Don Hewitt: Remembering Edward R. Murrow

[babylonsister]

Don Hewitt

Creator of "60 Minutes"
Posted February 26, 2009 | 09:24 AM (EST)
Remembering Edward R. Murrow




By and large, how Americans got their news when I first met, got to know and was privileged to work with the CBS News legend, Edward R. Murrow in 1948 was by reading newspapers. Listening to the radio took second place and watching television news was "so so" at best.

Although broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow, H.V. Kaltenborn, Gabriel Heatter and Lowell Thomas had become big names in America, newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle were where it was at — until the truck drivers delivering their newspapers to newsstands in those cities soon found themselves driving through neighborhoods, the rooftops of which were festooned with television antennas feeding what came to be known as commercials into the houses below (commercials paid for with money that once went into the coffers of newspapers) while, in the suburbs, kids on bicycles were tossing news papers they carried in a canvas bag slung over their shoulder up onto front porches on streets — under which cables carried commercials that gobbled up advertising dollars that had formerly been a source of income for newspapers. Along with that, broadcasters like Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, the late Ed Bradley, the late Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings and most significantly...

The late Edward R. Murrow, the most respected name ever in broadcast journalism, were attracting attention — especially Murrow who with his movie-star good looks, could have been a matinee idol, but, fortunately for us and the world at large didn't. A keen mind and a way with words led him to radio and then to television where I was privileged to be associated with him as the director of his and Fred Friendly's winner of just about every award in broadcasting — "See It Now" — as well as producing and directing his year-end specials and his coverage, 56 years ago, of Queen Elizabeth's coronation...the kinescope of which (film recorded off the tube before video tape burst on the scene) was edited by the two of us during what was then an eleven-hour trip across the Atlantic on a chartered British Airways trans Atlantic propeller-driven airliner stripped of a couple of dozen or so of its seats and replaced with what were called "movieolas" to edit what were called "kinescopes" (film recorded by cameras focused on the screen) ready to be aired when we touched down in Boston. Why Boston? We were in a race with NBC to be the first on the air with footage of the Coronation and landing in Boston and airing it from the airport instead of from a studio, gave us a head start.

That's how "horse and buggy" airing an event overseas the same day it took place was when television first burst on the scene — editing a kinescope (videotape was still a distant dream) — of an event of historic proportions on an airplane and airing it from an airport. Today, the lack of worthwhile programming — not looking for new and better ways to broadcast the existing programming — is the problem.

Today, the TV techs are virtual wizards at getting us on the air in a flash — even from the moon — which is nothing short of amazing. What is also "nothing short of amazing" is how much unadulterated drivel finds its way onto the tube.

Leave it to Murrow to say that without using television to teach, illuminate and inspire "it is nothing more than wires and lights in a box."

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-hewitt/remembering-edward-r-murr_b_169960.html