Ed Murrow: warned that unless TV was used to teach, illuminate and inspire 'it is merely wires and lights in a box'. Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty
Ed Murrow: a voice from the past with lessons for today's news broadcasters
Exactly 50 years ago today, the legendary American journalist Edward R Murrow stood up in front of the cream of American network television and warned them of the consequences for serious journalism if broadcasters were not prepared to "get up off our fat surpluses".
Murrow's impassioned plea on October 15 1958 was powerful enough for George Clooney to turn it into the opening sequence of his movie Goodnight … and Good Luck. And reading it 50 years on, it still has an uncanny resonance for the future of broadcast journalism.This instrument - television - said Murrow, "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".
Murrow understood the extraordinary potential of television as a force for enlightenment. But he also understood that left to its own devices, it would drive journalism down a vacuous black hole.
Over there, no-one listened. From the early 80s, the economics of news shifted dramatically. Competition for on-screen talent escalated. Cable news channels started making inroads. The big corporations took over.
And news became part of a bitter rating war, as network bulletins turned away from anything serious, foreign or challenging in favor of a crude audience-grabbing agenda: gory crimes, celebrity divorces, disasters with dramatic pictures, the trivial and the bizarre.
Without any regulatory obligations for quality, investment, or scheduling, network news divisions could only move in one direction: downwards. Today, some of America's most dedicated TV practitioners rail against the descent of network news into a market-driven celebrity, sensationalism, and trivia.
Meanwhile, the US media regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, stands aloof watching the carnage, described by one network news executive as "toothless and gutless".
Over here, we traveled a different route. Within a few months of going on-air in 1955, the ITV companies faced financial difficulties and unilaterally cut money and time from the channel's nascent news service, ITN. The Independent Television Authority, our first TV regulator, stepped in and demanded a daily minimum of 20 minutes' peak-time news.
Ten years later, in 1967, the regulator ordered an experimental extension to 30 minutes, then insisted in the face of bitter opposition from ITV that this should continue for another year – and so regulation paved the way for News at Ten as an authoritative competitor to BBC news for the best part of 30 years.
In 1982, Channel 4's first chief executive, Jeremy Isaacs, constructed a new editorial vision for television news out of the channel's statutory remit to be different. No crime, disaster, or Royal Family stories - but an agenda of politics, the City, science, technology, and the arts with lashings of foreign news. For one hour in the middle of peak time. A framework laid down in law promoted a serious approach to television news that has survived to the present day, watched regularly by more than 1 million viewers.
Even when Margaret Thatcher bequeathed a "light touch" regulator in 1990, the Independent Television Commission, it took two attempts for the newly liberated ITV companies to be allowed to move News at Ten - a move they subsequently regretted.
And despite the rhetoric of deregulation, the 2003 Communications Act maintained obligations for national and international news in peak time on the commercial public service broadcasters, even adding that ITV's service should be properly funded. While the ITC's successor Ofcom's position on regional news may be shaken by ITV's pleas of poverty, its defense of the main news bulletins has - so far - remained robust.
Regulation may be coming back into fashion in the banking industry, but its virtues bear repeating in broadcast journalism as Channel 4 seeks public subsidy and ITV cannot even guarantee that it will be doing news in 10 years' time.
Fifty years after Murrow's speech, this may be the time to dust down his words and shout them out again; because the forces that turned American television journalism into another branch of showbusiness are gathering steam over here.
Steven Barnett is professor of communications at the University of Westminster. A longer version of this article will appear in the next edition of the British Journalism Review. Read the full text of Murrow's speech here.
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