What do you think?
Rate this book
Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism
He has covered and analyzed nearly every major event of our the founding of NATO, the building of the Berlin Wall, the 1950s McCarthy hearings, and the 1990s Clinton impeachment hearings. As both a national and international eyewitness, Daniel Schorr has spent six decades fully engaged in world-watching.
After opening the CBS bureau in Moscow in 1955 and arranging an unprecedented television interview with Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev, Daniel Schorr went on to a career often revered and sometimes reviled. His no-holds-barred approach to reporting won him three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, and landed him on Nixon's "enemies list." In the 1970s, his refusal to name sources regarding CIA and FBI misdeeds led to his being threatened with jail for contempt by the House Ethics Committee. Always probing, Daniel Schorr continues in his quest for the truth as the senior news analyst for National Public Radio®.
This amazing autobiography not only details the life and times of the octogenarian newsman -- the last of the legendary Edward R. Murrow news team still active in journalism -- but also poses some important questions about the future of media.
After opening the CBS bureau in Moscow in 1955 and arranging an unprecedented television interview with Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev, Daniel Schorr went on to a career often revered and sometimes reviled. His no-holds-barred approach to reporting won him three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, and landed him on Nixon's "enemies list." In the 1970s, his refusal to name sources regarding CIA and FBI misdeeds led to his being threatened with jail for contempt by the House Ethics Committee. Always probing, Daniel Schorr continues in his quest for the truth as the senior news analyst for National Public Radio®.
This amazing autobiography not only details the life and times of the octogenarian newsman -- the last of the legendary Edward R. Murrow news team still active in journalism -- but also poses some important questions about the future of media.
354 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2001
7 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Schorr
16 books9 followersDaniel Louis Schorr was an American journalist who covered world news for more than 60 years. He was most recently a Senior News Analyst for National Public Radio (NPR). Schorr won three Emmy Awards for his television journalism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 12, 2012
Man I miss this guy. My Saturday mornings will never be the same.
September 13, 2010
Recommended for news junkies and those interested in the Cold War and/or Watergate. Not as good as I expected, honestly, but what a compelling and impressive life Daniel Schorr led!
September 3, 2011
Interesting to read but not great.
April 12, 2012
Summary: Daniel Schorr is a man of conviction who has witnessed important history, but you'd hardly know that from his book. People who admire Schorr passionately might find something worthwhile here. Everyone else is better off waiting for a book about him by someone else.
_____
Daniel Schorr describes himself in his autobiography as the "recording secretary" of his generation. It is an unfortunately apt analogy. Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism reads like the minutes of a long meeting.
Schorr's uncharacteristically flat prose provides an outline of his career and of many of the significant events of the second half of the 20th-century, which Schorr covered for CBS, CNN and National Public Radio. But his recounting of his history and the world's is so shallow that it, like notes taken for minutes, is helpful mostly as a reminder to those who were there. Anyone who expects Schorr to convey a sense of what it was like to be a distinguished correspondent in Khrushchev's Russia, Adenauer's Germany or even Nixon's Washington will be disappointed. In a memoir Schorr said he "had" to write to "help people remember an era fast disappearing," Schorr provides nothing to help his readers understand what he has seen.
Schorr saw, for example, the hearings in the 1950s on alleged Communist infiltration of the United States government. Schorr writes that he watched Senator Joseph McCarthy "destroy" a government worker whom Schorr had known in Europe. He says it was a "chilling" experience. But in the mere four sentences Schorr writes about the trials, he adds no detail to the historical record. His reporting consists almost entirely of quoting lawyer Joseph Welch's famous admonition of McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of shame?"
That quote is familiar to anyone interested in the history of the era. And Schorr quotes it incorrectly. Welch said, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Shame on Schorr. Reading his glancing and inaccurate citation serves only to leave the reader wondering in frustration why Schorr bothered to mention it all.
