Defining Moments in Journalism

Nancy J. Woodhull, Robert W. Snyder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351321266
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Most great transformations are not apparent as we live through them. Only in hindsight do individual moments acquire layers of meaning that give them great significance. Looking back is not something that comes naturally to journalists, immersed as they are in breaking events and relentless deadlines. But there is still good reason for journalists, scholars, and people who care about journalism to think about the critical episodes in its recent evolution. In Defining Moments in Journalism, such authors vividly describe episodes of this kind. Some of the chapters and contributors include: "The Lessons of Little Rock" by Harry S. Ashmore; "Vietnam and War Reporting" by Peter Arnett; "Photo-journalists--Visionaries Who Have Changed Our Vision" by Jane M. Rosett; "The Weight of Watergate" by Ellen Hume; "Women Sportswriters--Business as Usual" by Mary Schmitt; "The Connie Chung Phenomenon" by Somini Sengupta; and "Covering Politics--Is There a Female Difference?" by Judy Woodruff. The years since the Great Depression and World War II have seen vast changes in America and also in its journalism. Journalists' relationship to power and authority is more complex; the press corps has become more diverse; the technology of news reporting is almost unrecognizably different from that of fifty years ago; and economic reorganization of the media has bundled news and entertainment organizations into conglomerates of extraordinary size. 'Defining Moments in Journalism' is a fascinating read for communications scholars and professionals, historians, and political scientists.

Part I
The 1940s

1
The Murrow Boys—Broadcasting for the Mind’s Eye

Stanley Cloud & Lynne Olson

Sixty years ago, the Columbia Broadcasting System, then a struggling network in the still-new business of commercial radio, assigned a promising and ambitious 29-year-old employee named Edward Roscoe Murrow to work in its London office. The title they gave him was “European Director of Talks.” His job was to arrange for others to go on the air—members of parliament, boys’ choirs and the like. As Murrow prepared to sail for England, he was advised by his boss that the 1932 broadcast of a nightingale singing in the Surrey woods, a program that had been chosen by radio’s editors as that year’s “most interesting,” was the standard against which his performance would be judged. Little did anyone know then that Murrow would soon launch a revolution in journalism.

A speech major in college, Edward R. Murrow did not claim to be a journalist and indeed had shown no interest in becoming one. Nor did CBS want him to be one. He had worked for international student organizations prior to 1935, the year the network hired him. But he had scarcely unpacked in London two years later before concluding that neither his future nor CBS’s lay with nightingales singing in the woods. Europe was headed for a cataclysmic war, Murrow believed, and he was going to find a way to get on the air and report that war for CBS, whether his bosses in New York liked the idea or not.

Up to that point, journalism on radio had consisted primarily of “commentaries” on the news, not reporting. But within a matter of only a few months, Murrow, anticipating the Nazi takeover of Austria, had hired William L. Shirer, an itinerant foreign correspondent then based in Berlin, and had moved him to Vienna. Although New York was still insisting that Murrow and now Shirer act as booking agents, the Anschluss in 1938 gave them the break they needed to get on the air.

As Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna, the two CBS men provided their listeners with firsthand accounts. They had switched places—Shirer to London, Murrow to Vienna—so that Shirer could have a direct line to New York. With only eight hours’ advance warning, he had to arrange for phone lines linking London, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Vienna, and for other reporters and commentators to join him and Murrow on the air. Their amazingly successful broadcast, on March 13,1938—the first-ever “CBS World News Roundup”—immediately established Murrow and Shirer as bona fide war correspondents. Soon Murrow had hired more young journalists—Eric Sevareid, Larry LeSueur, Tom Grandin, Mary Marvin Breckinridge, Charles Collingwood and several others—and had begun to develop an informal theory about how to report a news story on radio.

The key, he told the members of his team, was to report for the ear, not the eye—or, to put it another way, to report for the mind’s eye. He wanted his reporters, all of whom he had chosen for their ability to write and think, to imagine themselves standing in front of a fireplace back home, explaining to a group of professional or businesspeople what was happening in Europe. But keep it simple, Murrow said, and tell stories, so that if a maid and her truck-driver boyfriend happen to be eavesdropping, they can understand, too. When Murrow hired Breckinridge, a 33-year-old photojoumalist and socialite, and sent her to cover the “phony war” in Amsterdam, he advised: “When you report the invasion of Holland...understate the situation. Don’t say the streets are rivers of blood. Say that the little policeman I usually say hello to every morning is not there today.”

To some extent, Murrow was borrowing, consciously or unconsciously, from the spare literary and journalistic style established by the likes of Hemingway, Ring Lardner and Mark Twain. But he was the first to adapt that style to the special requirements of radio news. He encouraged analysis and the use of the first person singular, believing that he and his “boys” had the background and firsthand experience to tell their listeners not only what happened but what they thought it meant. Above all, Murrow wanted what he called “pictures in the air,” in an era when broadcast reporters were allowed far more airtime to paint such picture stories than are their counterparts today. And what pictures Murrow and the “boys” painted! After Paris was occupied by the Nazis, Sevareid famously reported: “Paris died like a beautiful woman, without struggle, without knowing or even asking why.”

