The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism by Stanley Cloud

Nov 04, 2011 Evan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: __in-my-collection, celebrity-famous-bio, world-war-ii, tv, warfare, journalism, history-euro, pop-culture-misc, 2011-reads, murrow-boys, hemingway-ubiqitous-cameo

The Murrow Boys were a hotshot cadre of plucky young globetrotting CBS radio news correspondents created and supervised by the mesmeric Bogart-like newsman, Edward R. Murrow; who as cohorts smoked, drank, bluffed, blustered and whored their way across the battlefield theatres of World War II. They were the original Rat Pack of the remote feed; the Mad Men of the microphone. They not only scooped the competition (NBC, etc.) but each other. They hated and loved each other's guts equally. They twea...more The Murrow Boys were a hotshot cadre of plucky young globetrotting CBS radio news correspondents created and supervised by the mesmeric Bogart-like newsman, Edward R. Murrow; who as cohorts smoked, drank, bluffed, blustered and whored their way across the battlefield theatres of World War II. They were the original Rat Pack of the remote feed; the Mad Men of the microphone. They not only scooped the competition (NBC, etc.) but each other. They hated and loved each other's guts equally. They tweaked and battled censors in France, Germany, Britain, Russia and in the supposedly free United States; they finessed the line between patriotically guarding facts in wartime and telling the unvarnished truth. As with many things, they brawled with each other over that conundrum, too. They were seen as a group but operated and thought as loners.

They were men's men; former loggers and surveyors and canoers and sailors. More than one of them had stowed away in oceanic freighters, Jack London-style, prior to their news days. They evaded everything from bombs and shrapnel to Himalayan headhunters. They were rough-hewn and elegant, Tuetonic-maned and bald. One, the golden-locked Charles Collingwood, was so urbane they called him Bonnie Prince Charlie. Whatever they looked like, plain (William Shirer) or handsome (Collingwood and Larry LeSueur), they were equally cutthroat and vain. They were masters of the subterfuge, not above stooping to unethical tricks to scoop a story. Some had been commies and one was even a spy. One was not even a boy but a woman--Mary Marvin Breckinridge--a socialite hired by Murrow against the objections of his sexist CBS bosses to report hard front-line battle news instead of the fashion and society trivia expected of women reporters of the time. The boys mostly came from modest American stock and lifted themselves by dint of moxie into celebrities, finding themselves blurring the line between journalism and entertainment in a time when such distinctions mattered. When they began their run in 1937, radio news was considered the vaudeville and whorehouse of journalism. Professional news societies shunned them. By the middle of the war, they had become so revered that Murrow was named president of a press club that had once turned him away. Despite the camaraderie the boys eventually and perhaps inevitably succumbed to the pull of conflicting loyalities, egos, goals and outlooks in the McCarthy era and afterward, reflecting a brother-against-brother story as old as Cain and Abel. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, they had a collective pride over what they had achieved and the legacy they had left.

I bought this book for several reasons and partly because of the inevitable pull I have toward the many facets of World War II. One, Ed Murrow has always seemed a fascinating media icon of heroic proportions and the CBS news empire that he spawned under CBS president William Paley had a profound and legendary impact on 20th century American journalism, becoming the standard of quality for decades (though now decimated by trends inside and outside the company). Most of the TV journalists I watched as a youth (Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, etc.) were the spawn of the Murrow Boys, either as direct members of the group or closely related colleagues of it. Second, I wanted to know more about one of the group's charter members, Eric Sevareid (died 1992), who in the 1960s and 1970s was the intellectual editorial commentator on Cronkite's CBS Evening News. I would sit transfixed watching this great grey eminence whose monotonal authority greatly impressed me but whose 10-gallon words and complex sentences seemed to me as impenetrable as the Icelandic tongue. Sevareid was, indeed, a cogent and highly intelligent commentator--which can still be seen in the few clips of him that exist for viewing on Youtube, for example--but after his retirement from the airwaves in 1977 he seems to have fallen off the earth, another victim of the vicissitudes of fleeting fame. It's a shame because his likes are as foreign and remote as, well, Iceland, to a radio/TV wasteland now populated by the ignorant likes of pseudo-commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or inane talk show juveniles like Jimmy Fallon.

