Murrow Special: The Incompatible Combination of Show Business, Advertising and News

Gail Shister

If Murrow struggled with the news/entertainment balance in a time of The Big 3 networks, imagine how he’d feel about cable TV.


Anna Nicole Smith. Paris Hilton. Britney Spears. What would Murrow do? The same thing he would have done half a century ago—just said no. But no was easier to say in 1958, when CBS News icon Edward R. Murrow delivered his famous address to the RTNDA convention in Chicago.

For starters, television news was still a relatively novel concept. The country’s first cable news network wouldn’t launch for another 22 years. And “satellite” meant Sputnik, sending signals to the Russians from space. Fifty years later, the encroachment of entertainment into the once-sacrosanct territory of news continues unabated. In fact, thanks to the medium’s massive technological advances, it is growing faster than even Marshall McLuhan could have imagined.

And if Murrow saw what passes for news these days on 500-plus cable channels—as well as on The Big 3, to a lesser extent—“Zoloft wouldn’t be enough to lift his deep depression,” says Charles Kaiser, author, journalist and press blogger for Radar.com. Critics would argue that Murrow had no grounds to throw stones, having “visited” Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, among many others, at their homes on CBS’s popular Person to Person from 1953 to ’59. Murrow loathed it; viewers loved it. So did Emmy voters—they named the chain-smoking newsman as Most Outstanding Personality in all of TV after his first season.

Still, it’s a long way from weekly chats with smoldering actors to daily updates on the deteriorating mental state of a former teenybop star (Spears) or the “imprisonment” of a self-promoting socialite (Hilton) or even the sudden death of an industrial-sized model (Smith) with a taste for octogenarian billionaires.

Predictably, those stories were “covered” wall-to-wall on the cable news networks. By definition, cable has a more pressing need to load up on just about any narrative, large or small, that might break into the national conversation.

Its maw is bottomless.

“Cable requires ongoing drama,” says Marvin Kalb, hired by Murrow himself out of Harvard as a newswriter in 1957. “If they have an ongoing story that has any kind of emotion in it, they’ll run with it, non-stop.” (See Holloway, Natalee, et. al.)

No one would dispute that cable and broadcast news, for the most part, do not share the same DNA. But some of cable’s obsession with celebrity has seeped its way into the traditional broadcast outlets, as well.

Why?

Kalb, 77, Edward R. Murrow Professor Emeritus at his alma mater and senior fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Policy, says it’s all about competition. The saturation of celebrity “news” oncable drives the broadcast networks to cover the same stories, regardless of their editorial worthiness. Buzz equals bucks.

With cable news omnipresent in all network newsrooms, “there’s the impression that everyone and his uncle is reporting the story, so we better do it, too,” Kalb says.

Like the lion in The Wizard of Oz, network executives lack courage.“People derive comfort from a crowd. If everybody is going with a story, who are you to stand up and say it’s not a story? It takes courage to not go with the mob,” says Kalb, who left CBS after 23 years to join NBC in 1980.

Former network star Dan Rather, who once adopted “courage” as his CBS Evening News sign-off, stood up to “the mob” in spring 2001 by refusing to report on the scandal surrounding then-California Congressman Gary Condit.

Chandra Levy, a young Washington intern and, it was later reported, a paramour of the married, middle-aged Condit, disappeared April 30 of that year. (Her remains were found 13 months later. The case remains unsolved.)

While the rest of the TV world, including CBS’ own Early Show, Face the Nation and weekend Evening News, reported extensively on the story, Rather maintained the blackout on the flagship broadcast until a single piece by Wyatt Andrews aired on July 18. Ratings dipped and Rather was lambasted by critics. Then-CBS News president Andrew Heyward stood by his man.

“The story has clearly been covered excessively in a tabloid way by many, and Evening News gets criticized for showing the most restraint,” he told this reporter on July 26, 2001. The Condit-Levy imbroglio “had not reached critical mass of verifi able information—as opposed to speculation or smarmy, inaccurate reporting”—to break into Evening News’ lineup, Heyward said.

With Rather, Heyward and Evening News executive producer Jim Murphy all having left CBS, it’s unlikely that such a decision would be repeated today. “The people who run evening news programs now are not brave and adventurous souls,” Kalb says. "They’re looking at what others are doing… Courage and independent judgment are in very short supply; even less so in� able.”

Murrow certainly had courage, but even “the patron saint of journalism,” in Kalb’s words, couldn’t turn back the tide of an entire network. Or, for that matter, the tide of an entire industry that already had begun to migrate away from hard news.

“The industry, broadly speaking, does not truly honor what Murrow represented,” Kalb says. “He set certain standards
that are unlikely to be met today.”

Or, as Kaiser puts it, “the vast wasteland is getting vaster every day.”

Good night, and good luck, indeed.

—Gail Shister is a columnist for TVNewser.com. She was TV columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years, until April 2007. She now reports for the Metro desk.


Originally published in the March 2008 Communicator. All rights reserved.

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