Edward R. Murrow was born on April 25, 1908 to Ethel and Roscoe Murrow near Pole Cat Creek, NC. Edward's birth name was Egbert Roscoe Murrow, but lacking an official birth certificate, he was easily able to change his name to Edward as an adult.

Murrow's first and possibly most fundamental influence on broadcast journalism (circa 1937) was the concept of putting correspondents on the air. Early radio news broadcasting consisted of an announcer at the station or network studio reading wire copy. This new news format, applied to the reporting of WWII, gained CBS much critical acclaim for using the medium of radio to deliver news with a speed and immediacy not possible with print media. Paradoxically, I think that a side effect of this development was the setting of the stage for the "soundbite culture" that we have today because the next step after putting the reporters on the air was to put observers and newsmakers on the air, as well.

Attended Washington State University...The Murrow Communications Building (home of all of WSU's media in Pullman) is part of his legacy.

Proud to say I spent some time in that building! Great life learning experience.

I had not heard of the Murrow Communications Building before. That is pretty cool. Tufts University has the Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy. The town of Pawling, NY, where Murrow kept a vacation home, has Edward R. Murrow Memorial Park. Of course, there is also the Edward R. Murrow award for broadcast journalism.

Sometime within the next few weeks, I'll be getting a copy of the _Edward_R._Murrow_Collection_ video box set. Music Millenium carries this, but it is a special order item. I might write up a mini-review of this once I watch the entire thing.

"Good night...and good luck!"

Happy Birthday Mister Murrow!

Sorry about the whole broadcast journalism thing, yeah, we know, you warned everyone about it. You weren't the only one, but the dollars kept coming and some things just stopped mattering. You remember bullshit don't you? Yeah, the one constant left.

You and Ike should go for a soda and cheer up. You were both right about our dismal present, but at least you don't still wake up here every day. If you did, you fellers would be pretty pissed off, and it wouldn't be too good for your health. Skol!

Alfredo, I am looking forward to that review. As I recall, Murrow does compare distant shelling to "farmers blowing up stumps in Washington" during a radio report from wartorn England. I am curious if he references his fondly remembered days in the region in front of the camera as well.

My review of the Edward R. Murrow Collection may be coming sooner, rather than later, because Music Millenium just called to let me know that they received my DVDs!! I can't wait!

In 1965, two days after his 57th birthday, Edward R. Murrow died from cancer that spread from his lungs to his brain. His cancer was due to 30 years of smoking approximately three packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes per day (that is approximately 650,000 cigarettes). A link to Murrow obituary that appeared in the New York times can be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0425.html

It is a terrible shame that a great luminary like Murrow had to go dark so soon. What might have happened if Murrow had recovered from his cancer? Would he have gone into academia, teaching journalism? Would he have re-emerged as a smoking cessation advocate? Would he ever have returned to broadcasting? How might he have felt if he could have lived to see the broadcast journalism world of the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s?

Here is a partial review of the _Edward_R._Murrow_Collection_, which I bought Friday evening:

This collection was first released back in 1991 as a set of four VHS cassettes. The four volumes are:
1) This Reporter (I watched this one)
2) See It Now (I watched this one)
3) The McCarthy Years (I watched this one)
4) The Harvest of Shame (I haven't watched this yet)

This Reporter consists of a two-part documentary that was broadcast on PBS's American Masters show in 1991. The documentary includes many interviews with Edward R. Murrow's relatives and co-workers. I am really thankful that somebody produced something like this back in 1991, when Janet Murrow and Fred Friendly were still alive. A. M. Sperber, the biographer who wrote _Murrow:_His_Life_and_Times_ served as a consultant and appears at several points of the documentary. Stock footage is used to accompany recordings of Murrow's WWII radio broadcasts. The picture quality of all of the kinescope clips of See it Now and Person to Person is very poor. The documentary starts off strong in presenting a chronological history of the development of Murrow's career, but in my opinion, it meanders and loses focus a bit toward the end when it tries to tackle the philosophical issues about the role of news and reporters. The saddest part of this documentary is the clip of Murrow's on-air farewell at CBS, in which he is almost in tears and flubs his closing line, saying "Good luck....and good night."


See it Now is a collage of segments of this program that try to give the viewer a flavor of the kinds of topics that the show covered. To me, it comes across as a very frank, matter-of-fact view of American society in the 1950s (I wasn't around then, but I would be inclined to trust Murrow more than popular entertainment of the time). The Christmas in Korea show is presented in its entirety. Today, the opening to this show might seem a little bit hokey: the announcer explains that Edward R. Murrow is not appearing from the New York studios, but from Korea. As these words are being spoken, the camera tilts down to show the empty chair where Murrow would usually be sitting! Some of the other topics covered included: the inauguration of CBS's coast-to-coast television network, hurricanes, nuclear research and the industrial uses of nuclear technology, impacts of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, interviews with Louis Armstrong and "Grandma Moses," etc. This volume was a bit overwhelming to watch because of all the issues covered.