Murrow’s descriptions of the sights and sounds of the Blitz—inevitably opening with his dramatic “This...is London”—were masterpieces of descriptive reporting. Once during an air raid, Murrow went into Trafalgar Square with his microphone and let his audience listen for a moment to the siren wailing in the background. Then he said, “I’ll just ooze down in the darkness alongside these steps and see if I can pick up the sound of people’s feet.” He laid his mike on the sidewalk, and the click-click of people hurrying for the bomb shelters was carried back to millions of homes in still-neutral America. “One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these dark nights,” Murrow said at last, “is the sound of footsteps along the street, like ghosts shod with steel shoes.”

Although Murrow and his team were largely responsible for turning an also-ran network into “the Tiffany’s of broadcasting” and for transforming radio generally into a major source of news, their style frequently ran into criticism from the CBS brass in New York. What Murrow and the “boys” thought of as analysis, the brass thought of as “editorializing.” The executives were especially worried about incurring further government regulation if CBS’s correspondents were perceived by Washington as bucking official U.S. policy. Thus, while the United States was still neutral in the war, the executives wanted CBS to be neutral; but when the United States finally entered the war, they wanted as much flag-waving as possible. Murrow and the others mostly resisted such interference. Sevareid, for example, was scathing—or as scathing as he could be in the face of U.S. military censorship—about the Allies’ wasteful and bloody 1944 campaign in Italy.

After the war, the advent of network television drastically altered the nature of electronic reporting. First, so much money and power were at stake in television, and ratings were so important, that the line between news and entertainment became ever more blurry, with devastating effects on quality. Second, good, descriptive writing was gradually de-emphasized. Writing for TV news, with its terrible time constraints, consists mainly of trying to give as many facts as possible as clearly as possible in as few words as possible. That is a not insignificant craft, but today the camera, not the correspondent, is left to paint “pictures in the air.” Except for the obsolescent work of journalists in the Charles Kurault “On the Road” mold, the poetry of reporting, which Murrow, Sevareid and most of the other “boys” were so good at, has largely been eliminated. As one of the Murrow boys, Charles Collingwood, put it late in his career: “...Today’s correspondents so often are limited to writing captions for pictures.”

Still, the Murrow legacy is not entirely dead. It lives on in the hearts of countless reporters and producers who, from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf to various toxic-waste dumps, have battled government officials and corporate and political image mongers whose first loyalty is not to the truth but to a particular employer or point of view. In the end, it was the truth, simply told, that Murrow was after. And, against ever greater odds, that is what today’s best journalists—on and off the air—are still after.

Stanley Cloud is a former Washington bureau chief, national political correspondent and White House correspondent for Time. Lynne Olson, a former Moscow correspondent for the AP, teaches at American University. Married, they are the author of The Murrow Boys (1996).

Part II
The 1950s

2
The Lessons of Little Rock

Harry S. Ashmore

By labor day 1957, when Gov. Orval Faubus suddenly deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the invasion of Little Rock’s Central High School by nine black children, I had spent 20 years tracking the historical forces that shaped the constitutional crisis I now confronted as executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette.

Unlike the scores of national correspondents who camped out in our newsroom, I found few surprises in the unfolding events that kept Little Rock at the top of the news over the next two years. But I found much to regret as superficial media treatment branded the city with a reputation of bigotry it didn’t deserve.

I had already acquired a brand of my own as one of the handful of Southern journalists identified as liberal in the national press. Upon my appointment as editor of the Charlotte News in 1947, Time had cited me as “one of the South’s most realistic and readable editorial writers.” But, in seeking to place me in the political spectrum, it had been necessary to add a regional discount:

His campaigns (for two-party politics, racial and religious tolerance, votes for Negroes, higher pay for teachers) have established him as neither a Yankee-lover nor a deep-dyed Southerner. Ashmore tempers his enthusiasm for reform with consideration for the facts of Southern life.... Says he: “I am a Southerner by inclination as well as by virtue of two Confederate grandfathers, but it is high time we rejoined the union.”

The dominant fact of Southern life was the existence of a social order openly based on the doctrine of white supremacy. Legally enforced segregation of the races had survived the abolition of slavery and was now embodied in a one-party political system that disenfranchised blacks and severely limited their ability to rise above their assigned place at the bottom of the class structure.

As a fledgling political writer in my native South Carolina, I had seen the inherent injustices of the system highlighted in the course of the New Deal effort to repair the ravages of the Great Depression. But those of us who pointed out gross inequities in the distribution of benefits to blacks were open to charges of apostasy—an indictment still potent enough to prompt most newspapers to indulge in traditional tirades against meddling outsiders. The rest usually maintained a prudent silence.

For my generation of Southerners, fealty to the shibboleths of the Old South was undermined by the global conflict of World War II that sent most of us to far places. I had no illusion that the veterans had come home imbued by a passion for reform, but at Charlotte I found that the News could attract considerable support for a reasoned argument for racial justice—meaning equality before the law—as long as there was no implication of social equality between blacks and whites.

