There were no cars or telephones in Polecat Creek, North Carolina, the nearest community. No electricity, running water, or toilets in the Murrow home. Ed had two older brothers, meaning he was the third to wear the clothes Lacey handed down to Dewey who handed them down to Ed. Times was hard. Murrow grew up to be a dark and moody man subject to spells of crushing depression. His colleague Eric Sevareid explained that Murrow came from a family where there were “too many rules and not enough love.”
Who Was Edward R. Murrow?
All of America was listening to the radio, it seemed
Bruce Barton, advertising’s hot thing, said “Radio enthusiasm is spreading through the country like whooping cough through a kindergarten; it has taken the place of prohibition as the foremost topic of dinner-party conversation.”
FDR’s Fireside Chats
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started his folksy radio chats in 1933, fewer than half of American homes had indoor plumbing. Twice as many homes had radios, more than ninety percent. The few who didn’t have radios went to the homes of friends and neighbors who did.
More than 60 million people gathered around their radios to listen to FDR’s first fireside chat
He used simple words and spoke in way that made people think he was speaking directly to them. The President spoke on a variety of topics important to Americans, including the financial crisis, unemployment, our collective hangover from the Great Depression, drought, and the growing threat of facism in Europe. Families and friends gathered around this new “hearth,” for the same sense of community experienced by their ancestors gathering around the fire for warmth and protection from enemies and predators.
Edward Roscoe Murrow was appointed as broadcast journalist and war correspondent for the CBS news division in 1937
Concern over Hitler and his Nazis was growing across Europe. It’s a long story, but finally Murrow chartered a Lufthansa flight to Vienna so he’d be there when Hitler arrived to formally annex Austria as a part of Germany. CBS got its scoop when Murrow’s team of correspondents broadcast the events live and simultaneously from Vienna, Paris, Rome, and Berlin.
On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and World War Two began
Nazi Germany threw mass attacks against England, beginning with air raids on London. Hitler believed the bombing would compel Churchill to surrender.
The Blitz
The Luftwaffe dropped more 16,000 tons of bombs on London and its surrounds, killing more than 40,000 civilians. At one point, the Nazis bombed London for 57 nights in a row.
All of Murrow’s reports were broadcast live
He was describing the war, but wanted his American radio audience to hear the sirens, the airplanes overhead, the bombs exploding. One day he came up out of his sub-basement broadcast studio and went to the building’s rooftop. “Of course you’re afraid, mayhem and death falling from the sky. But it’s your job,” he later said.
Some thought it bravery; others believed he was grandstanding. It was most certainly dramatic. Murrow explained it this way: “I have a peasant’s mind. I can’t write about anything I haven’t seen.”
In the studio, radio correspondents worked from scripts
On the London rooftops, Murrow had no scripts. With a microphone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he told listeners what he was seeing so vividly they could picture it. You can listen to two minutes of one live broadcast here.
“The searchlights now are feeling almost directly overhead. Now you’ll hear two bursts a little nearer in a moment. There they are! That hard, stony sound, that faint-red, angry snap of antiaircraft blasts against the steel-blue sky, the sound of guns off in the distance very faintly, like someone kicking a tub.”
Murrow had studied speech, communication, drama, and voice
Speakers get to use tone, pace, inflection, emphasis, pauses, and the like in ways that writers cannot. The lessons he learned at Washington State University helped him become a spellbinding speaker.
Speech is less formal than writing. Murrow followed few of the rules of traditional journalism because he didn’t know them or care about them. He told stories his own way,
“This … is London.”
That’s how Murrow began his broadcasts until the war ended. The dramatic pause was suggested by his college speech teacher, Ida Lou Andersen, who had seen something special in Murrow. Anderson challenged him to be better than he thought he could be. She was right and he did.
Murrow gave all young reporters the same advice
He told them to write their stories as though they were writing letters to friends back home. When it came time to go on the air, he told them to imagine themselves in a bar with friends and talk to the microphone the same way. Murrow believed a reporter should describe things in terms that make sense to the man carrying a lunch bucket without insulting the intelligence of professors.
