Tag Archives: CBS News

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The Murrow Play: A Timely Reminder

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The play is a timely and generous act of public service by the 63-year-old film actor.

George Clooney is appearing on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater next month in a theater piece adapted from his screenplay written twenty years ago with Grant Heslov. Good Night and Good luck is based on the successful 2005 film about Edward R. Murrow, easily the most honored news broadcaster in the history of the medium. Murrow’s name is still tied to references to journalistic courage that went from radio in World War II to the first full decade of commercial television. A group of young news reporters known now as “Murrow’s boys” saw him as a model, with most going on to develop important careers at all of the networks.

The action takes place in a tense CBS television studio in the bowels of Grand Central Station, as Murrow unleashes a broadside against Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. It is 1953, and Murrow and producer Fred Friendly are ready to take on the senator known for reckless attacks on scores of civilians and celebrities imagined as “communist sympathizers.” At this time in the cold war the charges stung: the rough equivalent today of passing state secrets to the nation’s enemies.

“McCarthyism” still stands for career-destroying accusations by the powerful that have little validity. Sound familiar? Then, the specific issue was over the senator’s false accusations of communists in the Army, State Department, and probably the Girl Scouts as well. If he were more self-aware, our current president would hotly deny the many unflattering comparisons made today. Delivering lies and false accusations with abandon never seems to go out of style.

The uncomfortable coincidences are a reminder that the Fourth Estate will to have to stand strong against our accusatory President and his followers. The banning of the Associated Press from the White House is a case in point. They are soldiering on anyway, along with The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others. Ditto for several cable news outlets as well.

The play is a generous public service offered by the 63-year-old film actor who has never done live theater, tackling the role of Murrow for the first time. In a clip from the 2005 film a younger Clooney plays producer Fred Friendly, and Murrow is played with uncanny accuracy of David Strathairn.

The film and the play involve two key moments in Murrow’s career: a single program setting the recording straight about a mistaken charge  by McCarthy leveled against Milo Radulovich, a former member of the Air Force. The second event is a few years later in the form of a speech to peers warning about not caving in to soft news stories.

To be branded “pink” then was to be a national pariah and a false charge against Radulovich.  A See It Now program carefully prepared by Friendly and Murrow was a chance to call out this particular conspiracy theory that included allegations of communist collusion. This was no sure thing. The network and its sponsors were mighty unhappy that Murrow and Friendly wanted to take down McCarthy in prime time. CBS Chairman William Paley liked Murrow best when he did celebrity interviews for the popular Person to Person. But he was less enthusiastic about CBS Reports and See it Now when the Murrow team aired controversial programs on subjects like the blight of farm workers, or the empty attacks made by the rabid senator.  Here is a sample of Murrow at work in the Radulovich program:

The second moment emphasized in these dramas is a speech delivered in 1958 to a gathering of Radio and Television News Directors in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. In my study of Murrow in Persuasive Encounters (1990) I described the speech as a the rarest and most interesting kind of public address: a warning—a Jeremiad—to peers and colleagues. Murrow made it clear that the young medium of television was failing in its most important mission of providing nationally important and significant news.  With a bit of sarcasm he told his peers that their work is worthless if it does not help their audiences sort out fictions from hard fact. The address infuriated Paley, who favored light comedy in prime time.  But it was typical of Murrow.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must indeed be faced if we are to survive. And I mean the word survive, quite literally. If there were to be a competition in indifference, or perhaps in insulation from reality, then Nero and his fiddle, Chamberlain and his umbrella, could not find a place on an early afternoon sustaining show. If Hollywood were to run out of Indians, the program schedules would be mangled beyond all recognition. Then perhaps, some young and courageous soul with a small budget might do a documentary telling what, in fact, we have done–and are still doing–to the Indians in this country. But that would be unpleasant. And we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizen from anything that is unpleasant.

It might now be obvious to accuse television of “escapism and insulation from the realities of the world.”  But this was Murrow when the medium was still establishing its own conventions. And it suggests that his kind of journalism could still teach us something today.

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Another Living Room War

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True to form, dictators in closed societies are the last to know or care about changes in public opinion.

At the height of the Vietnam War the New Yorker writer Michael J. Arlen published a short but evocative piece that, like any good criticism, gave clarity to key events in that decade. In Living Room War, he played out the effects of a nation witnessing its own atrocities almost as they happened. “Shooting bloody” was soon to become the norm for reporters embedded with our troops caught in that quagmire. Americans could not help but notice the horrific attempts to fight a war in the jungle, or the United States’ massive efforts to bomb the North Vietnamese into submission.

The article published in October of 1966 and later included in a book of essays was barely 2000 words long: a short summation of the efforts of war reporters like CBS’s Morley Safer, who covered the actions of Marines in the Mekong Delta. Images of troops and snipers being fired upon were part of the reporting, which CBS was anxious to add to the studio-based “tell” stories that were common at the time. Footage from the field was quickly edited onboard a plane routed to Tokyo, where it was uplinked via satellite to CBS’s Broadcast Center on West 57th Street in New York. The network concluded that it was all well and good to have Walter Cronkite describe the day’s fighting. But they wanted to add the hastily edited reports about the close-range carnage in front of viewers, even during the dinner hour. It is worth remembering that most Americans regularly watched one of the three network evening newscasts: what another critic likened to a daily gathering at the “national hearth.”

Arlen’s article title was enough to suggest what had changed with the advent of portable video equipment and satellite links. The ability of politicians and citizens to insulate themselves from the effects of war was vanishing. The costs were not to be measured using static slides of casualty numbers or a few wire-service photos. Wars were about to be personalized by embedded reporters and camera crews who took their chances along with the troops. Arlen’s article title was enough for us to suddenly realize the sea change in war coverage that was underway. Even then, Lyndon Johnson began to realize that “his” war was going to lose support. Fifty-Eight thousand Americans were lost before the U.S. retreated.

These days I think of this article, admiring what a good media critic can do, but also pointing to the obvious reasons for the unprecedented international revulsion of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Army. No one can remain unmoved by the wrenching video segments of families in Ukraine struggling to survive the relentless onslaught.

True to form, dictators in closed societies are the last to know or care about changes in public opinion. But one could conclude that near total press censorship in Russia may not be enough to insulate ordinary citizens from the horrors their government is visiting upon Ukraine. Russia is not a perfectly closed society, especially with the flow of news and information still coming into the country via the internet. As Arlen might have predicted, ordinary Russians will soon see videos that will help explain why most of the rest of the civilized world has put their society on a path to financial destruction.