Edward R. Murrow

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Ron Simon

See It Now continued to provoke controversy. Murrow interviewed J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who was removed as advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission because he was suspected of being a Soviet agent. The series also documented issues of desegregation, the cold war, and governmental scandal. Beginning in October 1953, Murrow counterbalanced his grave image by hosting a celebrity talk show, Person to Person. Each week Murrow electronically visited the homes of personalities from the arts, sports, politics, and business. Critics worried about the show's lack of depth, particularly the interviews with such movie stars as Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. In the late 1950s Murrow hosted a discussion series of greater depth, Small World, where he moderated an unrehearsed conversation among intellectuals and world leaders situated in studios and homes around the globe.

Murrow received numerous awards for his work on See It Now and Person to Person, but his relationship with CBS deteriorated. Murrow complained about the increasing commercialism of television. He lambasted the industry at a 1958 convention for radio and television news directors by stating the medium insulated the viewer from "the realities of the world in which we live." His crusades and jeremiads were accepted in times of war and national hysteria, but in the late 1950s they seemed out of place in a prosperous nation. After the cancellation of See It Now, CBS split up the esteemed team of Ed Murrow and Fred Friendly. Friendly became executive producer of CBS Reports, for which Murrow occasionally hosted such investigative reports as Harvest of Shame.

In 1961, President John Kennedy persuaded Murrow to leave CBS to become director of the United States Information Agency. Murrow remained in that post until 1964, when he resigned because he was suffering from lung cancer. Always a heavy smoker, Murrow had investigated the connection between cigarettes and cancer for See It Now. Murrow died on April 27, 1965 and was saluted by The New York Times "as broadcasting's true voice."

Edward R. Murrow remains the dominant individual in broadcast news. During his 25-year career, he made more than 5,000 reports, many of which are now considered journalistic classics, probing into the twentieth century's most troubling issues with poetry and insight. Murrow and partner Friendly invented the magazine news format, which became the major documentary form on network television. Shaping the form and content of television news, they also tested the limits of editorial advocacy. Murrow became the exemplar of free speech and democratic ideals in a commercial media. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted, Murrow's "spirit is still invoked ... whenever the glories, the depredations, and the promise of television news come up for argument."