Edward R. Murrow: Inventing Broadcast Journalism

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Murrow refused to go into shelters, saying that once you did you lost your nerve. With considerable nonchalance, Murrow, LeSueur and a young New York Times reporter, James Reston, played golf on a nine-hole course on London’s Hampstead Heath. If a ball rolled near an unexploded bomb, it was declared an unplayable lie.

The hazards were all too real. Out walking one evening, Murrow suddenly stepped into a doorway. Two colleagues instantly followed suit. Seconds later, a shell casing landed where they had been standing. CBS was repeatedly bombed out of its tiny London office — always without serious casualty. Another evening, Ed and Janet Murrow were walking home and he suggested stopping in the Devonshire Arms, a pub frequented by journalists. Janet said she was tired, so they continued home. Ten minutes later the pub received a direct hit — and everyone inside was killed.

Sevareid did not share that bravado. He lived a few blocks from the BBC, and wrote: To get to the underground broadcasting facility meant a walk of a couple blocks for me. I would shuffle cautiously through the inky blackness to each curbing where the guns would make the crossing street a tunnel of sudden, blinding light. [Then,] I would plaster myself against the nearest wall, and, however sternly I lectured myself, I not infrequently found myself doing the last 50 yards at a dead run.

If Murrow was not frightened, he was nonetheless exhausted. Sleeping little, eating less and smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, he was driven by his sense of the importance of the event. Among other problems, Murrow had to reconcile his own views with CBS’ strict policy of nonpartisanship. In part he did this simply by presenting the British as the underdog, relying on his countrymen’s natural sympathies to take England’s side. Further, however, he was inclined to attribute his own point of view to others, then report it as news. He spoke of the attitudes of unnamed Englishmen who, he said, had given up on the notion that victory could be achieved without American aid. Now, Murrow reported, such Englishman had come to admit: British victory, if not British survival, will be made possible only by American action. There are too many Germans, and they have too many factories. It seems strange to hear English, who were saying, ‘we’ll win this one without America,’ admitting now that this world — or what’s left of it — will be largely run either from Berlin or from Washington.

Of Murrow’s influence, Sevareid later wrote: The generality of British people will probably never know what Murrow did for them in those days….Murrow was not trying to’sell’ the British cause to America; he was trying to explain the universal human cause of men who were showing a noble face to the world. In so doing he made the British and their behavior human and thus compelling to his countrymen at home.

The German air assaults varied in intensity. The strength of the attacks depended in part on the demands made by German operations elsewhere and, apparently, by Germany’s periodic shortage of lubricating fluids for its aircraft. After a lull, the Luftwaffe returned in April 1941. Murrow reported: They came over shortly after blackout time, and a veritable show of flares and incendiaries. One of those nights where you wear your best clothes, because you’re never sure that when you come home you’ll have anything other than the clothes you were wearing. Given the size of the city, Murrow added, it was difficult to judge the severity of an attack from one’s own vantage. If the bombs fall close to you, he added: You are inclined to think the bombing is very severe. Tonight, having been thrown against the wall by blasts — which feels like nothing so much as being hit with a feather-covered board — and having lost our third office, which looks like some crazy giant had been operating an eggbeater in its interior, I naturally conclude that the bombing has been heavy. Actually, it was the heaviest single attack of the war. The following month, CBS lost its fourth office.

Toward the end of 1941, Murrow returned to New York to receive what one observer called the greatest welcome given a journalist since Henry Morton Stanley returned, having found David Livingstone. One thousand gathered for a testimonial dinner at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. There, poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish praised Murrow’s work: But it was not in London really that you spoke. It was in the back kitchens and the front living rooms and the moving automobiles and the hotdog stands…that your voice was truly speaking. What Murrow had done, MacLeish added, was to destroy the belief that what happened 3,000 miles away was not really happening. You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead — were all men’s dead….Without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be, you destroyed the superstition of distance and of time.

Murrow’s own remarks were those of a man making a case. He told the audience: If you were in London now, you would be surprised at the number of people who would say to you, ‘Tell your fellow countrymen not to make the same mistakes we made. We didn’t want anything of this world except to be let alone — until it was almost too late.’ And, again making reference to thoughtful Englishmen, Murrow used the podium to issue a challenge: The question most often asked by thoughtful Englishmen is this: ‘If America comes in, will she stay in? Does she have any appetite for the greatness that is being thrust upon her?’

On the night that dinner was held — December 2, 1941 — America’s role in the conflict was still unsettled. Five days later, in an act that astonished Murrow, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and America was at war.

With the United States at war, Americans leaned more strongly into the day’s events. CBS expanded its European news team. In time, those reporting with Murrow included many who would make great careers in broadcasting: along with Shirer, LeSueur and Sevareid were Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, Richard C. Hottelet, Cecil Brown, William Downs and Winston Burdett. When Murrow hired them, they were little more than kids — bright boys in their mid-20s — as inexperienced at radio news reporting as Murrow had been. They did, however, meet Murrow’s personal standard: They could think and they could write. And most modeled their approach to gathering the news on Murrow’s approach. Customarily, their reports would be part fact, part essay, part color and part editorial, all wrapped up in a crisply written two- or three-minute account that became the standard format for CBS journalism. Many others in the field regarded their work as the best ever done in broadcasting.

Murrow, who defined their task and directed their efforts, never made any great claims for himself — not for his efforts during the Blitz, or for what followed. Writing to Charles Collingwood in the immediate postwar period, Edward R. Murrow said, For a few brief years a few men attempted to do an honest job of reporting under difficult and sometimes hazardous conditions and they did not altogether fail.

This article was written by Mark Bernstein and originally published in the June 2005 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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