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The Murrow Boys: Pioneers in the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism
DESCRIPTION"The Murrow Boys" tells the story of the legendary band of correspondents who, under Edward R. Murrow's direction, formed CBS's pioneering World War II news team and, in doing so, invented modern broadcast journalism. All in their twenties and thirties, Murrow and the Boys (who included William L. Shirer, Eric Sevareid, and Howard K. Smith) covered and brought to vivid life the war's great events, from the German invasion of Poland to D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Young idealists, they believed they were here to change the world. But their triumphant early careers, which made them celebrities in America, would eventually come to grief in the fickle world of broadcasting. The increasing desire for entertainment, McCarthyism, the rise of corporate sponsorship, and ultimately the birth of television all conspired to taint the tradition of serious journalism as the Boys had known it. A dramatic, exhilarating narrative that portrays exceptional lives against the tumultuous backdrop of the last half century, The Murrow Boys is both a powerful reminder of the possibilities of broadcast journalism and a sharp-eyed account of where the craft went wrong. REVIEWS"This is one of those rare books, a history so vivid and clear you get fifty years younger by reading it, about a shining moment in the radio business, CBS's reporting from Europe at the outset of World War II."--Garrison Keillor"These great correspondents created and set the early standards for broadcast news. They and their dramatic stories represent the 'right stuff' of journalism." -- Walter Cronkite"A lively, colloquial history of broadcast journalism that is so exciting one's impulse is to read it in a single sitting." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"One of the most fascinating and important accounts of broadcast journalism I have read." -- Jeff Greenfield, Time"A riveting, entertaining, exhilarating, warts-and-all story." -- New York Daily News "A wonderful evocation of a time and of a group of men bound together by their loyalty to Edward R. Murrow. Men of integrity all, but not without petty jealousies, ambition, intrigue, and yes, great courage, too." -- Morley Safer"A greater appreciation of the glories of broadcasting can be gained by reading [this] book than by observing the reporting and interviewing styles of...current news personalities." -- New York Times"A book to savor." -- BookPage"Consistently fascinating, The Murrow Boys is essential reading for anyone interested in broadcast journalism...Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson give us a splendid sense of the professional heritage that broadcast journalists might someday reclaim." -- Dallas Morning News
718 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 1996
362 people are currently reading
900 people want to read
About the author
Stanley Cloud
4 books11 followersI was born and raised in and around Los Angeles and graduated as an English major from Pepperdine College. After college, I was a naval officer for six years.
I am also a former journalist (the Monterey Peninsula Herald, Time magazine, the Washington Star, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner) and, now, am the author or co-author of books, both fiction and non-fiction. With my wife -- the writer and historian Lynne Olson -- I have co-written two books: The Murrow Boys and A Question of Honor. My latest is a historical novel entitled The Manhattan Well , about Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and a murder trial that scandalized New York City in 1800. (The novel is available from Amazon; for more information, please see the book’s web site: http://www.the-manhattan-well.com
My journalistic career consisted of, among other things, 20 years as a foreign and domestic correspondent for Time, reporting from San Francisco, Moscow, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, Saigon and Washington, DC. I was Bangkok bureau chief from 1970 to 1971 and Saigon bureau chief from September 1971 to January 1973. I have interviewed five U.S. presidents and covered the U.S. Senate, national politics and the White House. In the late 1970s, I left Time and became managing editor of the Washington Star. Later, I was executive editor of the L.A. Herald Examiner. I returned to Time in 1987 and became Washington Bureau Chief in 1989. In 1993, I was named the magazine’s media columnist but decided to take early retirement at the end of that year to concentrate -- belatedly but enthusiastically -- on book writing. I am currently at work on a novel about the fraught relationship between Poles and Jews.
My wife and I have four children and make our home in Washington, D.C.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews
May 13, 2018
Cloud & Olson have produced a magnificent account of the beginnings of broadcast journalism in London, Berlin and other centers in the late 1930s into the war years.
