Who is edward k murrow

He assembled a group of young reporters who would become household names during World War II. Ed sent Shirer to London, where he was able to deliver an uncensored account of Anschluss. Murrow then chartered a plane to fly from Poland to Vienna, Austria, to cover for his friend.

That brought together correspondents from various European cities for a simultanious broadcast. The "special" came off without a hitch, years before modern technology made it routine. The broadcast was considered to be revolutionary at the time, and was the basis for the World News Roundup , which still runs every weekday morning and evening on the CBS Radio Network.

When war broke out, he remained in London to report on it. He even flew with Allied forces during air raids. On April 15, , Murrow reported on the liberation of the Buchenwald extermination camp in Germany. The broadcast was an example of his uncompromising journalistic style, which caused a great deal of controversy and won him a number of critics and enemies. Murrow's report described the emaciated physical state of the concentration camp prisoners who had survived.

I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products.

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These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. A recurrent desire to get away from it all is not entirely a handicap to a high-priced employee in maintaining himself in a milieu of power politics. Murrow has achieved a position at C. In radio and television, those who appear on factual programs are ordinarily looked upon as poor cousins of the entertainers, because, as in most business enterprises, there is a tendency to value performance in terms of the amount of money it brings in, and in that the entertainers notoriously lead the field.

By appealing to all heights of brow—from the people who listen to comedians to the ones who tune in on symphonies—Murrow has risen far above the ranks of the poor cousins, and in doing so has achieved a singular amount of freedom from authority of any kind. Not only does he do pretty much as he pleases about running his own shows but he has had a fairly free hand in the creation and development of the whole C.

During the nine years he served as European director of the service, he hired many of its correspondents, often against the better judgment of his superiors, and he has doggedly fought off interference with their reporting, both from above and from the outside. Moreover, he has relentlessly looked after the best interests of the men he has hired—a loyal group known in C. Firmly entrenched though Murrow would seem to be, however, his position is an uneasy one, as he tacitly admitted when he insisted on inserting a clause in his contract that will release him from it should Paley ever cease to be the ultimate authority on the board.

This proviso is an indication of a relationship that goes a long way toward explaining how Murrow has been able to carve out his highly unusual niche in C.

Bill needs Ed to remind him to think in terms of news. Lack of money was the dominant theme of his youth. He was born on a small farm near Greensboro, North Carolina, in , the youngest of three brothers.

The eldest, Lacey, is now a brigadier general in the Air Force, and the other, Dewey, is a contractor in Spokane. The father, an easygoing two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder, taught his sons to fish and shoot, and liked to roughhouse with them. Then the father found work in a sawmill and the family moved into a house, and from the sawmill he went to a logging railroad, first as a brakeman and then as a locomotive engineer.

Murrow started earning money summers at the age of fifteen, as a whistle punk in a lumber camp, and at sixteen he was the fireman of a donkey engine; his last two years in high school he drove the school bus. After graduating, he worked a year as chainman for a survey gang, saving money for college. He wanted to go to the University of Virginia but decided it would take too long to earn enough money, so he went to Washington State College, where his brothers had gone.

He helped to pay his way by tending furnaces and washing dishes in a sorority house, and in the summers he continued to work in lumber camps. He got good grades, went in for some college dramatics, and became president of the student council, but he had no time, and little aptitude, for athletics.

In his last year at Washington State, Murrow was elected president of the West Coast Student Councils, and this led, after his graduation, in —at which he smudged a distinguished record by tripping over his sabre in the R.

Murrow was an earnest and hard-working young man; in two years he not only arranged dozens of tours but made speeches describing them at over a hundred colleges and universities and took one jaunt around Europe himself. Then, in , he found a better job, as assistant director of the Institute of International Education, an enterprise concerned with facilitating the exchange of graduate students and professors and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.

One of the attractions of this job was a free trip to Europe each summer. The director of the Institute was Professor Stephen P. Duggan, of C. I was running a kind of revolving seminar. Most of my time was spent with people twenty to forty years older than I was. They took me seriously, and I guess I took myself pretty seriously. Having just got married to Janet Brewster, a graduate of Mount Holyoke, whom he had met a couple of years earlier, he was on the verge of accepting the offer.

Then I heard that C. Murrow joined C. He got more into the thick of things during the months that preceded the Presidential election of the following year when, as assistant producer, he helped with some of the campaign broadcasts. In February, , in New Orleans, where he had gone to deliver a speech before the National Education Association, he received a long-distance call from Edward Klauber, who was then the executive vice-president of Columbia, asking him if he would like to go to Europe and indicating that he wanted an immediate answer.

Murrow immediately answered yes, and found himself with the title of European director of C. There were summer conferences in Salzburg and other pleasant places. I had no desire at the time to become a broadcaster. Why would I, with a job like that? It was more or less by accident that Murrow became a broadcaster. Radio reporting had fumbled its way to the point where not only politicians but well-known newspapermen were being called to the microphone to comment on important news.

The National Broadcasting Company even had a correspondent in Europe to report the news over the air. Shirer, and stationed him on the Continent. Shirer was in Vienna—he was trying to arrange a broadcast by a chorus of school children—in March, , when Hitler took over Austria. Murrow advised him to fly to London and broadcast it himself. Murrow then flew to Vienna. By the time he arrived, N. New York had raised no objection to his having put Shirer on the air—it was the first news broadcast from abroad in C.

When he got back to London, he found that his status had changed. Klauber, who before going to C. Because most of the news of the day was being made in Europe and Murrow was on the scene, Paley instructed him to build up a staff. Hottelet, and Bill Downs. After one of the new Murrow recruits had made his first broadcast, Murrow would frequently get a telephone call from Paley or Klauber complaining that the fellow was terrible.

During the Battle of Britain, he reported air raids from the streets and rooftops, drove an open car, and made a point of dining under a skylight, and he inexplicably found it necessary to have his office as close as he could get it to the headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which Nazi bombers treated as a prize target; the London C. When the Allies took over the offensive in the air, Murrow showed at least an equal disregard for his own safety by his insistence on going out on bombing missions.

Although the young Murrow originally sought a pre-law degree, Ida Anderson, his public speaking teacher, inspired Edward to pursue a future in broadcasting. Murrow graduated in , and the ambitious communicator and President of the National Student Federation later moved to Washington, D.

As events fell into place for the start of the second World War, Murrow was commissioned to Europe to report on the war. His first report came in from Vienna. Some of his most detailed and best accounts are from his Britain broadcasts. Not a sound to be heard.

As I look out across the miles and miles of rooftops and chimney pots, some of those dirty-gray fronts of the buildings look almost snow-white in this moonlight here tonight.