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This Above All: A Brief Memoir -- Edward R. Murrow as a News Colleague

Edward R. Murrow and I shared nine years as working colleagues in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

My dealings with him, except when he was traveling, occurred almost daily, and most often involved editing the writing of Ed’s weeknights’ radio work. “Good catch,” he’d say if one of us editors changed his script in a way that he thought made it better — no stonewalling, no pride of ownership where quality was improved.

Those days and years in Ed Murrow’s company summon memories of a reporter who stood in generosity to his colleagues when they were right. But he stood unmistakably to us and to others about hewing to the larger, and often harder, ethics of our work. Ed was mostly alone in that regard then, and perhaps still. I hope that somewhere someone is coming along to be called journalism’s new ‘Mr Standfast’ to replace him?

Murrow displayed to colleagues at CBS News and to the nation the inescapable need for fact and clarity in selecting and reporting important matters that were at times controversial, and — sometimes as a result — the need of speaking plainly to unhappy bosses. At CBS, this meant Chairman William S. Paley and one or two others.

Advertisers on his many broadcasts? Well, some, like Alcoa, stuck with him; others, timid, dropped off. The need for bravery is not confined to the newsroom.

Among larger stories of the time, we younger newswriters, as well as the veterans, lived the consuming stories of the time: the Korean War, the Cold War, the elections of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and much else, including the national imbroglios involving Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin and the associated blacklisting of actors, journalists. 

Some of those smeared sat at the next desk.

When Ed delivered his historic 1958 speech to RTNDA, we his colleagues in New York hung on its words. One unyielding statement stood then and still stands now, a bronzed warning in the virtual halls of journalism these many years later:

“Surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally.”

We fellow workers listened. How many journalists still listen? How many actually take up the heavier burdens that Ed Murrow set forth for us as hard truths? Awards in the name of Murrow are welcome; today’s RTNDA question is: “What would Murrow do?” None of us can know the answer to that. But this writer can make a guess: Changing the ways that some of us now do our work— let’s cautiously say ‘incompletely’ — in order to make that work more ethical, more fair, more unafraid would be the response that Ed would most welcome.

Do modern-day news broadcasts, Internet news reports, blogs, newspapers, or what-you-will testify strongly to a passionately disinterested integrity? (That’s uninterested — not disinterested.) Whatever the answer to that question, it’s worth hoping that modern electronic reporting will increasingly follow Murrow’s pattern and center on its highest duty: informing our fellow citizens.

We learned that the hard truth of Ed’s ’58 speech did have its effect on our employers: sad to say, it antagonized them. Apart from Murrow, though, few stood up to express unwelcome journalistic truths in the higher reaches of the company. For one, this beginning writer, newly wed and with a young daughter, at that time did not.

But we are all fortunate that the Edward R. Murrow of the RTNDA speech still walks and works in memory to generate inspiration (and perspiration) in journalists. It’s a spirit that perpetuates the living Murrow who once walked and worked among a lucky band of us in a tiny CBS newsroom on the 17th floor of 485 Madison Avenue in New York City.

We in that place, in that era unique to journalism, received an ultimate, an unmatchable, gift: we were there.

We lived at a psychological ethical center where we worked while we learned the indispensables of our profession amid the unending clatter of huge, black wire service machines that spewed coils papered in news, now long gone. Once, I returned to that Madison Avenue newsroom, now a tidy business office.

It was full of ghosts.

Those surroundings, and Ed Murrow, and all of those people who came to live their ethics on the job, most of them now also gone, remain part of my better self forever.

Murrow’s own persona on the air, in itself, implicitly conveyed his convictions about reporting. He was usually unwavering in his ethical command — but not invariably. Like the rest of us, he had imperfections: he anchored the lightweight Person to Person, and he did not stand strong in the firing of his longtime European fellow reporter, Bill Shirer. When New York employees joked about forming a ‘Murrow Ain’t God’ club, Ed learned of it and tentatively asked if he might join.

Rare exceptions aside, Edward R. Murrow displayed and dispensed this: don't fail; hang tough on reporting; breathe fairness; avoid falsity and fakery; select and report news on the basis of its importance to the lives of the citizens.

Like Ed, many of us have learned that journalistic adversity will at times involve standing fast to employers, advertisers, sales people, accountants, and others around us. I believe one fact, as surely as I believe that Ed Murrow also believed it: In the truest sense, all of these non-journalists adjacent to us in the news business are the journalist’s servants: They work with us, and they get us paid. But we tend to forget that they must also serve; they must rise to find ways to let us give the best of what we have to offer.

If they do not do this, they cannot properly exist. 

So, if we can put all that has been bequeathed to us by Ed Murrow into a single phrase, that phrase must be ‘integrity unafraid.’    

It’s common knowledge that some among us dismiss matters like those discussed here, and people like me, as “old media.” I don’t mind the name-calling, but the charge won’t fly, now or ever. Today’s varied “new media” are, and will always be, simply carriers of what we do as journalists.

Yes, technology changes; yes, sociology changes. So do most other building blocks of society. But any discussion of Ed Murrow must center on something quite different: the elements of high journalistic quality.

Those ethical elements endure; they cannot change.

And those among us who are glad to consider themselves Ed Murrow’s heirs won’t — can’t — stop working to instill his news practices more bravely and better.

Over my 35 years in broadcast news at many levels, I may have met some of Murrow's tough tacit tests. I surely failed others. It all led to a final exquisite irony: Eventually CBS News directed me to create a senior position — Vice President, News Practices — that effectively paid me to work with my colleagues worldwide to do justice to the undying demands that Ed Murrow made on everyone who labors at reporting the news — not least, himself.

This above all: Service to the citizen is the journalist’s highest duty.

Ed Murrow looks over the shoulder of each one of us.

-- Emerson Stone worked at CBS News from 1952 to 1987.