I noticed that unlike in the PBS documentary volume, kinescopes were shown here only when absolutely necessary. In other words, if the film on which the stories were shot was available, that was edited in at the appropriate place, after Murrow introduces the story, instead of showing the same story off of a kinescope of the film. I was surprised to see that one of the two Grandma Moses interviews was in color; Murrow explained, "this is our first attempt at color television," although I'm not sure if that meant a first attempt for See it Now or if that was the first time that CBS tried broadcasting in compatible color. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed that no clips from the show about research into the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer were included. I have read transcripts of this program, and I think that it would have provided a very interesting view of what the state of scientific knowledge on this subject was like in 1956.


The McCarthy Years consists mainly of about 3 1/2 See It Now shows with minimal editing. The first show is about Milo Radulovich's expulsion from the Air Force over the alleged political views of his father and sister. The second show is about Annie Lee Moss, who lost her government job over suspicions of being a Communist; the only place where we see Mrs. Moss is under questioning by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. The third show is McCarthy's rebuttal to Murrow. Then at the end, is an excerpt from the show that ran the week after McCarthy's rebuttal show. Murrow addresses each of the allegations that McCarthy had made against him on the previous week's program, making McCarthy look like a loon in the process. Murrow is visibly angry at the end of this show, in which he declares that in the next week's episode, he will hopefully be able to focus on matters of greater importance.

Last night, I watched the fourth volume of the _Edward_R._Murrow_Collection_, "Harvest of Shame." This is a famous and controversial episode of the series _CBS_Reports_ that was originally broadcast the day after Thanksgiving, 1960. The program is presented in its entirety, including the credits. What is not mentioned is that when Murrow went to work for the USIA in 1961, he unsuccessfully tried to prevent the BBC from airing this documentary in England, presumably because he believed that its critical tone would hurt his standing at his new job.

The program is about the lives of migrant farm workers. This documentary is interesting for two reasons:
1) Watching this documentary almost 47 years after it was first produced evokes the question, have there been any significant changes in the world of migrant farm hands since then? I suspect that the answer is no.
2) Throughout much of Murrow's career, there was a lingering philosophical question about the proper role of a reporter. Are reporters simply supposed to chronicle events, or are they supposed to provide some sense of social conscience? This documentary shows that by the end of his career, Murrow had very clearly assumed the latter role. At the end of the program, Murrow says something like, "These people are strong enough to harvest the food you eat, but they are not strong enough to improve their living conditions. Maybe we, through our representatives in the government, are strong enough to help them."

The program follows migrant labor crews to various parts of the country, showing their lifestyle and working conditions. Farmers, the Secretary of Labor, congressmen, migrants, migrant crew leaders, and chaplains are interviewed. Most of the migrant workers shown were Black, although there were a few White families profiled. It was stated that in the West, Mexican migrant workers were competing with the Black and White workers and helping to drive wages down further. None of the migrant workers interviewed had any savings. All of the families seemed to have at least five children and not enough money to feed them all. It was also stated that a very small number (about 1 in 3000) of migrant children complete high school and that none have ever been known to obtain a college degree. When asked how long they had been doing migrant farm work, the parents all said that they had been doing this since they were old enough to work in the fields, and they saw no way out of this line of work. One of the farmers, either out of callousness or cluelessness said that migrants have "gypsie blood" in them and that as a result, the nomadic life makes migrants happier people than farmers or professionals(!) It was pointed out that the main reason that migrants make so little money--typically less than $2 per day in 1960 dollars--is that the farmers pay the migrant crew chiefs, and the chiefs are responsible for paying the migrant workers. Some of this money, of course, goes toward transporting the migrant workers to the fields (it was not unusual for some of these crews to be transported 1,600 miles in search of work), but a fairly large chunk is pocketed by the crew chiefs.

Murrow was 52 years of age when this documentary was produced, and he appears much more dilapidated than in any of his other CBS programs; it looked like all the smoking and stress over the years had really taken their toll. I am not an anti-cigarette zealot by any means, but I am shocked that somebody of Murrow's intelligence could not see (or refused to see) what he was doing to himself by smoking so much. While he is in the offices of the labor secretaries and congressmen, he has a lit cigarette in hand as he interviews these people! In several scenes, the face of the interviewees is on the screen talking, as whisps of smoke from Murrow's cigarette waft in front of it. I have to reassure myself that back in 1960, this would not have been considered disrespectful or even out of place.