UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
speech class. Your first concern was the human
story, the suffering people, and the traumatized
city. According to Gerald Nachman’s “Raised on
Radio,” Murrow “picked up his basic speech patterns
from his Quaker mother, who often spoke
in inverted phrases like ‘This I believe.’ ” Many
don’t recall that you were dispatched to London
as CBS’s “director of talks,” not of news.
I can hear it now.
“Tonight, as on every other night, the rooftop
watchers are peering out across the fantastic forest
of London’s chimney pots. The anti-aircraft
gunners stand ready.
“I have been walking tonight – there is a full
moon, and the dirty-gray buildings appear white.
The stars, the empty windows, are hidden. It’s a
beautiful and lonesome city where men and
women and children are trying to snatch a few
hours of sleep underground.”
It was only years later that I learned most of
those memorable talks/reports were not delivered
live but instead carefully crafted and, then,
only broadcast three days after the incidents
they reported on. Some had been censored; others
were self-censored, clearly reflecting the war
“message” and propaganda of those times.
There were, for example, no reports I know of
in the early years about the then unfolding holocaust
that many news organizations including
the BBC knew about but did not broadcast for
fear of confusing war goals. Some British leaders
believed that the English people (perhaps like
themselves) were anti-Semitic and would not
fight if the war were pictured as a battle to save
the Jews. So they muzzled the biggest crime of
the century by decree. The truth came out much
later, sadly, after the fact, after the destruction of
a people.
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Fortunately, Ed, your moving reports from the
death camp at Buchenwald helped drive the horror
home with its reference to “bodies stacked
up like cordwood.”
Your broadcasts are still listened to in journalism
classes, still revered. How much of the media
coverage of the Iraq War will ever be regarded
that way? Alas, so much of what we produce
today is forgettable, disposable, even embarrassing.
Sometimes it is thought of as “product” to be
recycled into retrospectives or used as archival
material as today’s breaking news becomes grist
for tomorrow’s History Channel specials.
The pressures journalists felt in covering this
war were not new. Ed, you experienced them
yourself. A profile I found on the Internet
explained the internal tensions that existed
within your own beloved CBS between you, the
journalist, and your bosses.
Quote: “ . . . though he and William Paley, head
of CBS, were soulmates during the war, fighting
a common enemy, that closeness was becoming
strained. Paley felt he had to compromise with
the government, the sponsors. Murrow felt, at
first, that broadcast news could not suffer, should
not be compromised. It would eventually take its
toll on Murrow as he tried to straddle both
worlds.”
What you had then is what so many of today’s
self-styled experts and oh, so authoritative newscasters
lack today – a sense of humility that
admits that none of us are know-it-alls. It is a
stance that concedes that today’s news is just a
first and often flawed draft of a history still to be
written. You knew that Ed, and you said it plain:
“Just because the microphone in front of you
amplifies your voice around the world is no reason
to think we have any more wisdom than we