Bias in OTR News Broadcasts and News Commentators

P.S. My memory (having been born in 1956) is of the last of Fulton Lewis Jr broadcasts (and his son) also Edward P. Morgan and of course Lowell Thomas

Murrow was able to stand on London rooftops during the Blitz, yet remain completely impartial during his nightly news round-ups fed via shortwave back to "New Yawk." It was this impartiality and desire for fairness and balance which earned him ridicule from both the extreme left and extreme right (the latter including Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh)--yet by the end of his journalistic career Murrow was chosen as first head of the U.S. Information Agency (the early-Cold-War equivalent to Elmer Davis being head of the Office of War Information).

By some accounts within the journalism community, Murrow himself had "sold out," succumbing to good pay and perquisites at USIA, while he himself saw it as keeping Government honest--not entirely new to him after locking horns in 1954 with the likes of Joe McCarthy.

Today's commentators like Bill O'Rielly and even Rush Limbaugh ARE outside the mold of what Washington insiders accept as the norm. But also accounting for friction is the undeniable fact revealed by numerous studies undertaken by the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism, which showed that well over 90 percent of ALL Washington newspeople had voted Democrat in the last three Presidential elections. It's the same thing for the Hollyweird political activists such as Norman Lear and his group People For the American Way, or Barbra Streisand or Alec Baldwin, who all actively set out to humiliate and demean ANYONE who does not believe as they do.

There is a "pack mentality" on both sides of the political aisle, and it is NOT a modern phenomenon. Just read up on the contemporary uproar over Thomas Jefferson owning a slave and fathering children by her--something roundly disputed at the time but at least partly borne out by DNA tests in the present day. Historians (when they aren't defending themselves against charges of plagiarism) would hardly argue that the media of that period were almost universally in Jefferson's corner. Had it been the opposite, would there be a monument to Jefferson in D.C. today?

Murrow faced and defeated "Smokin' Joe" McCarthy, going against the tide of the time to accomplish the most good for the most people. In short, he believed it was the right thing to do. The phrase is, "For evil to triumph, all good men need do is nothing." Elmer Davis was the same, with OWI. We can listen to extant recordings from WWII or Korea and only imagine the contemporary circumstances forming a given statement. What we cannot do TODAY is listen to radio commentators and fail to hear the roar of partisans on either side, whose proverbial oxes have just been gored. As a writer, I assure you that you are not doing your job if you fail to make people think. That means people left AND right are both angry with you.

Ed Murrow once remarked he wouldn't have it any other way.

Newspapers were often far more brazenly partisan than they are today, and most were conservative. There was also the tradition, which scarcely exists these days, of newspapers being unabashedly Democratic or Republican (there are still ideological differences in the newspaper world, but the strict partisanship of the old days is pretty much gone). People did not throw words like "liberal" and "conservative" in quite the same way they do nowadays. Just as the media were more diverse than today, so were opinions. In rural areas such as the middle and far west there was a tradition of progressivism and populism, often highly leftist in orientaton, yet as likely to manifest itself in the Republican as Democratic party. It was also for the most part an isolationist leftism, pro-farm, and inclined to oppose entanglements abroad. In the big cities, especially those of the East, the Left was more labor-oriented, internationalist, with a world outlook closer to that of European socialism (and sometimes literally socialist as well). There were "reform" liberals, out to break up the then-powerful big city political machines; and there were liberals who worked wholly within that system. Nor was the Right much better organized, as the conservatism of the northeastern seaboard was inclined, like the Left of the same region, to be internationalist; while the Midwest conservatives, like the liberals from the same region, were prone to extreme isolationism. Then there was the South, a sort of caricature of the rest of the nation politically, which was both highly Democratic (with scarcely any Republicans at all), and also the most conservative region of the United States which, however, FDR carried easily, and where he was quite popular! Go figure.

