Rusty wires and lights in a box

It's the current fashion to bash journalists in general and the broadcast media in particular.

Without pausing, of course, to note that pretty much everything you know about the apalling state of affairs in big media you read or saw in big media.

The sins of our times--an ill-informed electorate, a vulgar culture, an apathetic body politic--are all conveniently hurled at the feet of the media, most aggressively by the very politicians and corporate interest who themselves have the most to deflect.

Blame these vague Eastern establishments, run by secret back-room cabals of cigar-smoking white men, determined to: Lie to us! Keep us in chains! Cover up the truth! Serve as big business lackeys! Drive us into war! Foment dissent and hate at home!

Far easier to tear down Dan Rather than to do the hard work and put in the time necessary to stay informed in an increasingly complex and at times scary world.

Because of course, if it weren't for big media and "their" obsessive celebrity-driven fluff coverage--tawdry stuff that nobody we know watches of course--we'd all fulfill our dreams of being Renaissance men and women.

Because that, of course, is what we all want--if not for that damn boob tube that somehow keeps growing in size in our living rooms, we could all properly buckle down and read Plato and Aristotle and Balzac and Lao Tze and above all Shakespeare, that bard from the better days, he of the high-minded plays.

Gosh, things were so much better in the good old days carved out by Edward R. Murrow and George Clooney's father--back when we all were sober, well-informed, upright citizens, a generation that won the war and then rushed home to watch all the serious documentaries and exposes that broadcasters back then offered us (so much great stuff that the only one ever cited by anyone is Harvest of Shame).

The beatings in the streets of Selma, burning of Vietnamese peasants, spying on protestors--none of that could possibly have been done by this best generation, raised on a diet of sober broadcast programming, with its cosmopolitan knowledge of the world and deep understanding of all elements of American society, all thanks to Uncle Walty's 15 minute newscast each night and Edward's every-so-often CBS news specials.

Of course Nicholas Lemann, a print journalist with no broadcast experience, writing in the pages of the New Yorker, makes sense of it all for us in The Murrow Doctorine: Why the life and times of the broadcast pioneer still matter.

Commercialism and superficiality seem regnant in broadcast news. Owners avoid controversy, cut budgets, and focus on producing the profits that Wall Street demands—we’re back in the fifties. Murrow represents a kind of implacable, heroic journalistic courage that could sweep away all the obstacles in its path. ...

On network television, no news star would openly disavow Murrow’s legacy. The standard today is to have smart, competent, physically magnetic people who do straight news gravely and celebrity interviews empathetically, and who occasionally, strategically, display moral passion and then retreat, as Anderson Cooper, of CNN, did during Hurricane Katrina. Everyone suspects them of being lightweights when they first ascend, and then, when they retire, wonders if we’ll ever see their like again. If being in the Murrow mold entails occasionally editorializing on the air, and letting it be known that you aren’t getting along very well with your superiors, there are only a very few Murrow legatees—Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers come to mind, and they’ve left network television.

Back in the 50s? When were those macro problems with broadcast journalism left behind?! When was the golden age of broadcast journalism, if not now?

I doubt Lemann would agree, but I'd say broadcast news has never been more Murrow-like than in the modern era.

If nothing else, the quality of what's produced today is light-years better than it was even when Murrow was in his prime--how can it not be, when on the one hand you have Murrow and his boys on one radio network to weigh against thousands of journalists on dozens of national television and radio channels and hundreds of local stations?

Everyone today is in cutthroat competition with dozens of peers and via the Internet essentially everyone with access to a computer in the world, for viewers and listeners. And as we know from our friends the free-market disciples, if you have two markets, one where CBS Radio and Television fends off a few other giants, the other where people are fighting tooth and nail with an ever-increasing number of competitors eager to fill any news and information hole that springs up, there's precious little time or opportunity for interference from the corporate structure.

Maybe people who aren't in the industry don't understand this, but journalists are no less competitive than athletes. Last thing you do at night and first thing you do in the morning is check the scoreboard and see what stories the competition had that you missed.