... Murrow's opening … "This … is London" … delivered often with the sound of bombs in the background
... radio correspondents dug out stories with their reporting, wrote the scripts, and spoke on the air … creating a sense of immediacy
... Murrow's guidance … use language and images that are informative and compelling to you (the broadcaster) … avoid high-flown rhetoric and frenetic delivery … understate … don't be afraid to use the first person singular ("I") … be a friend chatting with other friends ... establish a closeness to your listeners ... put in one package, the hard news, the feel of the scene, the quality of the people involved, the implications
... Shirer stood on the German side of the Rhine, looking across to France's Maginot Line … to the north, Germans were bombing Norway, but here he could see only a "vast panorama of bucolic peace" … wondering what possible excuse there could be for France's paralysis when its own territory was threatened
... the German bombing was the perfect event for Murrow's new broadcast journalism … obvious human drama … sounds: sirens, bombs falling and exploding, antiaircraft guns
... Murrow's opening … "This … is London" … delivered often with the sound of bombs in the background
... radio correspondents dug out stories with their reporting, wrote the scripts, and spoke on the air … creating a sense of immediacy
... Murrow's guidance … use language and images that are informative and compelling to you (the broadcaster) … avoid high-flown rhetoric and frenetic delivery … understate … don't be afraid to use the first person singular ("I") … be a friend chatting with other friends ... establish a closeness to your listeners ... put in one package, the hard news, the feel of the scene, the quality of the people involved, the implications
... Shirer stood on the German side of the Rhine, looking across to France's Maginot Line … to the north, Germans were bombing Norway, but here he could see only a "vast panorama of bucolic peace" … wondering what possible excuse there could be for France's paralysis when its own territory was threatened
... the German bombing was the perfect event for Murrow's new broadcast journalism … obvious human drama … sounds: sirens, bombs falling and exploding, antiaircraft guns
May 11, 2024
It feels like ancient history now. A world like our own but different. A black and white world. The names -- once known in virtually every American household, by vast numbers in the UK and Europe and Asia -- are now largely forgotten, save by people of a certain age or unusual reading proclivities. Edward (born Egbert) R. Murrow, William Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Larry LeSueur, and others. Heads of state around the world met with them. Men and women gathered at their radios to hear their reports, rapt as they listened to every word and sometimes the sounds of exploding bombs behind the familiar voices. They were celebrities, bestselling authors, who revolutionized how the news was reported... and then quickly became casualties of what they had created.
Lynne Olson is the author of a number of my favorite books, including "Citizens of London." She wrote "The Murrow Boys" with her husband, Stanley Cloud. The title refers to the men hired by and working with Edward R. Murrow in reporting the news during World War 2 and afterwards. (They were referred to collectively at the time by that sobriquet.) Until they came along, news reporting was almost exclusively the job of newspapers and, to a lesser extent, newsreels shown in theaters before a movie started. CBS sent Murrow to Europe in the 1930s to cover choral presentations and such, not current events. Even as the continent began to smoulder with the rise of Hitler, the network told Murrow to stick to the music and leave the news and analysis to the print guys.
In time, Murrow managed to force the network brass to listen. And then the world listened too:
"Here was the perfect event for the new breed of radio journalists. It had immediacy, human drama, and sound — sirens, bombs falling and exploding, antiaircraft guns. Murrow had been arguing that the future of radio news lay in on-the-scene reporting, not in an announcer’s reading wire copy in New York and not in Monday-morning quarterbacking by some commentator."
"The Murrow Boys" captures the stories of these extraordinary individuals and their times: who they were and how they came to cover the war; how, for the first time in history, people thousands of miles away could hear history as it was being made, the sounds of German bombs dropping over London, Wehrmacht boots marching through the streets of captured cities. How they flew from one place to another, risking their lives time and again, to broadcast their reports in the hope -- all too commonly frustrated -- that their (typically unscheduled, because they were reporting live and recordings were prohibited by the network) broadcasts would go through, that someone at the station would hear them and put them on air, or that the weather wouldn't turn their report to unintelligible static. Of parachuting out of an airplane when the engines failed, or jumping into the ocean when the ship they're on was hit by torpedoes, of missing death by mere minutes and pure luck when the building they lived in was destroyed during the Blitz. Of arguing with obdurate corporate bosses who couldn't see what the world had become even as it was changing before them. Of being struck again and again at the indifference of Americans to what was happening in the world ("The problem was that [bosses] Paley, White, and the others, like most Americans, were losing interest again in foreign news as the Anschluss crisis faded. They had reverted to their normal preference for entertainment, and once again Shirer and Murrow were being dispatched to sign up European acts and attractions.")
