Deregulation and the death of the Murrow doctrine

Nicholas Lemann provides many details of Edward R. Murrow's career that are new to me, but mostly he reminds us that, for all the Rightwing outrage over Dan Rather and Bill Moyers, broadcast news figures were pronounced in voicing their opinions to a far greater degree than any news anchor would dare today.

It is impossible to imagine the McCarthy broadcasts happening today. Although there is some dispute over whether Paley asked Murrow not to do the first show, everybody agrees that Murrow and his exuberant producer, Fred Friendly, decided to go ahead on their own, without asking anyone’s permission, and informed only Paley himself in advance, the day before it aired. But no problem: they got half an hour of prime time on a Tuesday night. The program ended with Murrow looking straight into the camera and saying, “The actions of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies.” He responded to McCarthy by saying that the American public would have to decide “who has served his country better, Senator McCarthy, or I.” (Newsweek ran a cover story not on McCarthy but on whether journalists should editorialize.) It was great television, because it was a showdown between a journalist and a politician, but the days when a major figure on network television can pick that kind of fight, and openly state political opinions on prime time, are long gone. Today, famous broadcast journalists are far more likely to battle each other than Washington officials. Murrow’s McCarthy shows make an absurdity of the modern-day conservative accusation that, say, Dan Rather represents the introduction of a heretofore unknown ideological strain into broadcast journalism. The Murrow broadcasts were far more nakedly political than anything on network television today, and came from a source with a much bigger share of—and more adoration from—the audience than anybody has now.

Lemann's larger point is that while broadcasters lament over the difficulty of finding "the next" Murrow or "our" Murrow, it is the very freedom the networks have today compared with the 50s and 60s that stifles or, at least, doesn't reward intelligent, opinionated newscasting. Government regulation of the airwaves forced the broadcast networks to pay more than lip service to programming "for the public good." Deregulation killed that quaint notion and it's been logically replaced by fake news and shout fests whose only goal is the almighty dollar.

The better way to insure good results, in any realm of society, is to set up a structure that encourages them; we can’t rely on heroes coming along to rescue journalism. The structure that encouraged Murrow, uncomfortable as it may be to admit, was federal regulation of broadcasting. CBS, in Murrow’s heyday, felt that its prosperity, even its survival, depended on demonstrating to Washington its deep commitment to public affairs. The price of not doing so could be regulation, breakup, the loss of a part of the spectrum, or license revocation. Those dire possibilities would cause a corporation to err on the side of too much “See It Now” and “CBS Reports.” In parts of the speech which aren’t in the movie, Murrow made it clear that the main pressure on broadcasting to do what he considered the right thing came from the F.C.C. The idea that, in taking on McCarthy, Murrow was “standing up to government” greatly oversimplifies the issue. He was able to stand up to a Senate committee chairman because a federal regulatory agency had pushed CBS and other broadcasters to organize themselves so that Murrow’s doing so was possible.

It isn’t possible anymore—not because timid people have risen to power in journalism but because the government, in steady increments over the past generation, has deregulated broadcasting. The Fairness Doctrine no longer exists. Regulation, license revocation, or reallocation of the spectrum are no longer meaningful possibilities. The advent of cable television brought a new round of debates over government-mandated public-affairs programming, with the result that private companies were granted valuable monopoly franchises in local markets; in return, they were required only to provide channels for public affairs, not to create programming. That’s why cable is home to super-low-cost varieties of broadcast news, such as C-SPAN, local publicaccess channels, and national cable-news shout-fests, rather than to reincarnations of the elaborately reported Murrow shows from the fifties. The rise of public broadcasting has freed the networks to be even more commercial.

And it is certainly not lost upon us that just as FCC regulations gave Murrow a platform from which he could take on the far right wing of the Republican party, de-regulation has given rise to programming and, of course, entire networks devoted to broadcasting the Republican party line.