The US broadcaster Edward R Murrow died 60 years ago on 27 April 1965. George Clooney’s 2005 film Good Night and Good Luck (the title is taken from Murrow’s sign off at the end of each See It Nowprogramme) is an evocative and accurate recreation of what is seen as an heroic episode in US broadcasting history when Murrow decided to challenge Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade.
The core of the film was about the events leading up to the programme, and the pressures on Edward R and the See It Now team. The film has now been recreated as a stage play which is running on Broadway until June with Clooney paying the part of Edward R. Murrow.
On 9 March 1954 the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) current affairs programme See It Now was devoted entirely to an exposé of the bullying, dishonest tactics used by the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R McCarthy, in his anti-communist witch-hunt. McCarthy was offered the right of reply to the charges made against him by Murrow and this appeared on 6 April.
The age of suspicion
On 9 February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia Senator McCarthy made a speech to the Republican Women’s Club in which he brandished a list which claimed 205 men in the State Department were members of the Communist Party.
This, and many other accusations naming communists or communist sympathisers, was publicised without evaluating its accuracy. The accusations were published by Republican newspapers, notably those owned by Scripps-Howard, Gannet, Hearst and Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald. They played a key role in both disseminating McCarthy’s allegations and attacking critical opposition to him.
Radio commentators and newspaper columnists like Walter Winchell, Fulton Lewis Jnr and Westbrook Peglerwere strongly pro-McCarthy, as was the Mutual Network, with over 600 radio stations. Another widely read pro-McCarthy journalist was George Sokolsky, a Hearst columnist who also wrote the script for McCarthy’s reply to Murrow’s See It Now broadcast.
Conflict between commercial and public interest values
CBS was built from a small radio network into the most successful radio and television network by William S Paley. His early commitment to public interest broadcasting wavered, however, as his television network rapidly developed.
CBS as a radio company had been profitable, but its profits from television were staggering. For the first 25 years of its history, net income averaged $4mn or $5mn a year. In 1953 television reached 21 million American homes and CBS made profits of $8.9mn; by 1954 profits were $11.4mn; by 1957 42 million homes had TV sets and CBS’s profits were $22.2mn.
Paley’s friendship with Murrow suffered during the 1950s as the network’s sponsor of See It Now, the aluminium company ALCOA, became uneasy about some of the controversial topics of the series, leading Paley to worry about lost revenue to the network, as well as unwelcome scrutiny during the era of McCarthyism.
For example, in June 1950 a 215-page book Red Channels: The Report on Communist Influence in Radio and Television was published. It listed 151 people – actors, writers, musicians, playwrights, directors. The editors did not say that everyone listed was a communist, only that they had advanced ‘communist objectives’.
Networks and advertising agencies established their own ‘security’ departments to screen out ‘controversial’ persons and the blacklist became institutionalised. CBS’s response in December 1950 was to require all 2,500 network employees to sign a loyalty oath.
Murrow takes a stand
Murrow had already made one programme on blacklisting. The previous autumn a See It Now programme was broadcast on the case of Air Force Reserve Lieutenant Milo Radulovich, who had lost his security clearance because of the supposed leftist leanings of his sister and father. The network was uneasy however and refused to promote the programme. Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly dipped into their own pockets to pay $1,500 for an ad in The New York Times. Murrow abandoned neutrality in presenting the case and took a vigorous editorial stance. A month after transmission Radulovich was cleared and reinstated.
In the McCarthy programme the intention was, Murrow explained, “to let him condemn himself out of his own mouth”. The team began with three hours of film to edit for a 30-minute programme, footage of McCarthy making speeches, holding hearings, questioning witnesses. Murrow’s endpiece again abandoned neutrality: “The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given 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’.”
The response to Murrow
The audience response was decisive. In the following weeks the letters, phone calls and telegrams received by CBS and its affiliates totalled over 75,000, with ten to one in favour of Murrow.
But again, CBS support for the programme from the top brass was withheld. The ad Murrow and Friendly wanted to place in The New York Times on the day of the programme could not be billed to a CBS account and no mention of CBS was to be made in the ad or the network logo used. They again paid for it themselves. As Joseph Persico comments in his excellent biography of Murrow, “There were to be no company fingerprints on this piece of work”.
The See It Now sponsor ALCOA was under intense pressure from sections of the press, and after the programme on McCarthy Westbrook Pegler lashed out: “How could the great Aluminium Company sponsor the left-wing tirades of Murrow?”
ALCOA dropped its sponsorship of See It Now in July 1955, a year after the McCarthy programme, when See It Now investigated a land-grant scandal in Texas at a time when the company was trying to expand its installations in the state. The failure to find another significant sponsor, as well as lack of support from Paley and CBS President, Frank Stanton, led to the marginalisation and, finally, the end of See It Now in 1958.
Murrow and CBS fall out
The McCarthy programme marked the peak of Murrow’s post-war influence at CBS. See It Now lost its prime-time slot after the 1954–1955 season and ended in 1958.
Murrow made his devastating attack on US network television’s performance at a prestigious gathering of the industry’s elite, the Radio and Television News Directors Association, in Chicago on 15 October 1958. “This just might do nobody any good,” he began, prophetically. Future historians, he said, would find in the film records of television “evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live”.
The following year he went on a year’s sabbatical from CBS, and he returned to CBS without a programme of his own. He did however contribute to Fred Friendly’s CBS Reports, including one outstanding programme, Harvest of Shame, a work of passion and anger on the plight of migrant workers picking oranges in Florida, peaches in Georgia, beans in Carolinas, and lettuce on Long Island. “They work the sweat shops of the soil…These are forgotten people,” Murrow says. It closes with Murrow saying, “The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do. Good night and good luck”.
Increasingly marginalised, Murrow left CBS in February 1961 to become director of the United States Information Agency, but one programme came back to bite him in his new role promoting the reputation of United States internationally. Harvest of Shame was to be broadcast on the BBC and Murrow phoned the Director General, Hugh Greene, to request a substitute. He was rebuffed.
The call was a blunder, and we do not know whether he was pressured to make it or acted on his own initiative. The publicity about Murrow’s call in UK newspapers drew me to watch the programme on a TV in the students’ union at Leeds University. I still remember the power of the programme’s images and Murrow’s commentary. It gave me a life-long interest in the man and his work.
Could it happen today?
As we look at the aggressive and divisive assault on a range of American institutions by the Trump Presidency it’s unlikely that we will see anyone produce a programme attacking Trump’s deliberate attempt to suppress oppositional voices which will have the same impact as See It Now did with McCarthy.
As Bernie Sanders addresses large audiences his focus is on the growing power of a few ultra-rich people who now control much of the media that Americans rely on every day. When just a small group of billionaires own major news companies and social media platforms it becomes a big problem for democracy. Sanders warns: “We need media who are fearless in speaking out on the issues of the day, and you’re not going to have that when you have a small number of very wealthy people controlling what we see, hear and read.”
And to echo Murrow’s earlier words, future historians of our generation may find in the film records of television, “evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live”.
