War, the Lead Story
The movies, radio, and journalism were all affected by the fight to liberate Europe and the Pacific. The war’s events made people hungrier for news than they had ever been, and a boom in radio news programs, movie newsreels, and newspaper sales resulted. The sheer logistics of mobilizing for war also placed a greater demand on the news media, as people sought information about employment, the services, and volunteering. The news explosion occurred together with codes of voluntary self-censorship adopted by the various media, which wished to avoid being run entirely by the government. Any information that could remotely aid the enemy was weeded out.
Patriotism was in style, and emotions ran high during the early forties. Loved ones were away indefinitely, family life was disrupted, and shortages occurred. Movies and radio offered an escape, fantasy, and the promise of a better future. The media translated Americans’ wishful thinking into indelible images. Programming became overly sentimental, saturated with cozy images of the ideal hearth and home.
The war itself was a much-repeated subject in which good and bad were clearly delineated. Characters depicted what Americans saw as their highest virtues: honor, self-reliance, and sacrifice for others. It is no accident that the American media tended to portray moral absolutes: Heroes were heroic, villains were villainous, and there was no ambiguity about it. Uncertainty about right and wrong was not allowed any quarter in America’s push for victory.
Toward this end, the government issued guidelines that influenced media content, recognizing right away that radio and movies could be used to keep morale high. Indeed, the government spent a lot of money making films and radio programs to deliver a patriotic message. But propaganda was nothing new to Americans in wartime. World War I had seen the glorification of the doughboy and patriotic songs such as "Over There." But there was something shrill about World War II media, no doubt because the government had such a large stake in much of the propaganda and guided its content to achieve victory. The message got hammered home again and again.
Much of the pounding was done by celebrities hired by the government to sell the war cause. Stars gave concerts to the troops, sold war bonds, and visited wounded soldiers, not to mention acting or singing in hundreds of war-related movies, radio programs, and popular songs. Naturally, it was good publicity for a star to be seen as a patriot during war. But the stars also gave war an added glamour and excitement that belied the drab uncertainties that most Americans lived with during wartime.
The Radio Lifeline
Between 1925 and 1948, the year of television’s first appearance, radio was where tens of millions of Americans turned each day for information and relaxation. Having emerged in 1920 as a viable medium, by 1940 thirty million homes in America possessed radios, or one for every four people. Families tuned into their favorite programs on a daily or weekly basis, much as with television today.
Radio was immediate. It was also highly intimate: Announcers sounded like they were in the room with the listener. Radio first brought Americans the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini in the thirties. And it was on the radio that most Americans learned that the nation was at war on December 8, 1941, when they heard Roosevelt announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor. From this day forward, news became radio’s biggest contribution to the war.
Official war messages were delivered over the radio, too — pleas to buy war bonds, announcements about rationing, appeals for scrap drives and volunteers for the USO or Red Cross, interruptions in programming for news flashes, and other items of interest. Radio offered an incessant vocal crusade on behalf of the war effort.
Military-oriented programming also proliferated, increasing empathy for American boys overseas. Programs such as "The Man Behind the Gun," "The Army Hour," and "Stage Door Canteen" were all propagandistic war movies. Children’s programming, especially, was propagandized, with military heroes as their subject: "Don Winslow of the Navy," "Captain Midnight," and "Terry and the Pirates" were typical.
American radio of the forties was also highly varied. In addition to news and music of every description, programming included fine drama, westerns, soap operas, quiz shows, sports, comedy-variety shows, and detective-crime mysteries — most of these formats a product of radio’s growth years in the thirties. Game shows and quiz shows, however, were sharply curtailed during the war, since it was feared that live audiences and players could give secret codes and messages to the enemy over this medium.
War’s end brought a period of reevaluation for radio. The Cold War cropped up in new social commentary shows such as "Meet the Press," and "Capitol Cloakroom." Quiz shows and game shows again became big. However, by the end of the decade, many of the same programs that had become popular in the twenties and thirties were still dominating the air waves, and radio seemed unable to offer anything new.
When television arrived in 1948, it quickly supplanted radio. Early television programming was not so different from the familiar formats of radio quiz shows and variety hours; in fact, television was called "sight radio" by many. Early television owed much of its success to the crossover of radio artists such as Milton Berle, Ed Sullivan, and Edward R. Murrow into television. By 1950, television shows such as "The Goldbergs," "Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts," and "The Life of Riley" came directly from radio, complete with the same stars and sponsors. But the novelty of seeing the program eclipsed the humble radio. As the number of transmitters and TV stations increased in the fifties, TV replaced radio with fresh images, new talent, and new shows.
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Egbert "Edward" Roscoe Murrow. (1908-1965) |
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Edward R. Murrow was a broadcasting pioneer, one of the more influential newscasters who helped catapult the profession to national importance during World War II. His memorable wartime contribution was his live broadcasting during the Battle of Britain in 1940. The tall, lean, dark-haired CBS correspondent riveted American radio audiences as he stood night after night on a London rooftop, bringing the drama of the blitz directly into American living rooms. Over Murrow’s deep, dramatic voice, Americans could hear the screaming engines of the Nazi Luftwaffe and know that it was happening live as Murrow spoke. Murrow, remarkably, had virtually no newspaper reporting experience. But he possessed a great deal of intuition, verbal skills, and common sense. To Americans, he was the prototype of the dapper war correspondent; trench-coated, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He repeatedly put his own life on the line to bring the news to Americans. Not only was the BBC building from which he broadcast bombed three times, Murrow also flew along on Allied combat missions. Accompanying one such bombing mission over Berlin in 1943, he reported, "Berlin … was a kind of orchestrated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame. It isn’t a pleasant kind of warfare — the men doing it speak of it as a job." Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Murrow was the son of a farmer and sometime railroad engineer who moved the family to the Pacific Northwest when Murrow was a child. At Washington State College, Edward Murrow was an avid debater and actor. Graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Murrow toured Europe for the National Student Federation, during which time he learned skills that served him as a newscaster. Long interested in journalism, Murrow joined CBS in 1935, in the heyday of radio, and became its European director in 1937. In 1938, his colleague William Shirer called him from Vienna with the news of Hitler’s Anschluss through Austria. Murrow had the scoop. He then flew to Vienna to witness and report on the arrival of the Nazis firsthand. During these early days, when America was not yet in the war, Murrow and his colleagues had the difficult job of reporting these harrowing events while trying to maintain a neutral tone; American isolationism was strong and the journalistic code insisted on objectivity — no easy task in the face of Nazi aggression. After the war, with his reputation for compassionate yet clear-eyed reporting firmly established, Murrow produced the weekly news digest, "Hear It Now," and its television successor, "See It Now," from 1947 to 1960. He also reported from the foxholes of the Korean war in 1950 for CBS. In the fifties, Murrow’s television reporting helped to expose the Communist witch-hunting tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Murrow director of the U.S. Information Agency, a job that paid him a paltry $21,000, compared to the $300,000 he had earned at CBS. But the work was a matter of principle to Murrow. While director, he applied rigorous journalistic techniques to the agency’s information gathering, saying "We cannot make good news out of bad practice." He held this job until illness forced him to resign in 1964.
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