As it turns out, this book seems mainly to source Sevareid's own autobiography Not So Wild a Dream in telling his part of the story, and perhaps someday I will read that. In lieu of that, this is a well-told, well-balanced, and (far less than my review) non-hyperbolic account of an exciting and influential time in broadcast journalism and the motley crew who raised the field to a new level.(less)

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Jul 03, 2012 Eric_W rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoir

The “Murrow Boys” were a group of radio correspondents active before, and for a while after, World War II who were considered protégés of the great CBS journalist and smoker, Edward R. Murrow. Together they invented broadcast journalism, watched it become great and then wither under the influence of McCarthyism and the advent of television.

Murrow and the aura of integrity became an icon that modern broadcasters tried to emulate and idolize. Dan Rather “donned the mantle so often in public” that...more The “Murrow Boys” were a group of radio correspondents active before, and for a while after, World War II who were considered protégés of the great CBS journalist and smoker, Edward R. Murrow. Together they invented broadcast journalism, watched it become great and then wither under the influence of McCarthyism and the advent of television.

Murrow and the aura of integrity became an icon that modern broadcasters tried to emulate and idolize. Dan Rather “donned the mantle so often in public” that he was asked to tone it down in 1987 by Eric Sevareid, one of the authentic Murrow Boys. “Rather is not Edward R. Murrow,” Sevareid said. Undeterred, Rather and CBS continued to trade on the past, “ignoring the inconvenient parts, such as the fact that Murrow and most of the Boys had been either forced out or sidetracked by the network’s bosses.”

Radio news had been an oxymoron. Those who read the “news” barely knew of what they spoke. Often they were merely shameless shills for sponsors and mouthed the scripts handed to them -- much like TV newscasters today.

Murrow came from a Quaker family. His real name was Egbert; he changed it after being unmercifully hazed by lumberjacks with whom he worked in the northwest during the summers he was in high school. His mother was so religious she refused to answer the phone by saying hello, for fear that she would be invoking the name of the netherworld. Fun was certainly frowned upon.

Radio was still a new medium and Murrow was given a great deal of freedom to recruit. He hired the best newspaper reporters he could find, arguing that regardless of the medium the idea was to write well and provide honest reports. If there isn't any news, just say so. "I have an idea poeople might like that."

He wasn’t concerned about their voices or their mannerisms. He had offered several positions to women, but the New York CBS office was adamantly opposed to such a radical idea. The people he did hire, such as Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid,became famous in their own right. A virtual cult developed around Murrow. Unconsciously, many even imitated his style of clothing. He became a sort of surrogate parent; “Murrow chose people who needed him.”
Paul White, of CBS, was the first to codify the concept of objectivity. It was severely tested by the war. Was it possible for a correspondent to "objectively" parrot Nazi propaganda when reporting from Berlin? The notion of objectivity meant different things to different people. To most people today, objectivity simply means agreement with their opinion.

Radio was particularly vulnerable to pressure from government. The airwaves were still considered public property, and some New Dealers wanted all radio under government control. Comments from FDR's press secretary warning the networks to behave were not ignored by the broadcasters. The issue of objectivity was to create enormous rifts in the industry as broadcasters sought to interpret what they knew, to place events in context. When several of the Murrow Boys reported on how the rear echelons were wallowing in luxurious settings and making huge sums from the black market, the generals accused the reporters of ruining morale. Front line troops asked them why they wouldn't report the horrible conditions up front and the disparity with the rear. This same conflict was to bedevil the journalists in Korea and Vietnam.
Radio brought fame to many of them. They were very good at their jobs. Celebrity was to affect them, too. “As long as a journalist and the outfit he works for are inconsequential, . . . it’s easy for them to believe in and stand for the verities of their craft: truth, reason, independence, freedom and the like. But when the reporter becomes a celebrity, or when his reporting affects masses of people, or when he and his outfit start to earn large amounts of money, then the pressures mount to conform, to protect oneself, to protect one’s income, to protect one’s outfit, to avoid giving offense.” A lesson many of today’s so-called journalists have forgotten or never learned.

The shift to television was to have profound impact on the business of news. After the war, sponsors had become more powerful in dictating the content of news shows they funded. Television’s requirement for larger staff and more expensive equipment made this relationship even more symbiotic. Murrow and his Boys were skeptical. They thought television was lightweight. Images rather than content became important. Nevertheless, Murrow made the transition successfully with his critically acclaimed See It Now program. The transformation to television had been fast. In the three-year period between 1948 and 1951 the nation had moved to television. But even with Murrow running the show, his Boys were appalled when he was heard to suggest that the cameraman was just as important a member of the team as the correspondent. That was part of the radical change. No longer were they independent nor did they have anywhere near the freedom that had existed during World War II. But it was really the money that was making the difference. Eric Sevareid summed it up neatly: "I have been impressed with how timid a million dollars' profit can make a publisher or radio executive, instead of how bold it makes him." How little things have changed.