The point of all this is that we were really a different society in the days of OTR, and the dissemination of news was almost as different as well. Certain information was simply not available. Most Americans did not know that FDR was confined to a wheelchair, as the press "boys" gave him a free ride. Nowadays this would be impossible. One trip to a shrink's office in one's college sophomore year would be front page news thirty years later. Information concerning the World War was spotty, and after Pearl Harbor highly censored. There was a television documentary a few years back on the witholding of vital information on the Nazi death camps both from FDR and the general public by higher-ups in the State Department rumored to be anti-Semitic. There is still considerable debate over what FDR knew and when. All this is a reflection of a paternalism that reigned supreme at the same, and which was scarcely ever questioned. The President himself, and indeed most politicians, essentially talked down to the American people for the most part. Education was far less widespread than it is today, and many in positions of power assumed that the average person was ignorant and needed to be shielded, essentially "protected", from the truth, political and otherwise. In this context radio was revolutionary, and far more egalitarian than the rest of the mass media. Ed Murrow and his kind were trailblazers in this regard, and if his "canonization" seems a bit much to some, well, pick up an old newspaper, or a Time or Life or Saturday Evening Post from, say, 1939, and see for yourself.

Even in the thirties, however, these commentators were considered exceptions. Most radio commentary was blandly moderate-right-of-center -- there were no genuine hard-core left-wing commentators on network radio at all, with Raymond Swing about as liberal as it got, and those of the extreme right tended to be those of the Coughlin/Cameron sort: not really news commentators at all. The goal was not to rock the boat, not to upset potential sponsors, not to do anything that would bring ill will to the network.

An additional thought on Murrow: he was an eloquent commentator, no question -- but I don't think you can call him an advocate of "unbiased journalism" at all -- there was nothing "unbiased" or journalistically-neutral about his work. His commentaries from Britain during the Blitz don't require much listening-between-the-lines to detect that he's an Interventionist, and his "See it Now" program on McCarthy makes no attempt at presenting "both sides of the story" -- instead, it presents footage specifically chosen and edited to make McCarthy look as loathsome as possible: the "insane little giggle" shots come immediately to mind. It's Advocacy Journalism in its purest form, and there's nothing the slightest bit "unbiased" about it. Murrow was not out to "tell McCarthy's story," he was out to demolish someone he believed neeeded to be demolished.

(That he was rather late in doing this is another matter -- he was far from the first reporter to take on the Senator, and at the time he was criticized by some for waiting until it was clear McCarthy was on the way down before "jumping on the bandwagon." In all honesty, columnist Drew Pearson did far more to ensure McCarthy's downfall than Murrow -- it was Pearson's investigations which led directly the Army-McCarthy hearings, not Murrow's. Murrow simply helped to push him further down the slope.)

That Murrow's cause was a noble one -- a correct one, from history's perspective -- does not mean we shouldn't be willing to take an analytical look at the methods he used, and be willing to ask an important question: just who gets to decide who "deserves to be demolished? This is an especially important question to ask, given how fashionable "advocacy journalism" has become.

Interestingly, Gilbert Seldes raised exactly these points in reviewing the "See It Now" broadcast for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1954. Seldes was an outspoken liberal and personal friend of Murrow -- but he was also deeply troubled by the precedents that the broadcast set. He called the broadcast "an attack, followed by an editorial call to action," and concluded that "in the long run it is more important to use our communications systems properly than it is to destroy McCarthy...Is it not possible, that an infectious smile, eyes that seem remarkable for the depths of their sincerity, a cultivated air of authority, may attract a huge television audience, regardless of the violence that may be done to truth or objectivity?"

As to the controversy over certain broadcasters and journalists of the thirties and forties, I was not aware of this. It does seem that the sponsors held sway in terms of content in ways that they didn't on television, or at least not to the same degree. Father Coughlin is the one I know of best, a sort of McCarthyish figure in some ways, though his career lasted much longer. In the book Radio Priest there were some interesting points made, such as Coughlin being largely a big city phenomenon, for all the national press he got. He scarcely had any stations that carried him on the west coast, as his listenership was largely urban and heavily eastern. As to Drew Pearson, I'm amazed that he stayed on the air at all. He thrived on the sort of controversy the networks and adverstizers didn't care for, but maybe they wrote him off, so to speak, as a Washington Winchell, more entertainer than journalist.

