Edward R. Murrow: Inventing Broadcast Journalism

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In 1937 Edward R. Murrow sailed with his wife, Janet, to London where he was to take up the post of chief CBS radio correspondent in Europe. At the time, Murrow had never written a news story in his life, and he had never made a scheduled radio broadcast. He was 29 years old.

During the next three years, Murrow would oversee the birth of foreign news broadcasting, and he would make his own clipped baritone voice one of the most recognized by his countrymen. More important, Murrow, utilizing the new medium, would report from beleaguered London during the Blitz of 1940, dramatizing Britain’s stand-alone defense against Adolf Hitler to an America that slowly rallied to England’s cause. In so doing, he virtually invented modern broadcast journalism.

Murrow was a somewhat unlikely champion for the British. He had traveled to England before, but had been thoroughly unimpressed and later told one English audience: ‘I thought your streets narrow and mean, your tailors over-advertised, your climate unbearable, your class-consciousness offensive. You couldn’t cook. Your young men seemed without vigor or purpose. I admired your history, doubted your future.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

From behind a CBS studio microphone and eventually from on the scene, Edwar R. Murrow presented live word pictures of Londoners’ life in underground subway station shelters while German bombers ignited the city above.

Edward R. Murrow was that peculiarly American thing, a self-made man. In Britain during the war, London hostesses came to regard him as a prized dinner guest — handsome and intelligent, an elegant dresser who displayed an understated wit that appealed to local tastes. But there was little in his background to suggest such style and panache. Murrow was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow on April 24, 1908, in Polecat Creek, N.C., a place no more sophisticated than its name might suggest. When he was young, his family moved to Blanchard, Wash., a small logging town near the Pacific. In high school the self-making began with a self-naming. He dropped the Egbert and eventually re-christened himself Edward R. He worked at timbering during summers while in high school and for a year after graduation to secure the funds to attend a Washington state college.

When Murrow entered college, the field of foreign radio correspondence did not exist. Still, his undergraduate interests did much to prepare him for his future work. His best subjects were speech, debate and ROTC. He was a natural leader; on graduation he became president of the National Student Federation, through which he met his future wife, Janet Brewster. He took an interest in European politics, uncommon in young Americans at the time. At age 25, he worked for a tiny organization that attempted to relocate persecuted scholars from Germany to the United States. In 1933 fear of Hitler in the United States was not great, so funds were limited and visas difficult to obtain. Still, the 335 refugees brought to the States included novelist Thomas Mann, theologian Martin Buber and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. All this was in Murrow’s background when he went to Europe in 1937.

If war was to be Murrow’s coming-of-age, it was also the coming-of-age of radio. Murrow’s lack of reporting credentials meant little when he went to London in 1937. He was sent to the British capital to be director of talks, and his task was to schedule interviews with notables from government, business and the arts. At the time, CBS did not report the news from London; CBS, and radio generally, barely reported the news from New York. News coverage was largely limited to radio commentators, like H.V. Kaltenborn, and to announcers who read the headlines on the hour. It was the Depression, and the public turned to radio not for news, which was mostly bad, but for escape — the humor of Jack Benny and Burns and Allen and the singing of Bing Crosby and Kate Smith.

Murrow was among the first to see serious journalistic possibilities in the airwaves. In August 1937, Murrow decided to hire an itinerant American journalist as CBS’ man on the Continent. The reporter, William L. Shirer, having fled Prohibition-era Iowa for a place where a man could drink a glass of wine or a stein of beer without breaking the law, had been knocking about Europe for a decade. By chance, on the same day that Shirer was laid off from his post as a correspondent for Universal Service in Berlin, Murrow offered him a job. Shirer accepted, but a hurdle remained. With CBS brass listening in from New York, Shirer made a voice audition. His speaking voice was Midwestern, nasal and flat, and CBS executives thought he was terrible. Murrow put his foot down: He was not hiring announcers, he said, but people who could think and write. That was Murrow’s personal standard, and Shirer was the first to meet it.

(The issue would resurface in 1939, when Murrow wanted to hire a young American newspaperman who had gone to Paris in 1937 to be near the war that he, though few others, expected. Not wanting to be a famous war correspondent named Arnold, the young journalist dropped his first name and presented himself to the world as Eric Sevareid. His voice audition was worse than Shirer’s. Shirer had been monotone; Sevareid was a mumbler. So he was, and — hired at Murrow’s insistence — so he remained through an illustrious four-decade-long broadcast career.)

Events pressed the new medium into a new role. On March 12, 1938, Shirer traveled to Vienna — coincidentally, the same day the Germans were marching in, adding Hitler’s native country to his Nazi state. The day’s top story had landed in Shirer’s lap, but he could not report it. German officials refused to let him broadcast and escorted him out of the radio station.

At Murrow’s suggestion, Shirer flew to London to report his story on air from there. Murrow then headed for Vienna to cover subsequent events. From New York, CBS news director Paul White called Shirer to say he wanted reports from London, Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Rome, using American newspaper correspondents: A half-hour show, and I’ll telephone you the exact time for each capital in about an hour. Can you and Murrow do it? I said yes, Shirer recorded in his diary, and we hung up. The truth is I didn’t have the faintest idea.

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