Murrow mold entails occasionally editorializing on the air, and letting it be known that you aren’t getting along very well with your superiors, there are only a very few Murrow legatees—Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers come to mind, and they’ve left network television.
News that makes money is alive and well; the incentive to present news that doesn’t, like all of Murrow’s great work, is gone. It is difficult for journalists to grapple with the idea that outside pressure—from government officials!—could have been responsible for the creation of the superior and memorable journalism whose passing we all mourn. But look what has happened since it went away.