Shortly before a disillusioned and frustrated Edward R. Murrow left CBS in January 1961, an internal company memo spelled out the new direction that CBS News intended to pursue for its flagship evening TV news show. "We want, where practical, to use the electronic camera as our reporter," the memo said. "The skills of our excellent correspondent staff" would be employed to "back up" the camera. CBS's knowledgeable journalists would have to take a back seat to TV's attention-grabbing pictures.

 The stylish wordsmiths, thoughtful analysts, and recognizable CBS News voices who knew the culture, history, and politics of the places they reported from were being downgraded. In the high-stakes new era of television, Ed Murrow's team of freewheeling CBS News radio correspondents, who had achieved world fame reporting the Nazi blitz from London rooftops, flying on bombing missions, parachuting out of crippled airplanes, landing with the infantry on invasion beaches, and jumping off torpedoed ships during World War II, were being pushed aside. Along with the departure of Murrow himself, the CBS memo signified the end of a glorious era of CBS News, when for twenty-five years the idealistic Murrow and his boys created a brilliant new form of broadcast journalism.

 The current television age, with its technological virtuosity, explosive influence, and instantaneous worldwide accessibility through satellites, video cameras, and computers, provides news reporting that is in many ways a good deal less satisfying, less intelligent, and certainly less high-minded than it was in the days before pictures could fly through the air live, right into people's homes. Almost four decades ago, Murrow explained why that is the case, in blistering words that continue to be true to this day. In a speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago on October 15, 1958, he denounced recent cutbacks at CBS News and charged that network executives, in their single-minded pursuit of ratings and profits, had turned television into a medium of "decadence, escapism, and insulation." "This instrument can teach," Murrow said. "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, its merely wires and lights in a box."

 The video camera, good for close-ups and instantaneous transmission, is not capable of providing perspective, background, context, or history. It furnishes no helpful filter of time, no depth of personal experience, and no human insight or intelligence. These require knowledgeable, dedicated journalists, an emphasis on words, which can be dangerous, and a television management willing to use "this most powerful instrument of communication" not only for ratings and profits but also to fight the good fight "against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference."

 The nostalgic story of Murrow and his band of star correspondents is told vividly and intelligently in The Murrow Boys by a husband-and-wife news team, former Time Washington bureau chief Stanley Cloud and veteran reporter Lynne Olson. The book reads like a contemporary version of the fabled adventures of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men in Sherwood Forest. For Murrow and his boys, "the bastards in New York," who controlled the schedule, had no stomach for controversy, and cared more about entertainment than news, were the evil counterparts of the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham and his mean henchmen.

 When World War II broke out, the shy, moody, elegant Murrow, in the words of Cloud and Olson, "wandered around Europe searching for talented lost children," whom he converted into great reporters for CBS radio. William L. Shirer, an out-of-work foreign reporter, was Murrow's first hire. His second, a man named Thomas Grandin, had no journalistic experience at all. As Murrow told a young, frightened new employee, Eric Sevareid, "I don't know very much about your experience but I like the way you write and I like your ideas."

 Unlike the few bombastic studio-bound commentators, such as Boake Carter and H.V. Kaltenborn, who were popular on radio at the time, Murrow believed in understated, honest, on-the-scene reporting. Never having been a reporter before, he had no use for many of the traditional, still prevalent practices of attention-grabbing, hyperbolic news writing. He used simple, down-to-earth words and sought to create pictures in the air, based on the experiences and images of ordinary people. "When there isn't any news, why, just say so," he instructed Sevareid, who was terrified of the radio microphone. "I have an idea people might like that."

 He advised Mary Marvin Breckinridge, the only woman to become one of Murrow's Boys, whom he assigned to Amsterdam to cover the war, "Don't say the streets are rivers of blood. Say that the little policeman I usually say hello to every morning is not there today. Give the human side of the war. Be honest. Be neutral and talk like yourself." His style was "calm and conversational, just friends chatting with friends."

 In addition to Shirer and Sevareid (and Grandin and Breckinridge, both of whom left before becoming household names), Murrow found Charles Collingwood, an "inexperienced kid" at twenty-three; Howard K. Smith, courtly, obstinate, headstrong, and idealistic; Larry LeSueur, war correspondent extraordinaire and tireless worker; Winston Burdett, a lowly writer of culture and movie articles for the Brooklyn Eagle "who looked more like Hamlet than a hard-bitten foreign correspondent" but whose aggressiveness caused the Nazis to kick him out of two countries; Cecil Brown, who thrived on adventure and roamed the world; and Bill Downs, a talented feature writer and no-nonsense reporter.