It's the story of smoke-filled rooms -- so ubiquitous, these rooms, that most of the Murrow Boys eventually died of emphysema or other lung-related illnesses -- and epic consumption of alcohol, of affairs and broken marriages. Of egos and envy and betrayals and stage fright. Of being arrested by the Gestapo on trumped up espionage charges. Of covering a story in southern France while one's wife is giving birth to twins in a hospital under Nazi siege ("He reached the Neuilly clinic at midnight. The lights were off, the place seemed completely deserted. Sevareid had to feel his way along the hall to Lois’s room, desperately afraid something had happened to her. He found her in bed, looking frightened and lost. She hadn’t been afraid of the sirens, she told him, or the far-off explosions; what scared her was knowing that everybody else — the nurses and patients — had left. And there she was, alone with the twins, unable to walk, unable to do anything at all if the bombs came. Of Nazi propaganda and megalomaniac Allied generals, of accompanying the troops on the beaches on D-Day, of fighting the growing power of advertisers in how the news was reported, and the development of news-as-entertainment.
The book is filled with humanity, for good or bad, fearful and ambitious, and with haunting images and details that linger in the mind. Of Paris on the verge of abandonment ("As late as June 9, when the government panicked and decided to leave the capital, it had made no arrangements for the evacuation or defense of Paris. The leaders merely sneaked out of town in the dead of night.") Of English church bell ringers pulling ropes on silent bells because, "The British government had decreed that no bells, church or otherwise, were to be rung for the duration of the war except in the event of a German invasion. All over England, clappers were removed to prevent false alarms." Or this: Murrow had been invited to have dinner at the White House with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt on December 7, 1941, very day the bombs fell at Pearl Harbor. Despite the emergency, FDR asked Murrow to come anyway so they could talk.
Like Olson's other books, this is a fascinating portrait of exciting stories and heroism, of a world aflame, and of a group of larger-than-life people at the dawn of a new era in reporting and the all-too-rapid sunset of that era as television replaced the spoken word with pictures and meaningful analysis began to vanish from the airwaves, leading, in time, to the birth of the current era. I can't recommend it enough.
Lynne Olson is the author of a number of my favorite books, including "Citizens of London." She wrote "The Murrow Boys" with her husband, Stanley Cloud. The title refers to the men hired by and working with Edward R. Murrow in reporting the news during World War 2 and afterwards. (They were referred to collectively at the time by that sobriquet.) Until they came along, news reporting was almost exclusively the job of newspapers and, to a lesser extent, newsreels shown in theaters before a movie started. CBS sent Murrow to Europe in the 1930s to cover choral presentations and such, not current events. Even as the continent began to smoulder with the rise of Hitler, the network told Murrow to stick to the music and leave the news and analysis to the print guys.
In time, Murrow managed to force the network brass to listen. And then the world listened too:
"Here was the perfect event for the new breed of radio journalists. It had immediacy, human drama, and sound — sirens, bombs falling and exploding, antiaircraft guns. Murrow had been arguing that the future of radio news lay in on-the-scene reporting, not in an announcer’s reading wire copy in New York and not in Monday-morning quarterbacking by some commentator."
"The Murrow Boys" captures the stories of these extraordinary individuals and their times: who they were and how they came to cover the war; how, for the first time in history, people thousands of miles away could hear history as it was being made, the sounds of German bombs dropping over London, Wehrmacht boots marching through the streets of captured cities. How they flew from one place to another, risking their lives time and again, to broadcast their reports in the hope -- all too commonly frustrated -- that their (typically unscheduled, because they were reporting live and recordings were prohibited by the network) broadcasts would go through, that someone at the station would hear them and put them on air, or that the weather wouldn't turn their report to unintelligible static. Of parachuting out of an airplane when the engines failed, or jumping into the ocean when the ship they're on was hit by torpedoes, of missing death by mere minutes and pure luck when the building they lived in was destroyed during the Blitz. Of arguing with obdurate corporate bosses who couldn't see what the world had become even as it was changing before them. Of being struck again and again at the indifference of Americans to what was happening in the world ("The problem was that [bosses] Paley, White, and the others, like most Americans, were losing interest again in foreign news as the Anschluss crisis faded. They had reverted to their normal preference for entertainment, and once again Shirer and Murrow were being dispatched to sign up European acts and attractions.")
