Radio prototype: Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly's Hear It Now.

Sig Mickelson later said "Fred was getting ready to produce the television version" of Hear It Now all along (Sperber, 1986, p. 353). Murrow, however, was ambivalent. In 1949, he had raised fears about attractive personalities drawing "huge television audiences regardless of the violence that may be done to truth or objectivity" and coverage consisting of "bathing girls on surf boards" (Persico, 1988, p. 294; Price, 1949, p. 152). As Hear It Now began airing the next year, Murrow wrote to a CBS correspondent that he hoped "neither one of us has to try to make a living in television" (Sperber, 1986, p. 350). As late as September, 1951--a month after Billboard reported that See It Now would debut that fall and the "radio counterpart of the video show will be killed"--Murrow was still telling affiliates that "management hasn't yet decided whether Hear It Now is coming back" ("CBS Plans Hour," 1951, p. 1 ; Murrow, 1951c, p. 593). Meanwhile, he reiterated his concerns about TV to the press along with his belief (if not hope) that "the premiere of 'See It Now' is still a long way off" (Mishkin, 1951, p. 2).

Regardless, See It Now debuted that November with the iconic image of the Golden Gate Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge appearing live side by side. If that reflected Friendly's "entirely new concept," he and Murrow also would recycle ideas from Hear It Now, including profiles of the troops in Korea, the biography of a pint of blood, and Carl Sandburg reading from The People, Yes. Later there would be the classic reports on redbaiting targets Milo Radulovich and Annie Lee Moss as well as the climactic showdown with McCarthy. Finally would come the loss of sponsors, the clashes with CBS management, and the speech from Murrow lambasting TV's masters for using it to "distract, delude, amuse and insulate." By 1961, he would be gone from CBS (Murrow, 1967, p. 363; see also Doherty, 2003, pp. 161-188; Friendly, 1967; Kendrick, 1969; Murrow & Friendly, 1955; Persico, 1988; Sperber, 1986).

"There are new and great possibilities in TV, but I still have the feeling I'm its prisoner and am getting pushed around by it," said Murrow at the time of See It Now's premiere. "In radio I have control" ("Top of the News," 1951, p. 58).

Discussion

One might view Hear It Now as little more than a trial run for the television series or as an anachronism even in its own time--"rather like building the best gas lamp at the turn of the century when most people were rewiring their homes for electricity," as one observer has put it (Persico, 1988, p. 301). In fact, by the time the series left the air, ratings for network radio programs were plummeting as the networks shifted the brunt of their energies toward TV (Barnouw, 1968, pp. 284-290).

Even so, evening radio audiences remained sizable (as shown by Hear It Now's debut reaching 10,000,000 listeners on 173 stations); as of 1950, they still were larger than those for television (Bliss, 1991, p. 233). Hear It Now's impact was big enough not only to mobilize mass blood donations but also to win a Peabody Award ("Peabody Awards," 1951). Whereas Murrow and Friendly's initial collaboration on the record album I Can Hear It Now had used old radio clips and sounded "like a valedictory tribute for a medium on the road to second-class status" (Doherty, 2003, p. 164), their radio series was marked by a rich eclecticism and innovativeness that represented the most creative use of the medium that Murrow would ever achieve.

Murrow did continue his nightly radio newscast and used it to launch what a biographer has called "trial balloons for television," trying out controversial ideas before putting them on See It Now (Sperber, 1986, pp. 402-403). He also lent his voice to CBS radio documentaries such as "Who Killed Michael Farmer?" (Murray, 1994, pp. 32-38). However, the newscasts did not employ the elaborate production techniques that Friendly brought to Hear It Now, and Murrow did not write or report the documentaries, which would embarrass him when a program on prostitution that he had narrated provoked angry controversy (Kendrick, 1969, pp. 418-420; Sperber, 1986, pp. 546-548). With Hear It Now, Murrow in fact did "have control," allowing him to expand the voices and sounds on radio and realize his desire to make the medium more "adult and intelligent" ("Top of the News," 1951, p. 58; Wertenbaker, 1953, p. 36). If TV's See it Now would exemplify "a rare excitement, an appetite to tackle every subject of interest under the sun" (Bliss, 1991, p. 237), it was following in the footsteps of its radio predecessor.

