Murrow at CBS, USA, 1946-1961

Murrow's broadcasts including those from World War II, won him and his colleagues every possible award in the field of broadcasting, numerous other prizes, honors, and honorary degrees. His broadcasts also earned him a salary higher than that of the president of CBS himself. Interestingly enough, the largest portion of his income accrued from his radio programs and sponsorship contracts.

The 1950s were characterized by a growing alienation between Murrow, CBS administrators, and sponsors, who both had come to dislike his independence, his critical broadcasts, and his critical analysis of the broadcasting industry. Entertainment and finance increasingly ruled priorities and decisions in the media industry, at CBS, and in its news division. In addition, personality conflicts between Murrow and administrators, in particular with Frank Stanton, grew worse over time. In 1959, when CBS was critiqued over its television quiz-show scandal, Stanton attempted to deflect attention away from CBS's collusion: he unfairly and incorrectly compared any rigging of its quiz shows to the preparation necessary to shoot Murrow's show Person to Person on site. He thus implied that Murrow and his team were using presumably duplicitous methods. Murrow protested publicly. By the late 1950s, most of Murrow's programs had been cut, negotiations for his new contract had stalled, and he was only occasionally doing CBS Reports. At the same time as CBS chose to underutilize its most renowned radio and television anchor, its news ratings slumped in comparison to NBC. Murrow, of course, began to look for other employment possibilities befitting his background and age. One such offer came from the BBC which asked Murrow to produce a television series about contemporary England. Ultimately though, Murrow accepted John F. Kennedy's appointment to become Director of the United States Information Agency (USIA). He resigned from CBS in January 1961.

Murrow's workload at CBS was tremendous. It left him little time for coming up with his insights and analysis and led every so often to breakdowns in his health. Juggling his many programs meant that much of the background work and even writing had to be done by staff members. In fact, over time, the staff learnt how to write in order to sound like Murrow.

Take the radio program Edward R. Murrow with the News. When Murrow returned to broadcasting in 1947 he took over Robert Trout's show, The News Till Now, which was renamed accordingly. Murrow kept on Jesse Zousmer and John Aarons, who previously had worked for Robert Trout. Together Zousmer and Aarons proposed, researched, and wrote the news portion as well as Murrow's word-for-the-day; much later Edward Bliss Jr. took over those tasks. Murrow wrote the tailpiece analysis for each radio broadcast. With more and more radio and television programs to organize and present e.g. See it Now,Person to Person, and This I Believe, Murrow was reluctantly compelled to hire a ghostwriter for most of his radio news commentaries. But, in hiring the veteran Raymond Gram Swing to write news for him and to arrange and edit the remaining This I Believe broadcasts, Murrow was one of the few in the industry who did not cave in to its blacklisting. Swing had been listed in the anti-communist Counterattack two years earlier, had resigned from the Voice of America after being besmirched by McCarthy, and had thereafter become unhireable.1

Murrow's political views were not radical or progressive; he was more closely alligned with the Democratic Party and had even considered running for political office several times. Given his family background, though, he never overlooked the poor, the so-called forgotten, the African Americans, or the 'everyday person' and included them and their points of view in innumerous broadcasts. His broadcasts were more interesting and lively for it. This focus was also rooted in his conviction that everyone deserved attention and equal chances, and that a democracy that foregoes the lives and fates of those people does so at its own peril. And so Murrow produced or presented memorable broadcasts on poverty; on the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court in 1954; on the link between lung cancer and smoking;the See It Now special Harvest of Shametracking the lives of migrant agricultural workers (produced and filmed by David Lowe and Marty Barnett); the documentary The Lost Class of '59 for which he and Fred Friendly won a Peabody Special Public Service Award; or the Christmas in Korea special in 1952, among many others.

Many of Murrow's program suggestions did not come to fruition such as As Others See Us, Who Made This Country, and A Thirty Day Diary, all ideas which Murrow mentioned to William S. Paley, then Chair of CBS Board and former owner of the network, in 1956.

The 2005 movie, Good Night and Good Luck, tells the story of the See it Now special for which Edward R. Murrow is perhaps best known. It is the broadcast on the Junior Senator of Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, from March 9, 1954. On the air and in print, numerous reporters and journalists had long attacked the senator for his undemocratic persecution of alleged Communists. In fact, Eric Sevareid, one of the Murrow Boys, and others had criticized Murrow over the years for not using his prominence to report on Senator McCarthy.