It's the story of smoke-filled rooms -- so ubiquitous, these rooms, that most of the Murrow Boys eventually died of emphysema or other lung-related illnesses -- and epic consumption of alcohol, of affairs and broken marriages. Of egos and envy and betrayals and stage fright. Of being arrested by the Gestapo on trumped up espionage charges. Of covering a story in southern France while one's wife is giving birth to twins in a hospital under Nazi siege ("He reached the Neuilly clinic at midnight. The lights were off, the place seemed completely deserted. Sevareid had to feel his way along the hall to Lois’s room, desperately afraid something had happened to her. He found her in bed, looking frightened and lost. She hadn’t been afraid of the sirens, she told him, or the far-off explosions; what scared her was knowing that everybody else — the nurses and patients — had left. And there she was, alone with the twins, unable to walk, unable to do anything at all if the bombs came. Of Nazi propaganda and megalomaniac Allied generals, of accompanying the troops on the beaches on D-Day, of fighting the growing power of advertisers in how the news was reported, and the development of news-as-entertainment.
The book is filled with humanity, for good or bad, fearful and ambitious, and with haunting images and details that linger in the mind. Of Paris on the verge of abandonment ("As late as June 9, when the government panicked and decided to leave the capital, it had made no arrangements for the evacuation or defense of Paris. The leaders merely sneaked out of town in the dead of night.") Of English church bell ringers pulling ropes on silent bells because, "The British government had decreed that no bells, church or otherwise, were to be rung for the duration of the war except in the event of a German invasion. All over England, clappers were removed to prevent false alarms." Or this: Murrow had been invited to have dinner at the White House with the president and Mrs. Roosevelt on December 7, 1941, very day the bombs fell at Pearl Harbor. Despite the emergency, FDR asked Murrow to come anyway so they could talk.
Like Olson's other books, this is a fascinating portrait of exciting stories and heroism, of a world aflame, and of a group of larger-than-life people at the dawn of a new era in reporting and the all-too-rapid sunset of that era as television replaced the spoken word with pictures and meaningful analysis began to vanish from the airwaves, leading, in time, to the birth of the current era. I can't recommend it enough.
February 18, 2024
A simply fascinating, objective, and mesmerizing account of the famous Edward R. Murrow and his team of journalists covering World War II and their lives afterwards.
July 3, 2012
The “Murrow Boys” were a group of radio correspondents active before, and for a while after, World War II who were considered protégés of the great CBS journalist and smoker, Edward R. Murrow. Together they invented broadcast journalism, watched it become great and then wither under the influence of McCarthyism and the advent of television.
Murrow and the aura of integrity became an icon that modern broadcasters tried to emulate and idolize. Dan Rather “donned the mantle so often in public” that he was asked to tone it down in 1987 by Eric Sevareid, one of the authentic Murrow Boys. “Rather is not Edward R. Murrow,” Sevareid said. Undeterred, Rather and CBS continued to trade on the past, “ignoring the inconvenient parts, such as the fact that Murrow and most of the Boys had been either forced out or sidetracked by the network’s bosses.”
Radio news had been an oxymoron. Those who read the “news” barely knew of what they spoke. Often they were merely shameless shills for sponsors and mouthed the scripts handed to them -- much like TV newscasters today.
Murrow came from a Quaker family. His real name was Egbert; he changed it after being unmercifully hazed by lumberjacks with whom he worked in the northwest during the summers he was in high school. His mother was so religious she refused to answer the phone by saying hello, for fear that she would be invoking the name of the netherworld. Fun was certainly frowned upon.
Radio was still a new medium and Murrow was given a great deal of freedom to recruit. He hired the best newspaper reporters he could find, arguing that regardless of the medium the idea was to write well and provide honest reports. If there isn't any news, just say so. "I have an idea poeople might like that."
He wasn’t concerned about their voices or their mannerisms. He had offered several positions to women, but the New York CBS office was adamantly opposed to such a radical idea. The people he did hire, such as Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid,became famous in their own right. A virtual cult developed around Murrow. Unconsciously, many even imitated his style of clothing. He became a sort of surrogate parent; “Murrow chose people who needed him.”
Paul White, of CBS, was the first to codify the concept of objectivity. It was severely tested by the war. Was it possible for a correspondent to "objectively" parrot Nazi propaganda when reporting from Berlin? The notion of objectivity meant different things to different people. To most people today, objectivity simply means agreement with their opinion.