Just win, baby--and the surest way to amassing ratings and dollars is still by breaking important stories first, and doing a better job of explaining what's happening in the world today.

Are all these men--and women--idiots that they can't do a better job than a dozen newsmen? Is Lemann saying his broadcast brethern are clowns, shams, fools, who go to journalism schools like his for two years and then show up for work every morning to put in a full day's worth of meaningless nonsense?

I mean, come on; Murrow was talented, and so was his team--but they weren't gods. And people beyond Ted Koppel and Bill Moyers--Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Jim Lehrer, Scott Simon, Bob Schieffer, Aaron Brown, Michele Norris, Diane Sawyer, Judy Woodruff are pretty good journalists too.

Are they so fettered by their blinkered corporate structure that these dedicated people--who have been in the business for decades and are supported by a pool of producers, researchers, writers, camerpeople, technicians, et al, and zounds of anything-you-want-anytime-you-want-it technology--can't do a better job finding out what's going on than a callow Murrow boy of 25, air-dropped into the middle of a war zone who files with bullets flying overhead?

Sheesh....

But if you don't believe in the truth-will-out journalistic process that undergirds the news business, or if you're one of those who are comfortable demeaning the integrity of an entire industry of men and women who have dedicated their lives to their craft--how about the end product?

Maybe Lemann considers the work of broadcasters today so beneath him that he doesn't watch television or listen to the radio. How else to explain:

“Harvest of Shame,” the great “CBS Reports” documentary on migrant farmworkers, which represented Murrow’s last major appearance on television, is also impossible to imagine on network television today—one hour, the day after Thanksgiving, 1960, of horrifyingly unpleasant images of poverty and hunger—and its aesthetic is straight out of the socialist-realist Depression-era work of Dorothea Lange and Pare Lorentz and Russell Lee.

Lemann later says of an interview Murrow did with Senator Joseph McCarthy:

It was great television, because it was a showdown between a journalist and a politician, but the days when a major figure on network television can pick that kind of fight, and openly state political opinions on prime time, are long gone. Today, famous broadcast journalists are far more likely to battle each other than Washington officials.

'Impossible to imagine today,' 'Long gone'--is 60 Minutes a mirage, 20/20 and Nightline and Frontline figments of our imagination? And where are these Washington officials who no longer feel battled by broadcast journalists?

The reports and footage from Ethiopia, Iraq, Bosnia, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, ANWAR--did we dream all that? Mike Wallace's interviews, Ted Koppel, Tim Russert--are these journalists not of this day and age? Are the Peabodys and Emmys and Columbia's own duPont awards given to fake stories that are broadcast in some parallel universe?

I mean, come on. There are thousands of broadcast stories airing every week on channels all across America--everything from schools to politicians to cops to large corporations are being looked at.

Not all the stories are stellar, far too many of them are fluff or entertainment-driven, a lot of them come out of the echo-chamber. But many of them are informative, and a substantial number of them are innovative and investigative--and a lot of them still give rise to change in the 'real world'.

Americans today have access to more and better journalism than we've ever had in our history. You just have to find it in the sea of programming; but it's your choice what to consume, and even if all you watch are the likes of FOX News, you'll be infinitely better informed about the world than almost any American living in Murrow's time.

And don't forget that through much of Lemann's golden age of Murrow the evening newscast was 15 minutes long, and anchors regularly pitched products before, during and after their broadcasts.

Read some of the transcripts of the newscasts sometime, it's quite astonishing how few stories were covered each night, and when they were covered, it often reads like a stenographer's notes of the government's daily press briefings.

There's very little imaginative journalism going on, and little-to-no challenging of authority; journalism then really was what some people imagine it to be today, a club of a few men sitting around deciding what the day's news was. (If you think the poor journalism of the day was limited to television, go read some of the newspaper articles from Murrow's day).

It's why Murrow had to do things like request 30 minutes of prime time to provide his sporadic special reports. There was no real news programming otherwise.

And maybe it's not a bad thing, given that the news was entirely reported by white middle-aged men.

