Murrow at CBS, Europe, 1935/37-1946

In the 1920s and 1930s, newspapers and news agencies in the United States and Europe perceived a threat to come from a brand new medium: radio, and they attempted to protect their industry by restricting radio news broadcasting both at home and from abroad. Still, the BBC began to do some radio news broadcasting as early as 1927, and by the mid 1930s, BBC radio news had come into its own. On the American side, it took a few years longer. Starting in 1936, the American veteran reporter and broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing(1887-1968) offered news analysis in his program World Events, which were five weekly broadcasts explaining the rise of Hitler for Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS). Max Jordan (1895-1977), working for NBC, did an onsite news broadcast in 1934 about the assassination of chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss in Austria and continued to do international onsite news broadcasts in the following years. News roundups from several national or international locations, although not frequent, were organized repeatedly in the 1930s, and the National Socialist government in Germany effectively incorporated recordings for their news broadcasts.1 Yet, at CBS the world of radio news was different and more limited. When Murrow was sent to Europe as CBS Director of Talks in April of 1937, CBS neither allowed news broadcasts nor news roundups, let alone recordings. Without recording sounds or interviews, the kinds of broadcasting that could be done during a war were severely restricted. In its stead, CBS chose to organize lectures and speeches given by famous individuals roughout the thirties and had staff read newspaper headlines and stories over the air. Murrow and his team of correspondents changed all of this. Instead of organizing cultural talks or choir performances, as they had largely done until fall of 1938, Murrow and his 'Murrow Boys' came to make regular news broadcasts, albeit still hobbled by the ban on actual recorded sounds or interviews. Here, the breakthrough was their news roundup of March 1938 after the Anschluss of Austria, a broadcast done to counter Max Jordan's scoop of that story for NBC. Then, with the Sudetenland crisis in the fall of 1938, Murrow got the green light to create a daily news feature, the CBS World News Roundup. It was not until late in the war, however, that Murrow and others managed to persuade CBS to allow them to use recordings for their broadcasts. In the meantime, CBS's publicity machinery won the publicity war against its competitors NBC and MBS back home.2 To cover up for the fact that Max Jordan from NBC first reported about the Anschluss in Austria, just as Jordan later was the first to broadcast the text of the Munich Pact Agreement, CBS published a handsome and well-written booklet right after the Anschluss called Vienna, March 1938: A Footnote to History, creating the impression that CBS alone had done and dominated the story. Other strategies included CBS organizing dinners and large receptions for its correspondents, interviews, photo opportunities, publications of scripts and recordings, and CBS encouraged and facilitated the Murrow Boys to write books about their experiences as war correspondents. In hindsight, after the war, all this made it appear as if CBS had done it alone and done it best. Ratings had been won as well as sponsors.

CBS's European office in the spring of 1937 was a small London office outfit consisting of Murrow, a secretary, and an office boy responsible for organizing radio programs to be broadcasts to the United States via the BBC. Both Murrow and William L. Shirer, hired by CBS for continental Europe in summer of 1937, were increasingly frustrated at being ordered to solely organize cultural broadcasts when Germany, in their opinion, was in fact preparing for war. The Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 became the turning point for Murrow's radio career. For the first time, he himself broadcast the news directly from Vienna, Austria. The New York office liked his voice, his presentation, and his marketability, and gave its approval. From then on, Murrow was also a correspondent. The Anschluss and the ensuing rivalry between NBC and CBS in covering it, also helped Shirer and Murrow to persuade CBS administrators that they had to do more in order to compete with NBC and to cover the situation evolving in Europe. It took the Sudetenland crisis in fall 1938 and Murrow's and Shirer's extensive coverage of it to finally convince CBS of the logic of their argument. It took another ten months for the man in charge of CBS's news operation, director of special events Paul White, to give the permission to hire more staff. Over the next few years, Edward R. Murrow became a household name for the American radio public. Broadcasts by his team of correspondents, the 'Murrow Boys', and his own programs about a war unfolding and enduring for seemingly endless seven years, made Murrow into an icon - fueled by CBS's intense publicity efforts to beat out its competitors. Most of Murrow's broadcasts originated from London. As CBS director for European broadcasts, Murrow usually was forced to stay in the capital or in the UK, from where he coordinated programs and did his daily broadcasts to the U.S. He relied on his correspondents to report from throughout Europe and the various Allied fronts, as well as to feed him information he needed for his own analysis. Rarely did he get a chance to do a radio broadcast from elsewhere, a constraint he detested. There were only a few days of broadcasting from Austria after the Anschluss (March 13-18 1938); a couple of weeks reporting from Tunesia in March 1943; a stint as combat correspondent accompanying British and U.S. bombing flights from England; and reporting from General George Patton's Third Army in Germany, as well as from the concentration camp in Buchenwald in April 1945.