Radio was particularly vulnerable to pressure from government. The airwaves were still considered public property, and some New Dealers wanted all radio under government control. Comments from FDR's press secretary warning the networks to behave were not ignored by the broadcasters. The issue of objectivity was to create enormous rifts in the industry as broadcasters sought to interpret what they knew, to place events in context. When several of the Murrow Boys reported on how the rear echelons were wallowing in luxurious settings and making huge sums from the black market, the generals accused the reporters of ruining morale. Front line troops asked them why they wouldn't report the horrible conditions up front and the disparity with the rear. This same conflict was to bedevil the journalists in Korea and Vietnam.
Radio brought fame to many of them. They were very good at their jobs. Celebrity was to affect them, too. “As long as a journalist and the outfit he works for are inconsequential, . . . it’s easy for them to believe in and stand for the verities of their craft: truth, reason, independence, freedom and the like. But when the reporter becomes a celebrity, or when his reporting affects masses of people, or when he and his outfit start to earn large amounts of money, then the pressures mount to conform, to protect oneself, to protect one’s income, to protect one’s outfit, to avoid giving offense.” A lesson many of today’s so-called journalists have forgotten or never learned.
The shift to television was to have profound impact on the business of news. After the war, sponsors had become more powerful in dictating the content of news shows they funded. Television’s requirement for larger staff and more expensive equipment made this relationship even more symbiotic. Murrow and his Boys were skeptical. They thought television was lightweight. Images rather than content became important. Nevertheless, Murrow made the transition successfully with his critically acclaimed See It Now program. The transformation to television had been fast. In the three-year period between 1948 and 1951 the nation had moved to television. But even with Murrow running the show, his Boys were appalled when he was heard to suggest that the cameraman was just as important a member of the team as the correspondent. That was part of the radical change. No longer were they independent nor did they have anywhere near the freedom that had existed during World War II. But it was really the money that was making the difference. Eric Sevareid summed it up neatly: "I have been impressed with how timid a million dollars' profit can make a publisher or radio executive, instead of how bold it makes him." How little things have changed.
Television news has become what the Murrow Boys feared, a vast, uninformative wasteland that celebrates image over substance, and happy talk over analysis. The networks cut costs by eliminating foreign correspondents, buying short video pieces from free-lancers and then layering local voices over the top. Broadcasters are hired for their looks rather than their brains. Frank Stanton recalled watching a network news broadcast one night and being appalled by the lack of knowledge of the reporter: "He had the technology, he had the pictures, he had the people to interview, and he asked the stupidest questions in the world. That didn't happen with the Shirers, the Howard K. Smiths, the Sevareids, the Murrows. They had a sense of history. They knew what was going on."
Ironically, CBS continues to extol the Murrow heritage. "It is almost axiomatic that the more an institution breaks faith with those who built it, the more it sanctifies them." This is a wonderful, revealing, impossible-to-put-down book.
Murrow and the aura of integrity became an icon that modern broadcasters tried to emulate and idolize. Dan Rather “donned the mantle so often in public” that he was asked to tone it down in 1987 by Eric Sevareid, one of the authentic Murrow Boys. “Rather is not Edward R. Murrow,” Sevareid said. Undeterred, Rather and CBS continued to trade on the past, “ignoring the inconvenient parts, such as the fact that Murrow and most of the Boys had been either forced out or sidetracked by the network’s bosses.”
Radio news had been an oxymoron. Those who read the “news” barely knew of what they spoke. Often they were merely shameless shills for sponsors and mouthed the scripts handed to them -- much like TV newscasters today.
Murrow came from a Quaker family. His real name was Egbert; he changed it after being unmercifully hazed by lumberjacks with whom he worked in the northwest during the summers he was in high school. His mother was so religious she refused to answer the phone by saying hello, for fear that she would be invoking the name of the netherworld. Fun was certainly frowned upon.
Radio was still a new medium and Murrow was given a great deal of freedom to recruit. He hired the best newspaper reporters he could find, arguing that regardless of the medium the idea was to write well and provide honest reports. If there isn't any news, just say so. "I have an idea poeople might like that."
He wasn’t concerned about their voices or their mannerisms. He had offered several positions to women, but the New York CBS office was adamantly opposed to such a radical idea. The people he did hire, such as Winston Burdett, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid,became famous in their own right. A virtual cult developed around Murrow. Unconsciously, many even imitated his style of clothing. He became a sort of surrogate parent; “Murrow chose people who needed him.”