Television news has become what the Murrow Boys feared, a vast, uninformative wasteland that celebrates image over substance, and happy talk over analysis. The networks cut costs by eliminating foreign correspondents, buying short video pieces from free-lancers and then layering local voices over the top. Broadcasters are hired for their looks rather than their brains. Frank Stanton recalled watching a network news broadcast one night and being appalled by the lack of knowledge of the reporter: "He had the technology, he had the pictures, he had the people to interview, and he asked the stupidest questions in the world. That didn't happen with the Shirers, the Howard K. Smiths, the Sevareids, the Murrows. They had a sense of history. They knew what was going on."

Ironically, CBS continues to extol the Murrow heritage. "It is almost axiomatic that the more an institution breaks faith with those who built it, the more it sanctifies them." This is a wonderful, revealing, impossible-to-put-down book.(less)

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Aug 10, 2011 Doug Ebeling added it

Enthralling, these men led exciting lives during a fascinating time. Their individual contributions to the coverage of the war were impressive and this book makes each of their individual stories come alive in a way that is almost novelistic. They each certainly had enough adventure in their various pursuits of the story of covering World War II for a brand new medium that was unproven and not respected until they came along and showed what could be done. Unfortunately their later lives were oft...more

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Oct 01, 2010 Converse rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, non-fiction, history, media

Murrow's "boys" were reporters hired by Edward R. Murrow for CBS before and during the Second World War, who were important reporters for some decades thereafter. They included William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingworth, William Downy, Howard K. Smith, and Larry LeSuer. Good female reporters didn't last long as management did not like hiring women, although Murrow hired a couple of good female reporters, such as Marry Marvin Breckinridge. Murrow seems to have a knack for hiring able, k

...more

Murrow's "boys" were reporters hired by Edward R. Murrow for CBS before and during the Second World War, who were important reporters for some decades thereafter. They included William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingworth, William Downy, Howard K. Smith, and Larry LeSuer. Good female reporters didn't last long as management did not like hiring women, although Murrow hired a couple of good female reporters, such as Marry Marvin Breckinridge. Murrow seems to have a knack for hiring able, knowledgeable people. Some of the reporters stationed in Europe kept their posts for several years, enabling them to increase their knowledge and contacts. According to some who knew these reporters and could compare them with televsion reporters hired decades later, Murrow's boys were much more knowledgeable.

During the Second World War, when demand for news was high and there was relatively little controversy about the war after Pearl Harbor in the United States, many of them became very well known and were cultivated by William Paley, the head of CBS. After the war, these reporters had the relative freedom of reporting and comment that they had enjoyed reduced. This freedom had never been absolute, as Cecil Brown found out during the war. They also had difficulty in making the transition to television, as they saw themselves primarily as writers.

The "boys" seem to have had difficulty with the concept that the Columbia Broadcasting System was a business. A business, run with the intent of maximizing profits. And that doing "controversial" news or commentary, meaning displeasing to sponsors or affiliated local stations, would reduce, not increase, profits. As reporters are less valuable than, say, free-agent sports stars, they invariably lost disputes about editorial control with management.

I found the book most interesting and enjoyable, as the reporters generally led interesting lives, both on and off the job. One aspect that struck me was the extent to which drinking hard liquor and smoking was what men did when socializing. I thought the book was well written and tried to give both sides of controversies, such as William Shirer losing his coveted radio program in 1948.

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Jun 27, 2010 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

To me, Murrow has always stood out as "The Man Who Took On McCarthy." I knew about his history of reporting from London during the Blitz and "creating broadcast journalism," but put more weight on the McCarthy pieces he did. This book not only presented a more rounded view of Murrow for me, but I also gained a much-needed understanding of the people Murrow put together during the war; the people who made a name for Murrow more than he did for himself. These were people who lived an adventure, an...more

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Mar 31, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

Publishers Weekly described The Murrow Boys as "a lively, colloquial history of broadcast journalism that is so exciting one's impulse is to read it in a single sitting." It tells the swashbuckling tale of Edward R. Murrow and his legendary band of CBS radio journalists - Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, and others - as they "paint pictures in the air" from the World War II front. Brimming with personalities and anecdotal detail, it also serves up a sharp-eyed...more

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May 24, 2012 Jeff Crosby rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, ebook, world-war-2, 2012, kindle

The first half of this book--set in the years before and during World War II--is fascinating. The evolution of Murrow and his boys into the core of CBS radio news is engrossing when set against the backdrop of the war.