In 1951, more homes had televisions than radios
After the war, Murrow moved from radio to television, still with CBS. He did more than just the Nightly News. On CBS Reports, he made documentaries. On See It Now, he spent an hour giving more coverage to issues for those who wanted objective information. Murrow invented the weekly newsmagazine format, believing everything worth knowing can be interesting, too.
Give the people more than just headlines
Murrow’s job was collecting the facts and organizing them in ways that made things easy for listeners to understand. That extra work gave reporters the extra time it took to reflect on the issue, see what others were saying about it, go deeper into it, and write with more facts and deeper insights. Murrow called it slow news.
Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy was a braggart and a bully
A 1950 poll of Washington, DC news correspondents named him the Worst Member of the U.S. Senate. Colleagues mocked his made-up persona, Tail Gunner Joe. During one of his tirades, McCarthy claimed to have the names of more than 200 members of the Department of State that are “known communists.”
This frightened Americans who hadn’t yet adjusted to the nuclear age and the Cold War. McCarthy capitalized on those fears by attacking the patriotism and character of his political opponents. Somehow blacklists, book bans, and loyalty oaths became “normal” during the Red Scare.
In 1954, Edward R. Murrow confronted Joe McCarthy on See It Now
The CBS staff had collected miles of recordings and film clips of McCarthy’s speechifying. One by one, Murrow showed viewers that McCarthy’s accusations lacked any credible evidence. Forced by the broadcast rules of the day to grant McCarthy equal time to present his case, Murrow set a trap that Tail Gunner Joe walked right into, finally revealing himself to be a liar and turning public opinion against him.
Listen to Murrow’s final on-air rebuttal to McCarthy here.
McCarthy never found any communists in the State Department
Murrow had made his point. “The real danger to democracy was not people suspected of possibly having Communist ties,” he said, “but McCarthy’s actions themselves.” Nine months later, the United States Senate censured McCarthy for bringing the Senate into dishonor by obstructing constitutional processes.
Person to Person, 1953 to 1961
Murrow, from his New York studio and with his perpetual cigarette in hand, interviewed celebrities in their homes. These interviews were the fluff pieces he did to earn enough money to do the investigative reporting shows he wanted to do but couldn’t because they lost money for the CBS network. He dreaded being better known for this than his serious work, but they made him sooo much money that he kept doing them for eight years. Yep, that’s Marilyn Monroe’s living room.
At its peak, nearly half of American homes with television sets watched Person to Person
This confirmed Murrow’s belief that Americans were more interested in celebrities than in issues that affected their lives. From his New York studios, Murrow “visited” Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, Salvador Dalí, Roy Rogers, Marlon Brando, and scores more during the show’s 8-year run. Far from journalism of any kind, it looks like Murrow invented the on-air fan magazine, too.
Ed Murrow’s argument with the show’s ”Hi, I just-dropped-by” theme
“People forget that these informal chats aren’t informal at all. They’re staged and rehearsed. People forget that this isn’t just dropping in. It’s a room full of technicians with lights, cameras, and wires everywhere.” It wasn’t long before viewers began to ignore the fact that the whole thing had been scripted, rehearsed, and stage-managed. Many believed it was all real and they were a part of it. That’s powerful stuff and pretty much how all (non-)reality shows do it today.
Murrow made more than 200 live broadcasts a year for 25 years
He built his stature on serious news and his celebrity status on Person to Person. When Murrow died in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson said he had “dedicated his life as a newsman and as a public official to the unrelenting search for truth.”
Bonus
Good Night, and Good Luck is now appearing on Broadway with George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow. In an interview with CBS News, Clooney had this to say:
“Journalism and telling truth to power has to be waged like war is waged. It doesn’t just happen accidentally. You know, it takes people saying, we’re gonna do these stories and you’re gonna have to come after us. And that’s the way it is.”
Ed Murrow had respiratory problems all his life. Some said it was a condition he inherited from his grandmother. Others thought his three-and-four-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day smoking habit is what did him in. He and brother Lacey each had a lung removed later in life.
