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NEWS/ENTERTAINMENT
Murrow Said It All In 1958
BY
LAWRENCE K. GROSSMAN
 One
of the more bizarre commentaries on ABC’s blundering effort
to replace Ted Koppel’s Nightline with David Letterman without
bothering to tell either Koppel or ABC News president David Westin
appeared in the March 24 Sunday New York Times. In “If the
Nightly News Goes Out, It’s With a Whimper,” Terry Teachout,
a magazine music critic, boasted, “I don’t watch any
network news shows and haven’t for years.” He tuned
in to one Friday edition of the show, Teachout admitted, in order
to write his piece. Inexplicably, the Times led its TV page with
this 2,000 word “expert” analysis, which concluded that
none of what’s happening to network news makes any difference
at all.
The difference management’s sacrifice of news for entertainment
can make was described forty-four years ago in a memorable speech
by Edward R. Murrow. The parallels between then and now are striking.
In 1958, CBS unexpectedly killed Murrow’s and Fred W. Friendly’s
pathbreaking See It Now. A fixture on CBS for seven years, it
was the jewel in the network crown, the lodestone for Peabodys
and Emmys, the most honored news show in television history, and
certainly the most courageous. When CBS decided to terminate See
It Now, unlike the stiffing that ABC management gave Koppel and
Westin, CBS chairman William S. Paley called Murrow and Friendly
to his office to give them the news before they could learn about
it from The New York Times. Friendly described the scene in his
book, Due To Circumstances Beyond Our Control. A stunned Murrow
asked Paley, his longtime friend and confidant, “Bill, are
you going to destroy all this?” Paley replied, “I don’t
want this constant stomach ache every time you do a controversial
subject.”
I had come to work for CBS, the so-called “Tiffany network,”
in 1956, my first job in television. None of us could believe
that the company would treat the revered Murrow so cavalierly
and abandon its most famous and respected news program. But in
1955, the arrival of the runaway hit The $64,000 Question in the
Tuesday 10 p.m. time slot that preceded See It Now forever changed
the rules. Prime time suddenly turned immensely more valuable.
Money became the medium’s single driving force. The corrupt
big-money quiz show drove the quality public affairs series out
of its accustomed weekly position. For the next several years,
See It Now appeared as an occasional special in prime time and
on Sunday afternoons, leading those of us inside the shop to refer
to it as, “See It Now and Then.” Then in June 1958,
it disappeared altogether.
On October 15, 1958, three months after See It Now’s demise,
Murrow delivered his electrifying keynote address to the Radio
and Television News Directors’ Association annual meeting
in Chicago. He charged that station owners, pledged to operate
in the public interest, had “welshed” on their promises,
viewing television simply as a “money-making machine.”
He berated the FCC for abdicating its responsibilities under the
Communications Act. “Sometimes there is a clash between the
public interest and the corporate interest,” Murrow said.
“The top management of the networks, with a few notable exceptions,
has been trained in advertising, research, or show business. But
by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final
and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs.
Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do
this . . . .” Sound familiar? Murrow could have been describing
ABC-Disney’s management today.
“There is no suggestion here that networks or individual
stations should operate as philanthropies,” he went on. “But
I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Communications
Act that says that they must increase their net profits each year,
lest the Republic collapse. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable
and complacent . . . . Our mass media reflect this. But unless
we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television
. . . is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us,
then television and those who finance it, those who look at it
and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture
too late.”
Murrow concluded with the famous words, “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 . . . .” Murrow went out not with a whimper but
a bang. His biographer A.M. Sperber described the audience’s
reaction: “There were a few seconds of silence, then roaring
acclamation.”
After Murrow left CBS to join the Kennedy administration as director
of the U.S. Information Agency, an awed young Bill Moyers, then
the Peace Corps’ assistant director for public affairs, asked
the legendary newsman about his time in broadcasting. Murrow replied,
“It was a great life, but they’ll break your heart.”
They still do. n
Lawrence K. Grossman is a regular columnist for cjr..
Geneva Overholser is a regular columnist for CJR.
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