That frustration will become depressingly familiar to anyone who wades through all of Schorr's 349 pages of fleeting references and vague descriptions. It taints even his account of his coverage of Watergate, which made Schorr a familiar figure throughout the U.S. There is nothing in his chapter on the White House coverup that led to Richard Nixon's resignation that hasn't been reported elsewhere in more detail. Schorr's reporting of Watergate and other stories infuriated Nixon and earned Schorr a spot on the president's infamous "enemies list."
Schorr's inclusion on that list could be the subject of a fascinating book by itself, but Schorr's treatment of it in Staying Tuned is cursory:
What interested me was that paranoid word enemy, an ominous new concept in American political life where opponent, adversary, and rival had sufficed before. I do not know what tax audits and possible break-ins would have lain in store for us "enemies" (with other lists they totaled 499 names) had Nixon not soon become preoccupied with his own survival.
That conclusion could have been written by any casual observer of Watergate, and the reader of Staying Tuned gains nothing from Schorr's having been involved personally.
This is true of Schorr's description of every single event he covered then and mentions now. Schorr's recollections of reporting from the U.S. South as it was torn by racial strife in the early 1960s are absolutely empty. His memories of covering Germany during the time that the superpowers struggled fiercely and dangerously over control of Berlin are notable only for their extraordinary accomplishment of making the Atomic Age anxieties sparked by the conflicts seem unimportant and uninteresting. Schorr's contemporary account of his years of reporting from the Soviet Union during some of the hottest years of the Cold War so lacks vividness that it could have been written by someone who got no closer to the country than Moscow, Idaho.
Schorr fails to give his readers any sense of the people he met. He spent years covering Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and decades later call him a "friend." He says their acquaintance was "remarkable," but provides no explanation. The reader is left to conclude that its only remarkable feature is that two men could be civil to each other while their countries were hostile. Schorr's conclusion after Khrushchev is dead: "So, Nikita Sergeyevich, in the end they buried you." That epitaph has been offered by hundreds of writers who never met Khrushchev.
Schorr's squandering the opportunity to describe such familiar figures as Khrushchev is not as maddening as his refusal -- it is too constant to be accidental -- to provide details about other people he covered, people who are not as well-known to contemporary audiences. Konrad Adenauer defied the Nazis when he was mayor of Cologne, and he went on to shape much of the foundation of modern Germany while he served as the country's chancellor. But Schorr shares little of his insights into Adenauer's character and reports nothing new about his actions. Schorr's conclusion after Adenauer dies in 1967 is to note "the contrast between [John F.] Kennedy, cut off in his youth, and Adenauer, who had outlived his era." That observation is so obvious that it is insulting to require a reader to invest time and money to reach it.
Students of journalism will find Schorr's memoir no more satisfying than will students of history. He was, briefly, a visiting professor until he realized that he is not interested in shaping the minds of disinterested students. Sadly, he is no more interested in educating interested readers.
Schorr was thrust into a spotlight when the U.S. House of Representative's Ethics Committee threated in 1975 to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal his source for a secret government report about the Central Intelligence Agency's illegal involvement in espionage in the United States. Schorr writes that he absolutely could not reveal his source, but he leaves it to his readers to guess the reasons for his deep conviction and to try to divine the philosophy behind it. It is profoundly unsatisfying that a man celebrated for representing freedoms of the press should require that we project on him our own ideas about those liberties.
Schorr is as inscrutable about his thinking in other instances where circumstances challenged his commitment to reporting. For instance, Schorr was a reporter in the Netherlands in the early 1950s, when that country's membership in NATO was important but tenuous. After Princess Juliana reluctantly assumed the throne from her phenomenally popular mother, Queen Wilhelmina, she sought guidance from a religious leader whom Schorr calls a "fanatic" and compares to Rasputin, without providing any support for the charges. Schorr has come to be fond of the Dutch and worries that his article about the spiritual leader's influence might harm their country. So he asks Time magazine to kill the article. Later the government of the Netherlands gives him a medal in appreciation. Does Schorr regret his decision? Why? Or why not? Did this incident affect his decisions later in his career? To these and other questions, Schorr is resolutely indifferent.