It was Anderson who advised Murrow on how to speak his famous phrase 'This is London;' an intonation that many broadcasters still attempt to copy to this day. It was R. T. Clarke, BBC's senior news editor and former military historian and classics scholar, who instructed Murrow on how to adjust a script to the peculiarities of radio broadcasts. Clarke was responsible for BBC news to be 'written for the voice.' BBC scripts were dictated to typists so as to be more informal, direct, and leaner in presentation.4 Murrow adopted this technique that also took care of his spelling difficulties, a weakness that Murrow thought might have been dyslexia. Guided by Clarke's learned discussions of historical events, Murrow began to incorporate larger and historical contexts into his stories. And adapting how the queen and Londoners wished each other 'So long and good luck' during the Blitz of London, turned into Murrow's 'Good Night and Good Luck' signature line of later years.

Murrow's scripts demonstrate what transnational broadcasts were supposed to achieve in his opinion: to transpose the listener to a new location or situation, and to provide analysis and facts for them to make up their minds. A good listener, Murrow encouraged people from all walks of life to talk to him without being self-conscious, and then quoted these soldiers, cab drivers, women, children, or workers. He expertly wove everyday details such as sounds, laughter, smells, change in dress code, or individual worries and woes into his political and economic analyses and put them on the air. He and other correspondents chafed at the rigorously adhered to objectivity standards of American broadcasting, which tended to veer into dangerous appeasement or neutrality on issues where there appeared to be no neutral side. Murrow's solution was to use the common British citizen and his views as an anonymous aggregate to express his own personal analysis and proposals. And Murrow was graceful in acknowledging on the air when he did not know something or when he was speculating so that listeners realized that others besides Murrow were frequently also only speculating or did not know.

Conversation - A Casualty of War

He spoke about what people read, what people invented now that the war had started. Murrow noted that, contrary to dear British custom, people did not talk about weather any longer since public weather information had become a censored item. And ..."that's the sort of thing that doesn't crop up in the course of man-made conversation in London. Something has happened to conversation in London. There isn't much of it. You meet a friend, exchange guesses about the latest diplomatic move, inquire about a mutual friend who has been called up, and then fall silent. Nothing seems important, not even the weather. ... Wit, happiness, manners, and conversation sink gradually. Conservation is about to become a casualty."

No Poet, No Popular Song, No Hate

On December 11, 1939, Murrow observed: “Sometimes, while reading long articles, listening to speeches, asking questions of so-called experts, one gets the strange feeling that perhaps no one really understands at all – that the machinery is out of control, that we are all passengers on an express train traveling at high speed through a dark tunnel toward an unknown destiny. We sit and talk as convincingly as we can, speaking words someone else has used. The suspicion recurs that the train may have no engineer, no one who can handle it – no one who can bring us to a standstill. Maybe that's why more people seem to be reading their Bibles these days [he mentions elsewhere, however, that church services are less frequented at the same time]. Perhaps that's why this war has not produced a poet or a really popular song, why it hasn't even produced much hatred.”