“The tube is flickering now … “

by David Benjamin

 

“When the shouting and tumult dies, the American people and president will realize that the unprecedented mudslinging against the committee by the extreme left-wing elements of press and radio was caused solely because another Fifth Amendment communist was finally dragged out of the dark recesses and exposed to public view.”

—Sen. Joseph McCarthy, quoted on “See It Now,” 9 March 1954

“Our shared values are under assault like never before. Extreme left-wing radicals, both inside and outside government, are determined to shred our Constitution and eradicate the beliefs we all cherish. Far-left socialists are trying to tear down the traditions and customs that made America the greatest nation on earth…”

— Donald Trump, Values Voter Summit, 12 Oct. 2019

 

MADISON, Wis.—When troubadour Don McLean cited rock ‘n’ roll great Buddy Holly’s death on February 3, 1959, as “the day the music died,” he was eulogizing a halcyon era of innocence and idealism in American popular culture.

McLean’s lyric came to me recently while I watched, again, a movie set in the days of Buddy Holly: George Clooney’s brilliant Good Night and Good Luck.

In a repeat viewing, I saw more clearly that the tension in Clooney’s treatment of the 1950s anti-Communist panic was not between Joseph McCarthy, the red-baiting Republican senator, and CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. The real clash, which reverberated into the future and altered American society, pitted Murrow’s courageous producer, Fred W. Friendly, versus CBS chief William S. Paley. 

In the film, after Murrow’s controversial “See It Now” broadcasts exposed McCarthy as a cowardly blowhard and helped doom his Senate career, Paley summons Friendly to his office and sternly sentences “See It Now,” perhaps the greatest investigative news show in TV history, to a slow but certain death. He assigns Murrow to finish his career as the anodyne host of a celebrity interview show, “Person to Person.”

That meeting between Paley and Friendly occurred, although perhaps not exactly as depicted in the film. Nonetheless, it deserves to be commemorated as “the day the news died.” Here was one irreversible moment when the world’s most powerful and prestigious broadcast organization subordinated the news to the imperative of popular amusement—eyeballs, ratings, clickbait and “likes”. 

That day, Paley—a pioneer of broadcast news—chose to appease CBS’ fretful sponsors with news less edgy, with newsmen less tenacious than Murrow and Friendly. Adding humiliation to injury, Paley made Murrow a mere emcee, who wasted his last years on TV tossing softballs to crooners, comedians and movie stars.

I was too young to have watched and appreciated Murrow’s dissection of Tailgunner Joe on “See It Now.” I only remember him on “Person to Person,” chain-smoking while sucking up smarmily to Milton Berle, Liberace and similar luminaries. He was of a fish out of water, and a boring one at that.

It’s worthwhile to quote Murrow in his finest moment, as he wound up that live exposé on national TV of the most prolific public liar since Goebbels and before Trump. While eviscerating McCarthy’s case against several of his victims, Murrow never sank to the name-calling that McCarthy preferred, nor did he even attach to the Dairyland gasbag the full responsibility for the damage he had done.

Speaking with an eloquence rare in any era of popular media, Murrow ended his broadcast thus: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

“The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’

“Good night and good luck.”

Until Paley moved CBS News from Page One to the “style” section, the news—especially on TV—was not explicitly expected to make money, although it often did. Newspapers and magazines, throughout the 20^th century, were profitable because they offered the most affordable advertising medium for most businesses. But all this profit tended to obscure a fact that today, as advertisers forsake virtually all news media, is manifestly evident. News isn’t a “product,” nor is it reliably popular enough to generate the consistent sales that assure profit and reward America’s insatiable shareholder class.

William Paley, in that fateful meeting, told Fred Friendly that—for the news to survive at CBS (and, by extension into the future, in every U.S. media organization), it had to do one thing it could not do and one thing it should not do.

The news cannot, to the satisfaction of America’s constant-growth, quarterly-report, Wall Street business culture, create wealth. 

The news should not, at the expense of seeking facts and informing its consumers as honestly as necessary, amuse people. The fact that it sometimes—even often—entertains is one of the reasons news continues to attract an audience. 

It’s notable that when Rush Limbaugh, the late superstar of talk radio, was caught exaggerating, misinforming or just plain lying through his teeth, he shrugged off his critics by reminding them that he was neither news anchor nor journalist, but an “entertainer.” Milton Berle. Liberace.

News, in its essence, is a public service, required to explore aspects of a nation’s life, politics, culture and governance in ways that can be dull, disturbing, even ghastly. News, if reported thoroughly, properly and bravely—as did Ed Murrow—can expose realities with which no sensible advertiser wants to associate. News, done well, can be dangerous. As heroic reporters, from Ernie Pyle to Shireen Abu Akleh remind us, it can get people killed. 

News serves. Under the sort of tyranny that Joe McCarthy so theatrically feared, news serves the state. In a republic, news at its best serves the people and sustains democracy, without fear, favor, razzle-dazzle or hope of wealth.

By allowing all those elements—timidity, favoritism, glitz and worst of all, the almighty buck—to subsume broadcast journalism, Bill Paley and CBS altered forever the shape of the news, and imperiled the integrity of American democracy.

We see the fruits of news-as-entertainment every day now, all the moreso at this moment, as we begin to plod through a tawdry, money-soaked and tragically information-free presidential campaign between the geriatric inquisitor of Anita Hill and the aged roué who grabbed E. Jean Carroll’s pussy.  

The death of the news, like “the day the music died,” is hyperbole. But Buddy Holly is really dead. 

And so is Edward R. Murrow, who said this: “… If they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”