Keith Olbermann: today’s Edward R. Murrow?
Jul 4th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Egbert Roscoe Murrow, later known as plain Ed Murrow, born April 25, 1908 near Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, half a century ago set the standard for responsible American television journalism. His finest hour came on March 9, 1954, when a half-hour documentary quoting the documented utterances of Wisconsin’s hysterically red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy brought the turning point in that vile demagogue’s career and led directly to his self-disgrace and downfall. I vividly recalled that telecast when I watched, fascinated, Keith Olbermann’s latest commentary in his “Countdown” program on MSNBC.
He has laced into Dubya and his gang before, but this blast goes far above and beyond any of those excoriations yet to come to my expatriated attention. For me, like Murrow in the 1950s, Olbermann - especially in the degenerate age of Fox News and such repulsive journalistic excrescences as Ann C**lt*r - has firmly restored journalism to the status of an honorable profession.
I both marvel and rejoice that MSNBC keeps Olbermann on the air; they assuredly cannot find it easy to find sponsors for him. During that bygone Murrow era, his own network, CBS, ranked head and shoulders for quality over its rivals NBC and ABC, but when Murrow and his equally courageous producer Fred Friendly launched their Person to Person series, CBS chickened out and left it to Murrow and Friendly to pay for their own newspaper advertising of their new series.
From that distant time, Murrow’s telecasts - especially the one that so skillfully maneuvered McCarthy into self-destruction by means of incontestably documented fact - remained so memorable that the Koch Vision label reissued them.
Letters, telegrams, and phone-calls at the time deluged CBS by the thousands, running 15 to 1 in support of Murrow. In a later A&E network tribute to Murrow, Fred Friendly recounted how, for instance, truck-drivers would pull up to the curb when they spotted Murrow on the street and call to him: “Good show, Ed!”
On this July 4th Independence Day I personally find precious little for Americans to celebrate, but I make a salient exception for Keith Olbermann in general and for this installment in particular, and I whole-heartedly commend it to you on this particular day as reassurance that the American principles laid down in 1776 - the present White House mob notwithstanding - have definitely not died.
