Edward R. Murrow was no Edward R Murrow

McCamy Taylor

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Thu Apr-03-08 05:10 AM
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Edward R. Murrow was no Edward R Murrow

Hold on to your seats, because we are in for a bumpy ride. I am going to do some radical historical revision here in order to make a point. Please do not flame me unless you read all the way to the end.

Alan Moore, the graphic fiction writer is probably the best living English language fiction author alive, now that William Burroughs has wandered off to the western lands. In his most famous book, Moore asks the simple question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? or Who Watches the Watchmen? .

Since the members of the press now construct (and deconstruct and reconstruct on an almost constant basis, depending upon the needs of their corporate masters) our history, it is no surprise that they glamorize the histories of their own. The career of Edward R. Murrow is a case in point.

I.

I found this article from The Nation. Yes, it is from the news media. The liberal news media, so it has to be glowing. Edward R. Murrow is the patron saint of speaking out in defense of the weak and helpless against the bully and those with power and money, right?

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/63464/

Then Murrow would do his closing essay, in which he would comment on some hot issue, continually treading dangerous waters: McCarthyism at home, apartheid abroad, J. Edgar Hoover, the atomic bomb, stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction -- all of which he opposed. He was pro-union and anti-business. He was a dissident on US foreign policy post-World War II. He spoke out against the Truman Doctrine, which had America supporting fascist dictatorships in Greece and elsewhere because they were anti-Communist.

Hold on there. That reminds me of a story that the press hardly ever talks about. William Shirer, Bill Shirer, another WWII radio correspondent for CBS. While Murrow was in London, Shirer was in Germany, France and Europe reporting on the rise of the Third Reich decades before he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . Eventually, he had to make a run for it, because the Gestapo was ready to arrest him for his reporting activity.

After the war, both men went home. Murrow got an executive position. Shirer had a radio program and some liberal views that made him unpopular with the sponsors.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/197601/cbs-1/11

The most delicate problem turned out to be Murrow's old friend Bill Shirer. Shirer was doing a Sunday afternoon radio news show and his sponsor decided to drop him and hire another broadcaster. Murrow reassigned Shirer to another time slot, though without a sponsor and thus at a considerable reduction in income. Shirer was bitter. He had sixteen months to go on his contract. Murrow tried to make him stay, but Shirer was hurt and felt he had been gagged. Since Shirer was the furthest left of the major commentators at the time—he opposed the Truman Doctrine and in general was less of what would come to be known as a Cold Warrior than his colleagues—many thought that CBS, Murrow included, was buckling under to political pressure. (Among those who felt that way was Shirer himself, who later wrote a novel, entitled Stranger Come Home, dealing with the McCarthy Era and singularly unflattering to a character seemingly modeled on Murrow.)

The incident underlined the question of who controlled the news, the network or the sponsors. Did the sponsors for example, have the right to control the tone of the news by deciding whose voice should be heard? Murrow said that a sponsor could select a broadcaster, though it could not control content. It was, he knew, an unsatisfactory answer because a newscaster defined the tone and style of a show; there was no such thing as pure content. In addition, it meant that sponsors, rather than CBS News, had the right to advance or thwart a broadcaster's career, and that very quickly the least offensive journalist, rather than the most talented, might rise and be rewarded.
The corporate role was not one that Murrow relished; the voice he spoke with was not necessarily his own. By 1947, he was back to broadcasting, awaiting the arrival of television, which he regarded with suspicion and ambivalence. But he was a communicator; and whatever else television was, it was clearly a powerful forum for communication.

