Here is your challenge: fix the news business.
Make it more than profits, ratings, and advertisement. Make it what it should be, and perhaps has been in brief moments, a public trust.
Speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention in Chicago (15 October 1958)
The Atlantic Monthly. CBS: The Power And The Profits
Make it more than profits, ratings, and advertisement. Make it what it should be, and perhaps has been in brief moments, a public trust.
Speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention in Chicago (15 October 1958)
Edward R. Murrow (Excerpted) said:This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television.
I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.
Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty 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, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.
During the daily peak viewing periods, 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.
For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally.
If radio news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it— I say it isn't news.
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. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the coporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this.
I have said, and I believe, that potentially we have in this country a free enterprise system of radio and television which is superior to any other. But to achieve its promise, it must be both free and enterprising. There is no suggestion here that networks or individual stations should operate as philanthropies. But I can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or the Communications Act which says that they must increase their net profits each year, lest the Republic collapse.
I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.
The sponsor of an hour's television program is not buying merely the six minutes devoted to commercial message. He is determining, within broad limits, the sum total of the impact of the entire hour. If he always, invariably, reaches for the largest possible audience, then this process of insulation, of escape from reality, will continue to be massively financed, and its apologist will continue to make winsome speeches about giving the public what it wants, or "letting the public decide."
If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.
Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
This instrument 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.
The Atlantic Monthly. CBS: The Power And The Profits
David Halbertsam said:In the spring of 1974, when the President of the United States was locked in an epochal struggle with, his adversaries in Congress and the media—including CBS News—and when fears at CBS's corporate level about its role in the fight were greatest, the corporation was attaining unparalleled success. Though much of the nation was in a deep recession, CBS was generating more money and profit than ever before—perhaps because free entertainment during a time of economic sag was attractive to viewers and thus to advertisers. In the second quarter of 1974, a record period, CBS earned $34 million net profit. One CBS executive congratulated Robert Wood, president of the television network, on this success. Wood, however, seemed to wince at the idea of it.
"What's wrong?" his friend asked.
"Do you rea1ize that what we just accomplished now becomes the norm?—that we must go against it in the future, and if we slip below it it means we've failed," said Bob Wood. And he was right. The pressure continued to make even greater profit, and in the second quarter of 1975, CBS made $58.1 million net profit, just $10 million less than in all of 1969.
Last edited: