I’ve been thinking a lot about Edward R. Murrow lately.
Journalists of a certain age are prone to do that. Not because we’re lost in our senile reveries, but because Murrow, the legendary London-based WWII CBS radio correspondent who later faced down Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch-hunts on TV in the 1950s, still exemplifies a kind of gold standard for talent, courage and integrity. He reminds us of what the profession used to stand for, what we once aspired to—and what it used to represent to the American public.
My first exposure to Murrow came in the late ‘60s—after he’d unhappily left CBS in 1961, and his brief tenure running the United States Information Agency under President Kennedy that was cut short by the lung cancer that in 1965, at the age of 57, had claimed his life. My high school social studies class had screened “Harvest of Shame,” his final CBS documentary, which first aired Thanksgiving week in 1960 and gave Americans a jolting exposé of the horrible conditions endured by the migrant farm workers who put food on their tables. To put it mildly, it made an impression on me.
A decade later, Murrow was a test question on the oral exam for my Master’s in broadcast journalism. A couple of years after that, when I was already working in radio news and documentaries, I was fortunate to meet and chat with Murrow’s long-time friend and CBS colleague Fred Friendly, who signed a book of his with one of my favorite inscriptions: “For Joel Bellman: who knows the good guys from the bad guys.”
Why Murrow, and why now? Because it seems that with a few notable exceptions, namely public radio and television, broadcast journalism—the field that Murrow and his team did so much to create, refine and elevate—has proven itself largely incapable of dealing seriously with the national crisis of leadership that now engulfs us. And not surprisingly, while the president continues his weird and obsessive personal attacks on journalists and his relentless efforts to delegitimize their news organizations, his proposed budget would by 2019 eliminate all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Chartered 50 years ago by an act of Congress, that private nonprofit corporation is the conduit for federal public broadcasting grants, and the single largest funding source for non-commercial radio and TV stations.
So, while the commercial networks and cable channels dwell increasingly on the sensational, the superficial, and the endlessly repetitious—and are routinely disparaged by the president as “fake news”—he is preparing to axe critical funding for the most thoughtful and credible broadcast journalism available to us.
Small wonder the public seems to be getting aggressively dumber with each passing day. This past Fourth of July, as it has for the past 29 years, NPR broadcast a reading and tweeted the entire Declaration of Independence—which crazed Trump supporters, ignorant of what they were reading and hearing, attacked as a liberal insurrection against their Dear Leader.
It’s been nearly 60 years since Murrow delivered his prophetic “wires and lights in a box” speech to a convention of broadcast news directors. In a bleak survey of what FCC Chairman Newton Minow would later call “the vast wasteland” of television programming, Murrow warned the news executives that “this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us.”
Heralded by the collapse of a vigorous and vigilant press, and ushered in by an apathetic electorate and the self-serving negligence of our political class, Murrow’s dark future has finally arrived.