It would take Murrow over ten years of wrestling with his conscience to get up the moral indignation to make his finest speech. No, the one about McCarthy. I will get to that one later. The one I am talking about is his 1958 speech in he extols the television news industry to think less about ratings and revenues and more about content.

http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/hiddenagenda/murrow.html

Here is William Shirer’s obituary from the New York Times.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE7DE153FF93AA15751C1A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Although Mr. Shirer denied that he was ever a Communist sympathizer, he was blacklisted in "Red Channels," a booklet that listed names of suspected Communists in the early 1950's. He had once signed a friend-of-the-court brief for the Hollywood 10. "Red Channels" was used to pressure the networks and advertising agencies to purge its liberal commentators. CBS was one of the broadcasting companies that bowed to the pressure and established loyalty oaths.
"I became unemployable," Mr. Shirer later wrote. "I was broke, with two kids in school. Some of my friends were editors and would pay me for an article, but nothing was ever published. I then decided I would speak my piece on the lecture trail. I spent almost five years when my sole income was from one-night stands at universities. They were almost the only place in the country in the 1950's that still had some respect for freedom of speech."
Of colleagues who behaved "not well" during the McCarthy era, Mr. Shirer said: "It's a question of character. It's a complex fate, being an American, as Henry James wrote. It would be easier here for a right-wing dictator than anyplace else."
"I have moments of great depression about the United States," he added, "and then something happens to restore faith."

Now, about Murrow’s great moment . The Press frames the story as David vs. Goliath. Sen. Joe McCarthy is at the height of his power, summoning fair starlets and hapless bespectacled writers who can not get jobs (like Bill Shirer) before Congress, when that great defender of liberty, Edward R. Murrow decides that enough is enough. He will speak his mind, consequences be damned.

It didn’t happen quite that way. This not the Brave Little Tailor, a story in which Murrow is the hero. This is The Man Who Learned Better, and McCarthy is the hero, whose overreaching leads to his own downfall.

Far from being at the height of his power, McCarthy had done the unthinkable. He had decided to take his show on the road into the Pentagon. With a war hero president. Some people are just plain born stupid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3002239.stm

McCarthy's downfall came when he began to attack one of the most revered US institutions, the Army.
His insistence that Army loyalty officers must appear before his Senate committee gained him the ire of the new Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, a former Army general.
In a classic confrontation, in public and private, he accused Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker of promoting an army dentist suspected of communist leanings to the rank of major, and fumed when he refused to reveal who had approved it.
"Any man who has been promoted to general and... who protected communists is not fit to wear that uniform," McCarthy said.
The Secretary of the Army, Robert T Stephens, and his lawyer, John G Adams, then appeared in a televised hearing and asked the senator, "Have you no sense of decency?"
In December, 1954, the Senate censured McCarthy by a vote of 67-22.

Some other stuff happened between the insult to Zwicker and the vote to censure. Eisenhower was pissed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/34_eisenhower/eisenhower_politics.html

When McCarthy, armed with little more than hearsay and innuendo, set out to expose communists within the U.S. Army, Eisenhower decided enough was enough. He instructed his staff to present information that would discredit McCarthy. It was revealed that McCarthy had petitioned the Army to award preferential treatment to his assistant, David Shine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._David_Schine

Interesting bit of dirt there. Cohn was probably infatuated with his assistant and definitely used his power to seek special military privileges. That must have caused a major stink for McCarthy as only a homosexual love triangle by innuendo scandal could.

In the middle of the Pentagon’s efforts to get back at McCarthy, Murrow launched his bold attack. It was a good speech, but with Eisenhower and the Pentagon gunning for the guy and the Republicans now firmly in control of Washington (and therefore no longer having any use for a rogue pit bull who did damage to his own side when he was supposed to be neutralizing the opposition) I can not say that Murrow was playing Gary Cooper in High Noon . I look at him more as one of the Dirty Dozen. Charles Bronson, maybe.

And yet, would Charles Bronson ever be this eloquent?

Here is the text:

http://www.honors.umd.edu/HONR269J/archive/Murrow540309.html

No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it -- and rather successfully. Cassius was right. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Good night, and good luck.

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5TTtStFMSw

II.