Schorr criticizes a 60 Minutes segment about him by Mike Wallace as a "hatchet job" without sharing any corroboration for so damning an indictment of one of his former colleagues. And he lambastes Dan Rather for living in a "luxurious glass house" while throwing stones at journalists who don't do their jobs properly. But Schorr keeps to himself any suggestion of how he would have handled things differently if he were in their positions. Whatever Schorr sees from the journalistic high road he claims to travel, he keeps it to himself.
Occasionally Schorr quotes himself to good effect. He thought Oliver North was a charming liar during his Iran-Contra testimony in 1987. "As they taught us in school, magnetic North should not be confused with true North."And of Boris Yeltsin's rise to power, Schorr notes, "The Gorbachev era in Russia comes to an end with a singular inelegance, looking less like a succession than an eviction." But these bits at the end of his lengthy and lifeless account serve mostly to remind the reader that Schorr's prose throughout almost the entire book is plain and flat.
Schorr promises that his chronicle will be more about his career than his personal life. And while Schorr doesn't go into extensive detail about his life off-camera and away from microphones, he ironically manages to tell his readers more about his family than he does about his reporting. An ulcer hindered his social life for years, and it was only after surgery to repair it that he was able to meet the woman he loves. Schorr was 50 years old when he and his wife, Lisbeth, married. His mother was nervous. When A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of The New York Times compliments her about her son's marrying so intelligent and beautiful a woman, Schorr's mother answers, "Believe me, Abe, I would have settled for a lot less."
Until some future biographer crafts an adequate biography of Schorr, readers of Staying Tuned have to settle for a lot less, too.
_____
Daniel Schorr describes himself in his autobiography as the "recording secretary" of his generation. It is an unfortunately apt analogy. Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism reads like the minutes of a long meeting.
Schorr's uncharacteristically flat prose provides an outline of his career and of many of the significant events of the second half of the 20th-century, which Schorr covered for CBS, CNN and National Public Radio. But his recounting of his history and the world's is so shallow that it, like notes taken for minutes, is helpful mostly as a reminder to those who were there. Anyone who expects Schorr to convey a sense of what it was like to be a distinguished correspondent in Khrushchev's Russia, Adenauer's Germany or even Nixon's Washington will be disappointed. In a memoir Schorr said he "had" to write to "help people remember an era fast disappearing," Schorr provides nothing to help his readers understand what he has seen.
Schorr saw, for example, the hearings in the 1950s on alleged Communist infiltration of the United States government. Schorr writes that he watched Senator Joseph McCarthy "destroy" a government worker whom Schorr had known in Europe. He says it was a "chilling" experience. But in the mere four sentences Schorr writes about the trials, he adds no detail to the historical record. His reporting consists almost entirely of quoting lawyer Joseph Welch's famous admonition of McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of shame?"
That quote is familiar to anyone interested in the history of the era. And Schorr quotes it incorrectly. Welch said, "At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Shame on Schorr. Reading his glancing and inaccurate citation serves only to leave the reader wondering in frustration why Schorr bothered to mention it all.
That frustration will become depressingly familiar to anyone who wades through all of Schorr's 349 pages of fleeting references and vague descriptions. It taints even his account of his coverage of Watergate, which made Schorr a familiar figure throughout the U.S. There is nothing in his chapter on the White House coverup that led to Richard Nixon's resignation that hasn't been reported elsewhere in more detail. Schorr's reporting of Watergate and other stories infuriated Nixon and earned Schorr a spot on the president's infamous "enemies list."
Schorr's inclusion on that list could be the subject of a fascinating book by itself, but Schorr's treatment of it in Staying Tuned is cursory:
What interested me was that paranoid word enemy, an ominous new concept in American political life where opponent, adversary, and rival had sufficed before. I do not know what tax audits and possible break-ins would have lain in store for us "enemies" (with other lists they totaled 499 names) had Nixon not soon become preoccupied with his own survival.