 The second wave of Murrow's boys included the scholarly foreign affairs expert Richard C. Hottelet, hired at twenty-six in 1944, still going strong on public radio; Alexander Kendrick, "the rumpled, steel wool voiced" Eastern European specialist whose thick glasses and heavy squint were the despair of television cameramen and directors; George Polk, the aggressive, handsome Middle East correspondent mysteriously killed during the cold war battle over Greece; David Schoenbrun, the five-foot-two-inch, mustachioed, dumpy ex-army correspondent who knew everything there was to know about France and was not shy about letting anyone know that he did; and a young Marvin Kalb, the last of Murrow's hires, a student of the Soviet Union, a tall, skinny, well-spoken kid from Brooklyn.

 It was a remarkably diversified crew of scholar journalists, and not above jealously scrapping with each other to capture the attention, affection, and praise of the boss they adored. That Murrow could command the undying affection of such a team of high-strung, self-centered individualists was a miracle in itself. That after World War II, he could work hand-in-glove with producer Fred W. Friendly, a "titanic volcano of a man known for his boisterous enthusiasms and violent temper tantrums," is almost impossible to believe. But the reserved Murrow and the exuberant Friendly worked together intimately and harmoniously for years, producing the extraordinary See It Now series and other news specials, the greatest and most unlikely news team in broadcasting history.

 Many years later, Murrow's lack of concern for traditional journalistic credentials was brought home to me personally in a particularly poignant way. In December 1983, the news broke that NBC chairman Grant Tinker, in a surprising and highly unorthodox move, had reached out and picked a rank outsider as the new president for his troubled NBC News division. Tinker's choice had no professional news credentials, had once even been in charge of advertising for NBC, and was at the time president of the Public Broadcasting Service, which didn't have a news department. I was Tinker's unlikely choice for the job.

 One of the first and most reassuring letters I received came from Richard S. Salant, the best news president CBS ever had. "Don't be bothered by the knee jerks, of whom there will inevitably be a few, who will raise the question about your news experience," Salant wrote. "I would just remind you of what Ed Murrow said to me back in 1961 when I was first made president of CBS News -- with no credentials whatever. [Salant had been a lawyer and general counsel for CBS.] Ed came into my office, took one look at me and noted that I seemed to be bewildered and scared because, as I told him, I had no news qualifications. He hitched up a chair next to mine, put his hand on my knee and said, 'I didn't start as a newsman. A good news director needs only two things -- first, a love and respect for news; and second, a love and respect for the dignity of the human race.' " Those were Murrow's guiding tenets and he followed them consistently throughout his career.

 Like the Robin Hood legend, the saga of the Murrow Boys ended badly. The "bastards in New York" won. Cloud and Olson write, "In January 1961 the great Edward R. Murrow-CBS epic -- which had begun in 1935 and swept through World War II, the postwar era, the cold war, the advent of television, and McCarthyism -- ended. Murrow accepted an offer from President-elect John Kennedy to become director of the United States Information Agency -- 'a beautiful and timely gift,'" said his perceptive wife Janet.

 Two years later, when Murrow was fifty-seven, his left lung was removed. On April 27, 1965, he died of cancer from smoking all those cigarettes, Murrow's on-screen trademark. "The man who had created this team was gone, the team itself irrevocably splintered, its members bereft. Howard K. Smith felt like 'a planet whose sun had gone.' "

 The Murrow legend lives on, as it should, told well in this fascinating book. In the perceptive words of the authors, "It is almost axiomatic that the more an institution breaks faith with those who built it, the more it sanctifies them." Despite the current hype and grand claims for television news in this day of cable, computers, satellites, and the Internet, there is nothing in broadcast journalism today that compares with the pioneering accomplishments of Edward R. Murrow and the boys.

 In the game of show and tell, the preeminent power of television now lies with the "show." Journalism, the "tell," is secondary, at times even nonexistent. As ABC News's Ted Koppel has remarked, "The electronic tail is wagging the editorial dog." The Murrow Boys shows how much better we are served when it works the other way 'round.

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