Show Business: Decadence & Escapism

The familiar, somewhat pompous figure with the familiar, somewhat pompous voice rose up before his fellows one day last week and, in his measured prose, indicted the whole breed. “I have decided,” said Edward Murrow at the convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago, “to express my concern about what I believe to be happening to radio and television . . . If there are any historians about 50 or a hundred years from now and there should be preserved the Kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white or color evidence of decadence [and] escapism . . . If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: ‘Look Now, Pay Later.’ “

Deploring the rampages of “Hollywood Indians,” singing commercials in the midst of news programs, the shallow, five-minute news spots that leave no room for the “why,” the networks’ fear of the controversial, Murrow went on: “One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. [We must] get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us . . .”

Murrow’s remedy: more and deeper information, more knowing public-affairs programs, more initiative, more ideas, more guts in radio and TV news. “Let us dream to the extent of saying that on a given Sunday night the time normally occupied by Ed Sullivan is given over to a clinical survey of the state of American education, and a week or two later the time normally used by Steve Allen is devoted to a thoroughgoing study of American policy in the Middle East.”