THE MURROW DOCTRINE.(Edward R. Murrow)

There is a memorable entry in William Shirer's "Berlin Diary" in which he describes--as, in effect, something that happened at work one day--the birth of broadcast journalism. It was Sunday, March 13, 1938, the day after Nazi troops entered Austria. Shirer, in London, got a call from CBS headquarters, in New York, asking him to put together a broadcast in which radio correspondents in the major capitals of Europe, led by Shirer's boss, Edward R. Murrow, who was on the scene in Vienna, would offer a series of live reports on Hitler's move and the reaction to it.

Shirer had to overcome two problems: CBS had no staff in Europe except Murrow and himself, so he had to find newspaper reporters in Berlin, Paris, and Rome; and then he had to line up shortwave transmitters that could carry the reporters' voices to the United States. Somehow, he and Murrow pulled it off. "One a.m. came," Shirer writes, "and through my earphones I could hear on our transatlantic 'feedback' the smooth voice of Bob Trout announcing the broadcast from our New York studio. Our part went off all right, I think. . . . New York said on the 'feedback' afterwards that it was a success. They want another one tonight."

After that, the exigencies of war in Europe turned Shirer and Murrow--and, over the next few years, a crew of additional CBS radio reporters like Howard K. Smith, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid--into unusually busy and prominent members of the working press. When Murrow returned to the United States for a home leave in the fall of 1941, at the age of thirty-three, he was more famous and celebrated than any journalist could be today. A crowd of fans and reporters met his ship at the dock. CBS gave him a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, with eleven hundred guests in attendance and millions more listening in via a national radio broadcast. Franklin Roosevelt sent a congratulatory telegram to be read aloud, and the poet Archibald MacLeish offered the most eloquent of many in-person encomiums, in which he said, "You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it."

It seems obvious now that the country was eager for broadcast journalism from Europe, so you wonder why CBS didn't realize that when it sent Murrow there in the first place, in 1937. Aside from the technical difficulties of broadcasting across the ocean, and the historical indifference of Americans to news from overseas, the answer is that CBS didn't think of itself as being in the news business. Instead, it was an entertainment company, under vague but frightening instructions (they came from the federal government, which had life-and-death power over the future of the networks) also to offer material that was uplifting and public-spirited.

The Radio Act of 1927 established a system in which the government owned the airwaves; rather than broadcast itself, however, it would grant licenses for locations on the spectrum to private companies, though only--fateful phrase--"if public convenience, interest or necessity will be served thereby." The Communications Act of 1934, which created the Federal Communications Commission, adopted the same language. During the debate over the Communications Act, two U.S. senators (one was Robert F. Wagner, of New York) proposed that one quarter of the spectrum be given over to purely educational stations. That, as Sally Bedell Smith writes in her 1990 biography of CBS's founder, William Paley, "would have been devastating to commercial broadcasters." The proposal was defeated, but still, with the New Deal at its apogee and with other Western nations setting up state broadcasting systems like the BBC, CBS had reason to be vigilant about protecting its public-interest flank.

It was in the aftermath of the fight over the Communications Act that CBS hired Murrow--and the company thought it was getting an educator, not a journalist. Murrow came from a nonprofit organization called the Institute of International Education, which set up lectures and student seminars all over the world (including, as Murrow later had occasion to regret, in the Soviet Union) and helped scholars to leave Nazi Germany. Like all great stars, Murrow was complicated; he was both a rawboned son of the West--he'd grown up in Washington state, and worked in logging camps--and a rising young man of the Eastern establishment. He was elected a member of the Council on Foreign ...