But that kind of editorial straddling was no longer possible after 1948, when President Truman announced his support for a package of civil rights legislation that would require the final dismantling of the South’s peculiar institutions. I would face the new test of Southern sentiment at the Gazette, a venerable morning paper that, like the News, was owned by a patrician family with roots deep in the region.

In 50 years as president and editor, the erudite J.N. Heiskell had endowed the newspaper with an institutional character, paid tribute in a memoir by James Street, a Mississippi author who had apprenticed there. The newspaper’s respect for tradition, he wrote, was that of a genteel Southern lady, “her Confederate limbs hidden under a Victorian petticoat and seen only in stormy weather when she kicks up her heels in an eye-catching crusade for her principles.”

Those occasions had arisen when demagogues sought to exploit race prejudice. Heiskell’s view was similar to that expressed by Harry Truman during his service as U.S. senator from Missouri, when he identified the issue as one of justice, not social equality. And Heiskell had no disposition to challenge the verdict of history when Truman, as president, concluded that justice could not be done under a binding system that enforced separation of the races without providing the corollary equality of treatment. The Gazette thus became one of the few major Southern newspapers likely to hire an editor with the views I had voiced at Charlotte.

I found myself in the eye of a political hurricane when Ben Laney, then governor of Arkansas, emerged as chairman from the founding meeting of the States’ Rights Jeffersonian Democrats with a manifesto that declared:

the President of the United States has by his acts and declarations repudiated the principles of the Democratic Party, threatened to disturb the constitutional division and balance of the powers of government, and has thereby forfeited all claims of allegiance from members of the party who adhere to its principles.

The Democratic National Convention nominated Truman after a young Minnesota delegate named Hubert Humphrey declared on the floor, “The time has come for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” When the dissident Southern Democrats reconvened in Birmingham, Ala., to formally launch a “Dixiecrat” third party, Laney, a gentlemanly conservative, stepped aside in favor of a Dixiecrat ticket headed by the uninhibited Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, with Fielding Wright of Mississippi as his running mate.

The Gazette had nailed the Democratic banner to its masthead when it was founded in 1819, and, as we rolled out the editorial artillery in support of the straight party ticket headed by President Truman, I asked “Mr. J.N.,” as everyone called him, if the newspaper had ever been anything other than Democratic. “I don’t like to talk about this,” he said, “but the fact is we went Whig twice.”

In the end the rebellious faction carried only four states in the Deep South, and I wrote what I hoped would be an obituary for the Dixiecrat movement:

Although they tried to be polite about it, it was quite clear that they were in fact the anti-Negro party.... The case they presented to the Southern voter was a familiar one. They appealed to his prejudices and played upon his fears. They hurled the reckless charge that election of either major candidate would mean Negro domination of the South, and for good measure added the allegation that the civil rights program endorsed by both the Democrats and Republicans is Communist in nature and inspiration.

The package of civil rights legislation that touched off the rebellion got nowhere when Truman sent it to Congress. But the U.S. Supreme Court was steadily whittling away the states’ rights doctrine in cases brought by the NAACP, and in the 1950s it set down for argument cases calling for desegregation of public education from kindergarten through graduate school.

Drafted by the Fund for the Advancement of Education to summarize scholarly studies on the effect of the pending decision, I completed my report in time for the University of North Carolina Press to publish it on the eve of the landmark Brown decision, handed down in 1954. When I told an old Arkansas politician that I was writing a book called The Negro and the Schools, he bespoke the conventional wisdom: “Son, it sounds to me like you have gotten yourself in the position of a man running for sonofabitch without opposition.”

The Court’s unanimous decision mandating an end to the dual school system produced a roar of outrage in the Deep South, but in the upper tier states, public officials—including Gov. Faubus—indicated that they would support compliance. In Little Rock, when the city’s school board announced the immediate initiation of a comprehensive plan to desegregate the schools, it had the support of both newspapers, an alliance of ministers and the Chamber of Commerce.

But it was soon evident that elected officials could not prevail against mounting pressure for massive resistance without moral support from Washington, and none was forthcoming. As the 1956 national election approached, I was convinced that the erosion of popular support for compliance could not be halted without the election of a president who understood Southern politics and could command the support of the loyal Democrats who still dominated the political process in most Southern states.

I had come to know and admire Gov. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois when he ran for president in 1952. A classic WASP with a family that included cousins scattered across Dixie, he had a natural talent for reconciliation. When he indicated willingness to run again, I took leave from the Gazette to serve as his personal assistant in the 1956 presidential campaign.

This was the first national election in which candidates were nominated in party primaries, and it followed that it was the first in which television played a dominant role. But the sporadic coverage of grassroots campaigning provided no context for the hundreds of speeches Stevenson made as he carried out his pledge to talk sense to the American people, culminati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part I: The 1940s
• Part II: The 1950s
• Part III: The 1960s
• Part IV: The 1970s
• Part V: The 1980s
• Part VI: The 1990s
• Part VII: Portfolio
• Part VIII: Review Essay
• For Further Reading
• Index