In Writing the Event Rolande Barthes describes three types of information or notation that are used to “write” the history of May ’68 in France. (the essay starts on page 169)

http://books.google.com/books?id=qj_Qe3aaItUC&pg=PA149&lpg=PA149&dq=%22Writing+the+Event%22+Barthes&source=web&ots=FwSOnZrIUD&sig=cWT2SpNC6MqTPGw-v7Td9LCITFc&hl=en#PPA149,M1

speech , symbol and violence . These three are obvious characteristics of a nationwide popular protest that caused a significant lasting effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968

May '68 was a political failure for the protesters, but it had an enormous social impact. In France, it is considered to be the watershed moment that saw the replacement of conservative morality (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) with the liberal morality (equality, sexual liberation, human rights) that dominates French society today. Although this replacement did not take place solely in this one month, the term mai 68 is used to refer to the shift in values, especially when referring to its most idealistic aspects.

Just as the graffiti, shouted word and acts of violence are the images which linger in the minds of the French and which serve to characterize and define May ’68 more than more classic forms of written historical analysis, so the television record of Edward R. Murrow delivering his speech with his fine voice along with the juxtaposition to the violent images of McCarthy grilling sympathetic figures like lowly government workers, writers, artists, movie stars and later military men and heroes are so vivid and fixed in our minds that they become THE history . We see and hear Murrow acting heroic. We see and hear innocent victims being lead to slaughter. Our minds create the familiar narrative of David versus Goliath or the Brave Little Tailor, because that is a story that comes easy to us. We enjoy it. This country in which we live, which teaches us to take care of ourselves and be rugged individuals not ask for handouts tells us everyday be strong, be Gary Cooper.

Be Edward R. Murrow

However, Edward R. Murrow was no Edward R. Murrow. And he was. The question is not which he was. The question is why do we think one way or the other, and what rests in the balance between the two answers.

At the end of his short essay, Barthes returns to familiar territory with the last paragraph which I will have to let you read on line, since I can not cut and paste it here. Here is a snippet.

“Interpretation must gradually give way to a new discourse whose goal is not the revelation of a unique and “true” structure but the establishment of an interplay of multiple structures: an establishment itself written i.e. uncoupled from the truth of speech. “

For Barthes and people like Wallace Stevens who were born in an early age, this was a concept that may have seemed revolutionary. It is something that we live and breathe now. It has informed all of our social sciences. I listened in amazement as an anthropologist delivered a lecture at my school of public health and discussed theory that could have come straight from Barthes thirty years ago or Stevens over half a century ago.

We all read on multiple levels now. However, we do not all consciously read on multiple levels. When we look at a story spread by the corporate media and we do not always ask “Why did this story get released today as opposed to next week? “ and “Who suggested this story?” (knowing as we do that journalists seldom do their own leg work anymore, nowadays lobbyists or political parties or someone selling dog food does the work and gives it to the journalist) and “How does this benefit the parent company?” and if we do not know whom the parent company is and what their future money making plans are, we can never hope to read the whole news. At best we will be like those who look back at May ’68 and remember graffiti and shouts and overturned cars and say “That was it!” And that was it. But that was not all of it. Because it was chaos but it was also a new order.

Historians, self styled nonfiction writers and the press will try time and again to tell us that one thing is true. Propagandists are especially skilled at this. They know just how to use speech , violence and symbol to convince us that just one thing is true. Like Muslims are scary. Or Hillary is never sincere. Members of the press just love to get on TV and tell you that just one thing is true and that they have just now figured out what it is and why it means that you should go straight out and vote the way they tell you or spend your money the way they tell you. Like Tweety, on the night of the New Hampshire primary with his ridiculous "Methinks paleface speaks with forked tongue" pronouncement. Only a true devotee of the one true thing can say something like "Bill Clinton is ghettoizing Obama" (Pat Buchanan).

I will let you in on a secret. There may be a few eternal truths, but they are not of the type that you are likely to find the guys and gals of the press pontificating upon. Most of what passes through their lips is bullshit. The more they admit that they are guessing, the closer they are coming to the truth. If they give you two or three mutually exclusive possibilities, you have probably found a winner.

If you practice the art of reading the way Rolande Barthes touches upon in this short essay and expands upon in his classic S/Z you will be able to pick up a newspaper and tell from the stories what the RNC is doing now and is planning to do next. Because there is a hell of a lot more information buried in there than the corporate media realizes. If they had any idea how much they reveal to those who read on all the levels, they would be afraid to issue any kind of news.