That conclusion could have been written by any casual observer of Watergate, and the reader of Staying Tuned gains nothing from Schorr's having been involved personally.
This is true of Schorr's description of every single event he covered then and mentions now. Schorr's recollections of reporting from the U.S. South as it was torn by racial strife in the early 1960s are absolutely empty. His memories of covering Germany during the time that the superpowers struggled fiercely and dangerously over control of Berlin are notable only for their extraordinary accomplishment of making the Atomic Age anxieties sparked by the conflicts seem unimportant and uninteresting. Schorr's contemporary account of his years of reporting from the Soviet Union during some of the hottest years of the Cold War so lacks vividness that it could have been written by someone who got no closer to the country than Moscow, Idaho.
Schorr fails to give his readers any sense of the people he met. He spent years covering Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and decades later call him a "friend." He says their acquaintance was "remarkable," but provides no explanation. The reader is left to conclude that its only remarkable feature is that two men could be civil to each other while their countries were hostile. Schorr's conclusion after Khrushchev is dead: "So, Nikita Sergeyevich, in the end they buried you." That epitaph has been offered by hundreds of writers who never met Khrushchev.
Schorr's squandering the opportunity to describe such familiar figures as Khrushchev is not as maddening as his refusal -- it is too constant to be accidental -- to provide details about other people he covered, people who are not as well-known to contemporary audiences. Konrad Adenauer defied the Nazis when he was mayor of Cologne, and he went on to shape much of the foundation of modern Germany while he served as the country's chancellor. But Schorr shares little of his insights into Adenauer's character and reports nothing new about his actions. Schorr's conclusion after Adenauer dies in 1967 is to note "the contrast between [John F.] Kennedy, cut off in his youth, and Adenauer, who had outlived his era." That observation is so obvious that it is insulting to require a reader to invest time and money to reach it.
Students of journalism will find Schorr's memoir no more satisfying than will students of history. He was, briefly, a visiting professor until he realized that he is not interested in shaping the minds of disinterested students. Sadly, he is no more interested in educating interested readers.
Schorr was thrust into a spotlight when the U.S. House of Representative's Ethics Committee threated in 1975 to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to reveal his source for a secret government report about the Central Intelligence Agency's illegal involvement in espionage in the United States. Schorr writes that he absolutely could not reveal his source, but he leaves it to his readers to guess the reasons for his deep conviction and to try to divine the philosophy behind it. It is profoundly unsatisfying that a man celebrated for representing freedoms of the press should require that we project on him our own ideas about those liberties.
Schorr is as inscrutable about his thinking in other instances where circumstances challenged his commitment to reporting. For instance, Schorr was a reporter in the Netherlands in the early 1950s, when that country's membership in NATO was important but tenuous. After Princess Juliana reluctantly assumed the throne from her phenomenally popular mother, Queen Wilhelmina, she sought guidance from a religious leader whom Schorr calls a "fanatic" and compares to Rasputin, without providing any support for the charges. Schorr has come to be fond of the Dutch and worries that his article about the spiritual leader's influence might harm their country. So he asks Time magazine to kill the article. Later the government of the Netherlands gives him a medal in appreciation. Does Schorr regret his decision? Why? Or why not? Did this incident affect his decisions later in his career? To these and other questions, Schorr is resolutely indifferent.
Schorr criticizes a 60 Minutes segment about him by Mike Wallace as a "hatchet job" without sharing any corroboration for so damning an indictment of one of his former colleagues. And he lambastes Dan Rather for living in a "luxurious glass house" while throwing stones at journalists who don't do their jobs properly. But Schorr keeps to himself any suggestion of how he would have handled things differently if he were in their positions. Whatever Schorr sees from the journalistic high road he claims to travel, he keeps it to himself.
Occasionally Schorr quotes himself to good effect. He thought Oliver North was a charming liar during his Iran-Contra testimony in 1987. "As they taught us in school, magnetic North should not be confused with true North."And of Boris Yeltsin's rise to power, Schorr notes, "The Gorbachev era in Russia comes to an end with a singular inelegance, looking less like a succession than an eviction." But these bits at the end of his lengthy and lifeless account serve mostly to remind the reader that Schorr's prose throughout almost the entire book is plain and flat.
