Murrow Special: An Effort to Illuminate

Al Tompkins

Advocacy journalism and the role of opinion in the newsroom.


In that speech that we celebrate in this issue of Communicator, Murrow made the point over and over that the listeners and viewers deserve better. He was witnessing the steady rise of comedy, variety and game shows, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to get sponsors or airtime for serious news. A question was rising about whether the public, weary from war, wanted hard news anymore.

“I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is—an effort to illuminate rather than agitate.”

NBC Nightly News’ chief investigative correspondent Lisa Myers hopes the public recognizes journalism as an effort to illuminate. “I think at our best, we attain that standard,” she says. “But clearly there are those on both sides of the political spectrum who seem to view any story as part of a continuing partisan political struggle, rather than an objective presentation of facts.”

Did Murrow mean to imply in that speech that journalists should dryly recite the facts and let the chips fall where they will? Certainly not. Murrow was something of an evangelist at times.

In his 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame,” he advocated and even agitated for the migrant workers. This is the closing passage of the documentary:

In taking on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he advocated for fairness. In the 1953 broadcast “Christmas in Korea,” he used only the faces and voices of the grunt solider, no generals. Just regular guys caught in a war not of their own making.

Myers used some Murrow tactics when she took on the Pentagon’s ban of Dragon Skin, a new kind of body armor that the CIA approved and purchased for top operatives in Iraq. But the U.S. Army forbade soldiers from using it and �stopped families from buying it for their loved ones.

Myers interviewed parents of dead soldiers who felt their loved ones might have been saved by Dragon Skin. Myers and NBC commissioned side-by-side tests of the Army’s vest and Dragon Skin; the testers declared it the hands-down winner, saying there was good reason for the Army to do extensive and objective side-by-side tests.

“I see our work as raising complex issues and reporting on them, as an effort to illuminate rather than advocate,” Myers says. “Clearly, in devoting large amounts of time and resources to a subject, we are saying we think it is important and worthy of the attention of our viewers.”

Myers adds that she just wanted to know why Dragon Skin was good enough for elite soldiers as well as covert CIA operatives, if it tested as poorly as the Army maintained it did. “We never suggested—nor would we—that the Pentagon should adopt Dragon Skin. Rather, we questioned why something that was good enough for the geese wasn’t good enough for the gander.”

Myers agrees with Murrow, that journalists should illuminate more than agitate or advocate. But investigative reporter Brett Shipp at WFAA-TV in Dallas says he considers it to be part of the journalist’s job to spark change.

“Busted. What else can I say other than I would and will never apologize to anyone who would argue that I am campaigning for reform? That’s why we as journalists take on the stories we investigate,” Shipp says. Shipp’s stories often cause reform.

When he investigated the insurance industry’s inhumane treatment of injured workers caught up in the Texas Worker’s Compensation system, state lawmakers quickly moved to overhaul the system. “Last year alone we exposed the incarceration of immigrant children in a medium-security prison in a small town in Texas, as well as the existence of faulty natural gas couplings in the ground in north Texas that have had a decades-old propensity to fail, and kill,” he says. “In both cases I could have done one or two stories to satisfy the needs of the producers to fi ll their newscasts and perhaps garner ratings.”

But in neither case did he stop at two stories. He kept cranking them out until someone took notice. “In the case of the prison, conditions were modifi ed and a judge ruled against the government forcing it to make radical changes,” he says.

“In the case of the deadly couplings, they were ordered removed from the ground.”Shipp says it is the continual drumbeat of follow-up coverage that makes a difference. “Anything short of a ‘campaign’ would have been ineffective, I believe, in forcing social change. This job empowers us as journalists and human beings to change our world and make it a better place. To not recognize and act on that is a waste of a career. If someone were to write Brett Shipp, ‘campaigner for social justice,’ on my tombstone—hey, I’m down with that.”

Murrow Award-winning investigative reporter Christine Young views her work differently. “I don’t think journalists should be crusaders or campaigners for change,” Young says. “I think our role is to carefully investigate and then to report the facts, and to expose attempts to hide or distort the facts.”

Young’s dogged reporting has given new hope to Lebrew Jones, who was convicted 18 years ago of the savage killing of a young woman. Young discovered, nearly two decades after the case went to trial, that police ignored key witnesses and failed to link other brutal killings with similarities that could have been tied to Micki Hall’s death. This former television reporter now working for The Times-Herald Record (Middletown, NY), pulled together a massive multimedia web presentation laying out audio and video interviews with key witnesses and the questionable confessions that Jones offered police years ago, and even explained through interactive graphics where Jones may have been at the time of the murder.

“I became outraged by the absence of any investigation and the complete lack of evidence pointing to Jones’ guilt,” Young explains. “When I found Micki Hall’s mother, Lois, she immediately said she never believed Jones was the killer, and is so haunted by it that she can’t even bury Micki’s ashes.” Although journalists may have to report repeatedly on a topic, such as wrongful convictions, Young says, it’s a campaign for truth, rather than a campaign for change.

“My experience with this tells me Murrow was a very wise man,” she says. “Nobody has accused me of agitating—nobody. I have received only thanks from readers. In fact, I got positive notes and offers of help from retired NYPD members … Most people want the truth and want to do the right thing.”

If it is true that people still appreciate journalism that illuminates, something else has not changed in 50 years: The constant battle to get hard-hitting stories on the air.

“Fewer news organizations have the fortitude and resources to do what� are inherently expensive and potentially risky reports,” Myers says. “Although NBC remains committed to investigative journalism, the reality is that there is less airtime for these kinds of reports on all the major networks because of assumptions about viewers’ attention spans and interests.”

Murrow took on subjects that were tough to tell. In his 1958 speech, he mentioned a few of them—a documentary on Egypt and Israel, the dangers of smoking, radioactive fallout from nuclear tests-in Chicago, that he was going to cause a lot of discomfort. He scolded network executives for losing their nerve. He suggested that big sponsors give up their highly viewed entertainment shows once in a while in favor of an occasional program that would serve the public.

And he spoke directly to the news directors, urging them to stiffen their spines and have confi dence that if they covered stories of signifi cance; the public would listen and watch. In that same address, there is this passage, buried between the more quoted paragraphs:

“I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation. Heywood Broun once said, ‘No body politic is healthy until it begins to itch.’ I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers. It can be done. Maybe it won’t be, but it could.”

—Al Tompkins is the broadcast/online group leader for The Poynter Institute. He may be reached at atompkins@poynter.org

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