For me personally, the second half of the book is less compelling. I enjoyed learning about these men and how their lives and careers proceeded in the post war years, but it was more fragmented. As some of them left CBS I found myself loosing the thread of each story. I don't thin...more

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Jun 18, 2012 Linda Underwood rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great book. Story of the start of radio and TV new and those who were hired and tutored by Murrow. Story of the early start of Eric Severide, Cronkite, etc.

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Oct 28, 2011 Jeremy Pack rated it 4 of 5 stars

Highly readable. Eschews technical details for the politics and intrigues of a fledgling industry and gives deeper insight as a result. Fascinating!

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Jan 19, 2011 Glenn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

An interesting account of the pioneers of broadcast journalism. A far cry from what passes as news now on television.

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Aug 29, 2010 Ed rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An excellent look back at the poineers of broadcast journalism

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Dec 14, 2012 Ron Willoughby rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history-politics

Brilliant. Engaging. Insightful. Honest. Respectful. Fascinating. Well done Mr. Cloud!

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Nov 18, 2012 Patricia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well written, but so hard to finish. I fell in love with Lynne Olsen's later work "Citizens of London" and was disappointed that this didn't have the same magic. After the war ends, this book loses steam. It picks up a bit with McCarthyism and the fight with CBS over truth vs. objectivity in reporting. A great resource for anyone studying the history of broadcast journalism, but anyone else should run out and get "Citizens of London" if they want a great read.

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Nov 26, 2008 Anna rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

Great read and page-turner. History of real people written without strictly academic manner. Journalists who would go anywhere where something important was happening. Each of them could be a hero of a book himself. Story of complicated personalities and full of anegdotes connected to them. Those people were great examples of their craft, which went wrong in years after WWII, when vanity and commercialism appeared in a place of profesionalism.

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Mar 08, 2009 Katy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It was a fascinating read that offers insight into, not only the lives and motivations of these amazing men and women, but to the hand that they had in shaping today's broadcast journalism at its best (and the pain they felt in seeing broadcast journalism at its worst). The authors do a good job of not putting the "Murrow Boys" up on pedestals, highlighting the faults along with the strengths of all, even Murrow himself.

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Apr 15, 2010 Tracy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

These guys were certainly amazing reporters. They knew their topics first hand and were not talking heads. Unfortunately, the smoked, drank, ran around on their wives, and let their egos get in the way of relationships and that sort of life catches up with you in short order. They also could not transition to television yet couldn't let go and let the next generation take it on. Very good read, but sad in the end.

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Aug 13, 2008 Amy rated it 3 of 5 stars

The pioneering suggested in the title all took place during WW II, and that was the part of the book I enjoyed the most. There was a lot more inner CBS politics than I really wanted to know, although it was interesting to see people that I remember (Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather) start to pop up in the later years.

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May 04, 2013 Robert rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a sad bunch.

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Jan 12, 2011 Lisa Hayes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Starts out well....hope it continues well.......

Another one I forgot about. I don't know if I'll get it again. Finally there is someone actually named "Egbert!" Ed Murrow was really Egbert Roscoe.......who knew?

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Jun 19, 2011 Robin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A must-read (an an interesting and educational and entertaining one) for anyone who grew up listening to The Murrow Boys on the radio or watching the beginnings of television. I loved this book.

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Dec 06, 2010 John Price rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Well written account of the rise and fall of broadcast journalism in the USA. The authors kept things interesting throughout.

If you like American history I recommend this book

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Jul 11, 2008 Mike Chambers rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: shelf-of-fame

I'd a dork, but a historical text about journalism was right up my alley. And Murrow was from Washington.

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Dec 09, 2011 Peggy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Just added to my Kindle - $2.99; looks like a good read and I love reading history.

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Nov 06, 2008 Garth rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Multiple bio of compelling personalities living through interesting times. Well written.

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May 16, 2013 Donalee is currently reading it

May 14, 2013 Mlg is currently reading it

Shelves: non-fiction-book-club

Apr 29, 2013 Terry rated it 4 of 5 stars

Apr 20, 2013 Ronel marked it as to-read

Shelves: biography, non-fiction

Apr 16, 2013 Mark Reiter rated it 4 of 5 stars

Apr 15, 2013 Phil rated it 3 of 5 stars

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