One exception to Murrow's silence on the topic was his 1951 Thanksgiving evening radio broadcast in which he stated: 'This is a day when it is customary to list reasons for thankfulness. ... We should, I think, be grateful to Senator Joe McCarthy. He has become a symbol of accusation without proof. We shall have to decide - we are in the process of deciding, - whether as a people, we are prepared to proceed upon that premise.' Murrow, in fact, had lost a personal friend to an early campaign of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1948. HUAC and one of its more famous members, Richard Nixon, turned the accidental death of Laurence Duggan, director of International Institute of Education, into an admission of guilt in 1948. Laurence, Stephen Duggan's son and a friend of Murrow's from the 1930s, had been interviewed in connection with the Hiss investigation a few days of his accident. Upon Laurence's death, rumors about his ties to the Soviet Union were spread by HUAC without providing any evidence for those claims.2 In response, Murrow did a scathing radio broadcast about the accident and HUAC's allegations.

Against a backdrop of rising opposition to McCarthy in 1953, Edward R. Murrow and his See it Now producer Fred Friendly finally found an interesting angle to address McCarthy's tactics. In October 1953, they aired a See it Nowprogram regarding the case of Milo Radulovich (1926-2007). Radulovich, a second-generation U.S. citizen, was discharged as reserve Air Force lieutenant due to his family's alleged Communist contacts. After Murrow's program and the ensuing publicity, Radulovic received a hearing and was reinstated in the Air Force.

Murrow and Friendly followed this up with their March 1954 See it Now Special on the Senator from Wisconsin himself, paying for the program's advertisement out of their own pockets. Consisting largely of excerpts from McCarthy's television appearances, this broadcast and McCarthy's televised response did much to reveal the senator's illogical, crude, and undemocratic crusade to a general public. Murrow's stature and analysis did the rest. Murrow's broadcast came right in the middle of the Army - McCarthy dispute over preferential treatment for a former McCarthy aide, Gerard David Shine. Starting in late April 1964, the 36 days of televised Army - McCarthy hearings were key to three developments: McCarthy's eventual censure by the Senate in December 1954, his loss of political power, and the public's disenchantment with the senator after his behavior was exposed on ABC over seven weeks.

Murrow was critical of the potential editorial role of sponsors, the role sponsors played in making or unmaking radio or television programs, and he was opposed to their advertisements infringing on or interrupting his reports and analyses. When he began Edward R. Murrow with the News, for instance, he successfully insisted that Campbell's Soup Company was not allowed to break into the middle of his program with a commercial. At the height of his fame and stature, Murrow was long cushioned from usual commercial pressures on program content. However, with radio news and, later on, television maturing, corporate sponsors gained in power over the U.S. media industry. At the same time, the media industry itself was turning increasingly corporate and was thus ever more sensitive to corporate pressures. Over time, the broadcasting industry increasingly passed over news and education broadcasts in favor of more lucrative entertainment programs. This further weakened Murrow's position.

As long as ALCOA produced aluminum goods for industry, it stood behind Murrow's programs - and as long as it needed to reinvent its corporate image, which had been partially tarnished by a 1937 antitrust lawsuit. In sponsoring See it Now in the early 1950s, which usually cost ALCOA about $50,000 per week, ALCOA relished the positive image that Murrow's programs gave to its company. Given little notice and no indication of what was about to be aired, ALCOA also sponsored Murrow's McCarthy special. It stood by Murrow after the show had aired and refused to pay the production cost of McCarthy's filmed reply, as the senator had demanded. Instead, CBS picked up the bill. However, the more the company moved into producing household goods, such as aluminum foil, the less enchanted it became with Murrow's provocative broadcasts. The final straw was a See It Now program called The Power of the Press regarding a land grant scandal involving Texan state officials and veterans in May 1955. ALCOA was trying to expand its production in Texas at the time and in response to the show it canceled its sponsorship with the end of the season. This killed the weekly See It Now program.

While the See it Now series had never been a big crowd pleaser, it had brought CBS numerous awards, industry leadership in the making of news documentaries, and public acclaim. During the Harris Congressional subcommittee hearings over the quiz scandal in 1959, Frank Stanton opportunistically pointed to CBS's continuing, albeit lukewarm support for See it Now Specials to escape more trenchant criticism and action given the network's rigging of quiz shows.

Some of the hundreds of Murrow's awards and certificates are on display in the Edward R. Murrow Room at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, Medford. All others are part of the Edward R. Murrow Papers, ca 1913-1985 at the Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University.