« Previous Story | Next Story »

February 13, 2006

An American Icon Newly Polished

Murrow Center revival coincides with Hollywood buzz about famed journalist

He was the patron saint of broadcast news. Edward R. Murrow’s live broadcasts from London in 1940 brought the Blitz into American living rooms and set the standard for radio and, later, television news reporting. Generations of journalism students have gone to school on his See It Now show that helped take down Sen. Joe McCarthy, and his CBS Reports exposé of the plight of migrant farm workers, “Harvest of Shame.” Murrow sought to make TV more than “merely wires and lights in a box,” in his words, and in so doing, became the icon for integrity in broadcast journalism. “He’s the head of the parade, he’s the pinnacle of the pyramid,” colleague Walter Cronkite said. “He led the way.”

The Murrow legend has gained fresh currency with the release of the George Clooney film Good Night, and Good Luck, about the newsman’s joust against the Red Scare tactics of Sen. McCarthy. This upsurge in publicity has coincided—fortuitously, for Tufts—with a recently launched effort by the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy to raise the profile of one of its jewels, the Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy.

The Murrow Center, dedicated in 1965, houses the late CBS newsman’s papers, and serves to promote academic work, fresh research, and dialogue relating to the field of public diplomacy. Many distinguished journalists, diplomats, and policymakers have spent time at the center, among them David Halberstam, who worked on his Pulitzer-winning book, The Best and the Brightest, as a writer-in-residence in the early 1970s.

The center, a bit neglected in recent years, has been reborn under Fletcher Dean Stephen Bosworth, who describes public diplomacy as a newly critical element of foreign affairs.

Crocker Snow Jr., longtime Boston Globe journalist and founding editor of The World Paper, happened to be Fletcher’s first Edward R. Murrow Scholar in the mid-1960s, and he has returned to the Murrow Center as director. Crocker Snow, Jr.

“Murrow’s great legacy was one of credibility, of not being cowed by authority in presenting the truth,” said Snow. That legacy is underscored in the revitalized programming Snow is overseeing at the center.

An advance screening of Good Night, and Good Luck before a capacity crowd in Barnum Hall September 29 was attended by Murrow’s son, Casey, and highlighted by a Q&A with actor David Strathairn, who plays Murrow in the film. Recent speakers at the center have included NPR analyst Daniel Schorr, a Murrow disciple earlier at CBS News, 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney, and advertising executive Keith Reinhard, head of Business for Diplomatic Acton.

Karen Hughes, the State Department’s new undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs who recently made her first “listening tour” of Muslim countries in the Middle East, has accepted an invitation to speak at the Murrow Center this academic year, Snow said, while a dialogue between U.S. and Arab editors is planned in March.

Meantime, a fundraising push is under way to support an endowed Murrow Chair, an annual lecture series, an annual scholarly conference, and expanded and improved course offerings.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the center’s dedication by Vice President Hubert Humphrey two years after Murrow died and left his scripts, broadcasts, and professional papers to the Fletcher School.

The term “public diplomacy” was coined at the time by Fletcher School Dean Edmund A. Gullion to refer to the “influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policy…encompassing dimensions of foreign relations beyond traditional diplomacy.”

Murrow was seen as the consummate “public diplomat” as head of the United States Information Agency in the Kennedy years, when his job was to “tell the world about America in words, not weapons,” through Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. He sought, in his own words, “to make U.S. foreign policies everywhere intelligible, and wherever possible, palatable.”

The U.S. Information Agency was phased out in the 1990s, the cold war over, its job seen as done. But if public diplomacy ever has been needed, Snow said, it’s needed today, when American image and popularity abroad are at low ebb. A renewed public diplomacy, he added, would incorporate the many nongovernmental players—including corporations, the media, and the entertainment industry—that play a large role in shaping international public opinion today.

“The key ingredients of public diplomacy are credibility and empathy,” Snow said. “The end of public diplomacy is a more accurate or balanced view of America; if goodwill and understanding are the end results, all the better.”

Edward R. Murrow provided the model, said Snow. “He had great credibility as a journalist, and he brought that credibility to the government.”

On the web: fletcher.tufts.edu/murrow.

Mark Sullivan - reprinted from Tufts Magazine

Posted by fletcher at February 13, 2006 11:37 AM