(The Gilbert Seldes comment on Murrow and television journalism in general is fascinating. I've wondered a lot about the same thing. Is Peter Jennings a distinguished journalist because he looks good in a trench-coat or does he look good in a trench-coat because he's a distinguished journalist? Put a bow tie on someone, give him a vaguely English air, a Latin phrase or two, and voila,--instant intellectual! An authority on everything. I especially find the Left versus Right style of a lot of news shows, whether the News Hour or Crossfire, very irritating, as if all political issues have one of two "appropriate" responses. And one can't help but get the impression of dueling "think tanks" rather than two people discussing political issues of the day. There's a disturbing lack of originality to this approach, too, as the Leftists and Rightists are compelled to function passively, within a preconcieved framework, rather than creatively, as thinking human beings with minds of their own. But I digress.)

Essentially all of these incidents kept bringing McCarthy's activities into Murrow's frame. After the implication by Don Surine, the McCarthy associate, of Murrow's activities back in the late thirties, Murrow commented "The question now is when do I go against these guys."

The famous McCarthy broadcast on See It Now was a developing production changing from week to week on how best to approach the subject. Murrow had the final say as to when it would be ready.

As Elizabeth already pointed out, it was really more of a matter of who controlled the medium. That is, either the sponsor influenced if a commentator stayed on the air, or some external force such as the White House. Boake Carter was removed partly because the White House had expressed continued outrage at his anti-New Deal diatribes and Philco, which previously supported him, caved in and withdrew their sponsorship. Over at NBC, Hugh Johnson was removed in 1937 because of his strong anti-Roosevelt, isolationist comments.

Fulton Lewis Jr. another strong isolationist and generally anti-everything Roosevelt was never labelled "conservative" despite being considered one upon historical reflection. And, as mentioned, Raymond Swing is now considered "liberal" in reflecting on his commentaries from the pre-war period. Generally, he was even left of Roosevelt, who then was certainly left of center, though not by far.

Radio news was pretty much divided into "straight news" such as you might hear from Bob Trout, and persuasive monologues such as the various radio commentators and even the overseas reports of Ed Murrow, William Shirer, Fred Bates, and to some degree Max Jordan.

The Murrow/Shirer team certainly had an agenda, which was to convince America of the atrocities of Hitler and the lone battle England was fighting. They were certainly interventionists and their reports were often colored by that agenda. But they were not less eloquent because of it. We probably admire their reports today because they happened to end up on the side of right. Carter and the others unfortunately are looked at today as having got it wrong and thus they are often overlooked in what they wrote.

It is not exactly revealing a political trade secret here that demagogues of all stripes first feel the public pulse and FDR and Hitler were exactly alike in that regard, giving Depression-torn Germany and America respectively exactly what they needed: victims to blame. In McCarthy's case it was communism, which was tearing Italy asunder and having recognizable impact in England's House of Commons as well (anyone recall the "Fifth Man" scandal?). FDR in turn blamed the same economic conditions in Europe which Hitler did, and until just this last decade we saw a national debt which had been completely out of control from New Deal freewheeling.

Go ahead and tell someone who was saved from starvation that the New Deal was bad for them--just try. And yet the New Deal also gave us the TVA and it in turn uprooted literally hundreds of villages and countless thousands of people as the Tennessee Vally started filling up with water. These were the people who sat in migrant camps while the REST of America listened from the comfort of homes they could scarcely afford under the tax burden FDR and his mob imposed on our middle classes.

Maybe it's that recognition of betrayal that turned the former slaveowning south against the liberal wing of the Democrats--and if you still think the south was a caricature of the liberals now infesting that party, then you've learned nothing from listening to your radio, and have accepted the NEA's version of history without a second thought.

I think after all that historical second-guessing we've ALL been doing here, I'll go out on my front lawn and work on my mortar practice. Cheers!

Sorry, Lou!

Eric Cooper

Didn't I read once in one of the books on Murrow's life that he chose never to register to vote and never voted in one election during his broadcasting career? H