Hear It Now also foreshadowed the future of long-form radio journalism. In the 1970s, developers of the new public radio newsmagazine All Things Considered would consciously avoid replicating the "steady, authoritative, [and] a bit pompous" style of Murrow's news commentaries. Instead, they would feature highly produced stories that would be "the radio equivalent of a television news report, in which 'sound' assumed the function of 'pictures'" (Mitchell, 2005, pp. 62-63). Thanks largely to Friendly, Hear It Now had helped pioneer that form 2 decades previously--a form in which "the real reporter was the tape recorder gathering reality sound, to which narration as needed could be added" (Lichty, 2004, p. 476).

If in some ways the radio series was a departure for Murrow, his editorial stance on the program hewed to that for which he was already known. "He is at heart a moralist, troubled by the series of dull thuds which pass for civilization nowadays," wrote one observer before Hear It Now began airing. "Still, he won't preach, because he has vowed to be an objective newsman" (Price, 1949, p. 152). Moralism and objectivity were not seen as mutually exclusive. As Schudson and Tifft (2005, p. 27) note, "objectivity was universally acknowledged to be the spine of the journalist's moral code" in the immediate postwar era. Furthermore, Barnhurst and Nerone (2001, p. 67) observe that the burgeoning Cold War "demanded a firm consensus on U.S. values" celebrating the "unique superiority" of American institutions and the "genius of the American character"; that consensus encompassed both "anti-communist liberal and conservative elites." So it was that Murrow wholeheartedly supported American troops in Korea against a vilified enemy and the battle to win hearts and minds elsewhere in the world. At the same time, he scolded if not outright preached at those who did not fulfill their duties at home or who put partisan interests ahead of the national interest.

There were gleams of liberal sympathies in Murrow's work, as when he defended George Marshall and Anna Rosenberg against redbaiting. Nevertheless, as an acquaintance told The New Yorker when it profiled Murrow, "Ed never pushes his liberalism beyond a carefully calculated safety point" (Wertenbaker, 1953, p. 29). In part, that reflected FCC and network restrictions on editorializing that Murrow had unsuccessfully tried to loosen at CBS (Seib, 2006, pp. 9-13; Sperber, 1986, pp. 276-279). Yet it also reflected Murrow's belief that facts should speak for themselves and audiences should make up their own minds. The New Yorker said Murrow had been commended for his fairness by none other than Joseph McCarthy (Wertenbaker, 1953, p. 29).

That impulse toward safety and objectivity frustrated those who wanted Murrow to take a bolder stand. In fact, by the time The New Yorker profile appeared in December, 1953, See It Now had begun adding what Friendly later described as the "missing ingredients" of "conviction, controversy, and a point of view" (Friendly, 1967, p. 3). The Milo Radulovich report already had aired; the McCarthy program soon would follow. For biographer A. M. Sperber (1998, p. 403), that marked a decisive move away from Murrow's previous neutrality toward "adversary programming."

However, the contrast between the See It Now of 1954 and the Hear It Now of 1951 was not as pronounced as it might have seemed. Whatever McCarthy may have once said about Murrow's fairness, the journalist never was wholly neutral toward the senator. Murrow's defense of George Marshall on Hear It Now stopped short of directly criticizing McCarthy. Still, it featured "the sarcastic and satiric tenor" (Rosteck, 1994, p. 138) that would later characterize the See It Now report on the senator, with Murrow ironically commenting on how McCarthy's "expose" of Marshall had served "the cause of truth and free men who will not be divided" (Murrow & Friendly 1951v).

Beyond that, See It Now's McCarthy program made the same appeal to consensual values that Murrow had regularly made on Hear It Now: not to "walk in fear, one of another," not to "be driven by fear into an age of unreason," not to imagine that our ancestors had "feared to write, to speak, to associate [or] to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular" (Murrow, 1967, pp. 247-248). Rather than being purely adversarial or oppositional, Murrow and Friendly extolled the rationality of the common citizen and the benefits of pluralism while placing faith in the electronic media to promote those ends (Rosteck, 1994, pp. 184-187). Again, the tone had been set on Hear It Now, when Murrow proclaimed of his and Friendly's radio series, "We believe that the human ear is capable of great understanding" (Murrow & Friendly, 1951c).