In a long-forgotten speech delivered to the Radio & Television News Directors Association in 1958, legendary CBS newsman and journalist Edward R. Murrow offered the following warning to a young industry at a critical juncture in our postwar history:

“Our history will be what we make it,” he cautioned. “And, if there are any historians about 50 or a 100 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, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: Look now, pay later.”

We were not always insulated from those important realities. Edward R. Murrow first came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II, which brought those realities home to millions of Americans. During the war, he hired a top-flight cadre of correspondents who would become known as “Murrow’s Boys.” These intrepid journalists were noted for their honesty and intelligence in delivering the news.

In the 1950s, Murrow went on to produce a series of televised news programs that helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose hysterical anti-communist crusade was responsible for destroying innocent lives through rumor, innuendo, and false accusations.

It was during this dangerous period that our nation came perilously close to abandoning those constitutional rights and freedoms which define us as a people. That we give up the fundamental right to question and challenge our government’s policies, some of our elected leaders told us then, was a price we had to be willing to pay in order to confront and defeat a new type of evil doer.

In battling McCarthy, Murrow took the measure of his demagoguery noting, “His [McCarthy’s] primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”

Sadly, such courage, candor, and intellectual honesty is sorely lacking almost 50 years later. Today, we live in an attention deficit democracy defined by entertaining imagery and colorful sound bites.

Informed consent has fallen victim to public apathy. Today, television gives us what we desire rather than what we truly need.

As Murrow cautioned, “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.”

In a perilous age in which history commands us to intelligently assess the threats we confront — from dictators intent on using nuclear blackmail to achieve their nefarious ends to a host of shadowy organizations who would visit death and destruction upon us for no other reason than because they find our way of life somehow threatening — we would do well to heed the advise of Thomas Jefferson who said, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

In the information age, television, and the array of electronic media that have become its offspring, could serve to educate and inform the general public in a way that would encourage us to ask the tough questions of elected officials which our democracy demands.

These questions, and the public debates they would foster, are healthy for our body politic and vital to our democratic way of life.

As Murrow concluded, “This instrument [television] can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”

In an age of global terror, we no longer have the luxury of being insulated from the stark realities of the world in which we live. Let us therefore remember that democracy relies on informed consent. In the final analysis, it is our responsibility to hold our leaders accountable for decisions as to why we fight, how we fight, and against whom we fight.

Or, as Edward R. Murrow warned us, “If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.”

Tony Pattiz
Peachtree City, Ga.

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