Word: murrow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Exaggerated Portrait. The plight of the migrant workers is bad; but because of its overstatement, Harvest drew howls, especially from Florida's U.S. Senator Spessard L. Holland, whose state was the one visited by Murrow. Harvest of Shame, said Holland, contained at least seven distortions and errors of fact. Holland cited, among others, the example of the 29-year-old Negro woman who told Murrow that she was the mother of 14 and had earned $1 for a full day's work in the fields. The facts were, said Holland, that seven of her children were dead...
...British Broadcasting Corporation, which has first foreign rights to CBS Reports, hadn't decided to pick up Harvest of Shame. Dismayed at the damage that a European showing of the film could do to the image of America that he was now pledged to promote abroad, USIA Director Murrow called the BBC in a vain effort to suppress the show. Harvest of Shame, said Murrow, had been for domestic use only...
...disagreed. "To deny overseas subscribers the use of a news report," said a CBS spokesman, "would be inconsistent with basic principles of freedom of information." The show went on, and the British press, aware of Murrow's gag attempt, delightedly gave his role as narrator full billing. "Murrow's documentary," said the London Daily Herald, "blazed fiercely with his incomparable and indispensable indignation." Wrote Neville Randall in the London Daily Sketch: "I can only say that if Murrow builds up America as skillfully as he tore it to pieces last night, the propaganda war is as good...
...Embarrassed Cough." The U.S. press took a far dimmer view. "The background noise you hear," said the New York Post in a sly dig at Chain-Smoker Murrow, "is an embarrassed cigarette cough." The New York Times's TV Critic Jack Gould all but invited Murrow to retire: "If Mr. Murrow was acting under orders of the State Department, he should have resigned after 24 hours in office. If Mr. Murrow acted on his own responsibility, his action constitutes an inexplicable refutation of the principle he has enunciated for years-that the good and the bad about this country...
With this Murrow's former boss agreed. "All CBS Reports shows are scheduled to go into full syndication, including foreign," said Richard S. Salant, president of the network's subsidiary, CBS News, which televised the show. "Murrow knew that at the time and knows it now." By week's end Murrow seemed to agree with his critics. His transatlantic intervention, said he ruefully, was "both foolish and futile...