Schorr promises that his chronicle will be more about his career than his personal life. And while Schorr doesn't go into extensive detail about his life off-camera and away from microphones, he ironically manages to tell his readers more about his family than he does about his reporting. An ulcer hindered his social life for years, and it was only after surgery to repair it that he was able to meet the woman he loves. Schorr was 50 years old when he and his wife, Lisbeth, married. His mother was nervous. When A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of The New York Times compliments her about her son's marrying so intelligent and beautiful a woman, Schorr's mother answers, "Believe me, Abe, I would have settled for a lot less."
Until some future biographer crafts an adequate biography of Schorr, readers of Staying Tuned have to settle for a lot less, too.
May 18, 2017
Reminiscent of the novel about "the 100 year old man who climbed out of the window ". I have a new respect for journalism after reading this book, and we need excellent journalism now more than ever.
February 15, 2019
It was interesting to read about the Watergate era as we live through the scandals of the current administration. Obviously Daniel Schorr writes well. It is very much about his professional life with only hints about the personal.
February 27, 2018
Great read! A lifetime of journalism made Schorr an outstanding story teller with a very humble approach.
Very timely read as he discussed being in Russia in the forties and fifties with their antagonist stance towards media. His return to the USA in the sixties and seventies revealed that as much as we think today's current political climate is tough it was actually worse at one point.
Makes you hopeful for the future but see the absolute necessity of having a free press to challenge the lies governments tell us
Very timely read as he discussed being in Russia in the forties and fifties with their antagonist stance towards media. His return to the USA in the sixties and seventies revealed that as much as we think today's current political climate is tough it was actually worse at one point.
Makes you hopeful for the future but see the absolute necessity of having a free press to challenge the lies governments tell us
January 14, 2017
STAYING TUNED: A LIFE IN JOURNALISM is the mémoire of famed broadcaster Daniel Schorr. It chronicles his 30-years with CBS News, 5-years with CNN, and concludes while he was a weekend commentator for National Public Radio. Schorr comes across as a bit of an abrasive personality and a First Amendment zealot who regularly ran into conflict with his bosses. It is a reminder that the news media has always been subject to commercial and political influence. Just as there is no such thing as pure objectivity, there is also no such thing as pure independent journalism free from the constraints of outside power and wealth. STAYING TUNED makes for fascinating reading. Schorr led a life of adventure even though, by his own admission, he was a coward. But I wonder if Schorr fully realized how often he was being “played” by the very sources that made him an iconoclast.
July 20, 2013
While he was a featured commentator with Scott Simon on NPR's "Weekend Edition," Daniel Schorr was the "voice of reason" who always made sense of world events and national politics, no matter how depressing or clamorous to me. His death left a void that no one else has filled in the same way. (Except sometimes Jon Stewart.)
His autobiography is interesting, reasonable: he was a hardworking and dedicated journalist whose career covered a lot of ground.
I especially enjoyed the jokes he quotes from various times and places: they so vividly tell of their Cold War times. And then there's the time when he's on the air, reading an announcement of President Nixon's "Enemies List" and he suddenly encounters HIS OWN NAME! Wow.
His autobiography is interesting, reasonable: he was a hardworking and dedicated journalist whose career covered a lot of ground.
I especially enjoyed the jokes he quotes from various times and places: they so vividly tell of their Cold War times. And then there's the time when he's on the air, reading an announcement of President Nixon's "Enemies List" and he suddenly encounters HIS OWN NAME! Wow.
Want to read
July 12, 2007I got this for my birthday? Cool.
August 29, 2016
this is really written by Daniel Schorr. His prejudices and singular perspective on 60 years of American history in Russia, Poland, the Netherlands and United States.
000-099-generalities
January 15, 2020070.92
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews