The Ascendancy of Radio News in Wartime

In 1937, the American Foreign Correspondents Association in London denied membership to Edward R. Murrow, CBS's European director. As a broadcaster, it reasoned, he was not actually a journalist. Less than seven years later Murrow was elected the organizations president. This reversal of fortune dramatizes how quickly broadcast news gained legitimacy during World War II, and media historians have emphasized how the war itself actually stimulated this growth. Richard W. Steele, for one, has documented the Roosevelt administration's use of radio and radio news to build support for entry into the war, while Michele Hilmes has detailed the role radio played in sustaining American unity during the war itself.1 Similarly, Gerd Horton has examined the government's role in producing radio programing in service of the war effort.2 Nearly fifty years ago, Eric Barnouw wrote in his History of Broadcasting in the United States that as the war began, "the nation's attention was increasingly on radio. News broadcasts were winning a growing audience-and stirring increasing controversy."3 Historians continue to stress this link, as when Susan J. Douglas recently titled her chapter on this period "World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism."4Historians frequently highlight Murrow's own dramatic reporting from England as the crucial event in the acceptance of broadcast journalism. When Murrow had arrived in London in 1937, broadcast journalists resided at the margins of newsgathering. This was largely the result of the close and conflicted relationship between the newspaper industry and radio as the latter developed in the 1930s, a time when, in Michael Stamm's phrase, the newspaper industry became the news industry.4 As a consequence of the tangled relationship with the newspapers, for much of the thirties news was barely a presence on radio, little more than periodic bulletins of wire service copy intended to steer listeners to their newspapers, supplemented by short commentaries by policy analysts such as Dorothy Thompson, Elmer Davis, and H.V. Kaltenborn.6In Europe, Murrow was initially little more than a glorified booking agent, arranging for various politicians, public figures, and print journalists to discuss current events on the air. Beginning with his work orchestrating live broadcasts from various European capitals during the Munich crisis in 1938, Murrow expanded the possibilities of broadcast news, exploiting its natural advantages in speed and immediacy. Through his eyewitness reporting of the Battle of Britain and especially his dramatic rooftop accounts of the subsequent bombing campaign against London and other major British cities now known as the Blitz, Murrow brought the European conflict vividly into American homes.Such reporting leads most historians to focus on Murrow to the exclusion of other wartime broadcast journalists. In the words of his biographer Joseph Persico, "over 120 correspondents covered the Blitz. The words that best captured the feel and sense of it for America were Edward R. Murrow's."7 Christopher Daly echoes this sentiment in his recent history of American journalism: "Although NBC and the much smaller Mutual network also had correspondents in London, none of them matched Murrow. . . . Murrow proved that radio news could be accurate, responsible, even soulful. And it could run rings around newspapers and magazines."8 Douglas Gomery concedes that "many students of broadcast history believe radio journalism and war coverage were invented in the late 1930s and early 1940s by Edward R. Murrow" even as he suspects some mythmaking in assessments of Murrow.'1However consequential Murrow's reporting from London was for American audiences at the time and has proven ever since, a closer inspection of the historical record suggests a different story. A comprehensive search of military and other governmental records in the National Archives of both the United States and the United Kingdom (many of which have never before been examined in this context); the unpublished papers of several broadcasters, government officials, and news organizations; and subsequent published accounts of other broadcasters reveals that this exclusive focus on Murrow, and especially of Murrow's work during the Blitz, is misplaced. …