Does Lemann seriously believe that the news business as a whole is worse today than that produced by Murrow, when women and non-whites were invisible on-air, and more importantly as producers and editors behind-the-scenes where story decisions were made?!

Lemann loses any remaining shred of credibility on this topic with the juxtaposition of two paragraphs:

By dint of trial and error, and of inspired hiring, Murrow wound up as a pioneer of virtually every variety of television journalism except evening-news anchoring: the documentary, the celebrity interview, the prosecutorial investigative piece, the on-the-scene sociological report, the expert-rich treatment of an “issue,” the gee-whiz account of one of the world’s wonders, the scary, exciting bout with danger.

Murrow’s McCarthy shows make an absurdity of the modern-day conservative accusation that, say, Dan Rather represents the introduction of a heretofore unknown ideological strain into broadcast journalism. The Murrow broadcasts were far more nakedly political than anything on network television today, and came from a source with a much bigger share of—and more adoration from—the audience than anybody has now.

Lemann first says Murrow was everything but an anchor; then he rebuts contemporary criticism of an anchor's role by using Murrow as an example?!

By confusing the two roles here and in a previous excerpt, Lemann reflects a profound lack of understanding of broadcast journalism--or at best he's just sloppy, which is ironic given his devotion to Murrow.

An evening news anchor in his role of presenting the reports of correspondents detailing the day's events has to take pains to come across as fair and balanced. That's why Dan, Peter and Tom never aired their investigative pieces on the same newscast they anchored, and that's why anchorman Rather's on-air confrontation with George H. W. Bush in 1988 stands out (incidentally, it was subsquently revealed that the Bush campaign planned the confrontation beforehand in a bid to dispel the image of Bush as a weak man).

If anchors display an ideological strain, that actually is a big deal; but it's not a standard that would be applied to the host of a news special, and so to contrast Murrow's political outspokeness with the demeanor of today's evening newscast anchors and reporters is ridiculous.

As someone who worked at the broadcast journalism trade organization that Murrow founded, and as someone who read years ago the transcript of his speech to that group that Clooney's film is built around, it's odd to read articles and criticisms like Lemann's of an industry that I actually have first-hand knowledge of.

I am by no means a Pollyanna when it comes to the state of broadcast news. The patient is nowhere near dead, but it's not exactly in the pink of health either. There are some fundamental micro issues about the medium and the way broadcast news is created on a day-to-day basis that--coupled with the macro structure of the industry, sometimes, perhaps even often times and maybe even increasingly as of late--keep the talented men and women who live and bleed journalism from sharing with the public the full benefit of their daily work.

That's a shame. Because at its best, and when these obstacles are overcome, there's no better way of understanding the world than to watch television news or listen to news on the radio. There's a melding of intellect and emotion that no other medium comes close to offering.

However, no matter the problems in the industry, it has never been better. There is no golden age of broadcast journalism, or any other type of journalism for that matter. We are it.

Even if you throw out the boom in the sheer number of people now devoted to covering the news, ignore the technological improvements that let reporters spend more time digging for stories and less time worrying about creating and transmitting them, if nothing else, this is journalism's golden age because the industry has never been as diverse as it is today. Both in terms of journalists themselves and in terms of access to story sources, so stories are less likely to be ignored or overlooked out of sheer ignorance.

It's hard to overestimate how important this is. Murrow and his boys never even had the chance to ignore or cover poorly 90% of the day's news, because they simply didn't know those stories existed. By the context of his time, he was a great journalist--if we reran his stories today, he would be seen as limited.

Today's diversity, again not just in people themselves but also in the sheer number of ideas they can access via things like the Internet, is not where it should or even could be. But it's still better than it's ever been.

And if you don't believe me, read Murrow's celebrated 1958 speech. Compare the bleak news landscape he describes to the vibrant, noisy one around us today--Murrow's life and he stood for is best exemplified by our times.

I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.

We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure--exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.

To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

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. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, "When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.

Photo of Edward R. Murrow from the organization he started, the Radio-Television News Directors Assocation.