Word: murrow
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UPTON SINCLAIR was a muckraker when it was a proud title. At some point in this century muckraker lost its prestige and became synonymous with troublemakers, often reporters, who looked for dirt where little existed. But the Sinclair tradition carried on with reporters like Edward R. Murrow using the television camera to expose evil in a more sophisticated America...
...1970s, an age of specialization, reporters like Murrow had metamorphosed into "investigative journalists" like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the enterprising Washington Post reporters who cracked the smilingly slick evil of Richard Nixon. They continued the tradition, and if they didn't have Sinclair's poetic ability, drive and something of his anger, they were heroes of a sort to a shocked America...
...husband Philip's manic-depression and tragic suicide in 1963. From Dorothy "Buff" Chandler, he elicited the real reason her husband Norman dropped Robert Taft in 1952 to go for Ike--Buff simply refused to sleep with Norman until he came around. From friends and colleagues of Ed Murrow, Halberstam relates the details of CBS chairman Bill Paley's horning-in on the memorial program to Murrow the day after he died--when it was Paley who had virtually forced Murrow...
Since they had helped create it, Paley and CBS adapted quickly to this new pace. Within a few years, Edward R. Murrow had become a star and his network basked in the reflected glow. As it happened, one of Murrow's college speech teachers had written him and suggested the slight pause in the introduction that he made famous: "This . . . is London." No one at the time seemed troubled by this hint of theatricality; years would pass before politicians began frisking TV anchormen for hints of raised eyebrows or smirks...
Halberstam can be rough on his principals, who sometimes emerge as caricatures, but his harshest treatment goes to Paley. While acknowledging Paley's genius and eminence ("the supreme figure of modern broadcasting"), Halberstam also insists that the chairman coldly let highly profitable entertainment programming elbow out the news division. Murrow, who helped invent broadcast journalism and became a symbol of integrity to colleagues and the public, eventually left the network in despair. Much later, Bill Moyers told Paley that he wanted to quit CBS and return to public broadcasting. Paley asked what it would take to keep him. Moyers said...