Paul White, of CBS, was the first to codify the concept of objectivity. It was severely tested by the war. Was it possible for a correspondent to "objectively" parrot Nazi propaganda when reporting from Berlin? The notion of objectivity meant different things to different people. To most people today, objectivity simply means agreement with their opinion.
Radio was particularly vulnerable to pressure from government. The airwaves were still considered public property, and some New Dealers wanted all radio under government control. Comments from FDR's press secretary warning the networks to behave were not ignored by the broadcasters. The issue of objectivity was to create enormous rifts in the industry as broadcasters sought to interpret what they knew, to place events in context. When several of the Murrow Boys reported on how the rear echelons were wallowing in luxurious settings and making huge sums from the black market, the generals accused the reporters of ruining morale. Front line troops asked them why they wouldn't report the horrible conditions up front and the disparity with the rear. This same conflict was to bedevil the journalists in Korea and Vietnam.
Radio brought fame to many of them. They were very good at their jobs. Celebrity was to affect them, too. “As long as a journalist and the outfit he works for are inconsequential, . . . it’s easy for them to believe in and stand for the verities of their craft: truth, reason, independence, freedom and the like. But when the reporter becomes a celebrity, or when his reporting affects masses of people, or when he and his outfit start to earn large amounts of money, then the pressures mount to conform, to protect oneself, to protect one’s income, to protect one’s outfit, to avoid giving offense.” A lesson many of today’s so-called journalists have forgotten or never learned.
The shift to television was to have profound impact on the business of news. After the war, sponsors had become more powerful in dictating the content of news shows they funded. Television’s requirement for larger staff and more expensive equipment made this relationship even more symbiotic. Murrow and his Boys were skeptical. They thought television was lightweight. Images rather than content became important. Nevertheless, Murrow made the transition successfully with his critically acclaimed See It Now program. The transformation to television had been fast. In the three-year period between 1948 and 1951 the nation had moved to television. But even with Murrow running the show, his Boys were appalled when he was heard to suggest that the cameraman was just as important a member of the team as the correspondent. That was part of the radical change. No longer were they independent nor did they have anywhere near the freedom that had existed during World War II. But it was really the money that was making the difference. Eric Sevareid summed it up neatly: "I have been impressed with how timid a million dollars' profit can make a publisher or radio executive, instead of how bold it makes him." How little things have changed.
Television news has become what the Murrow Boys feared, a vast, uninformative wasteland that celebrates image over substance, and happy talk over analysis. The networks cut costs by eliminating foreign correspondents, buying short video pieces from free-lancers and then layering local voices over the top. Broadcasters are hired for their looks rather than their brains. Frank Stanton recalled watching a network news broadcast one night and being appalled by the lack of knowledge of the reporter: "He had the technology, he had the pictures, he had the people to interview, and he asked the stupidest questions in the world. That didn't happen with the Shirers, the Howard K. Smiths, the Sevareids, the Murrows. They had a sense of history. They knew what was going on."
Ironically, CBS continues to extol the Murrow heritage. "It is almost axiomatic that the more an institution breaks faith with those who built it, the more it sanctifies them." This is a wonderful, revealing, impossible-to-put-down book.
February 25, 2018
The Murrow Boys were a hotshot cadre of plucky young globetrotting CBS radio news correspondents created and supervised by the mesmeric Bogart-like newsman, Edward R. Murrow; who as cohorts smoked, drank, bluffed, blustered and whored their way across the battlefield theatres of World War II. They were the original Rat Pack of the remote feed; the Mad Men of the microphone. They not only scooped the competition (NBC, etc.) but each other. They hated and loved each other's guts equally. They tweaked and battled censors in France, Germany, Britain, Russia and in the supposedly free United States; they finessed the line between patriotically guarding facts in wartime and telling the unvarnished truth. As with many things, they brawled with each other over that conundrum, too. They were seen as a group but operated and thought as loners.
They were men's men; former loggers and surveyors and canoers and sailors. More than one of them had stowed away in oceanic freighters, Jack London-style, prior to their news days. They evaded everything from bombs and shrapnel to Himalayan headhunters. They were rough-hewn and elegant, Teutonic-maned and bald. One, the golden-locked Charles Collingwood, was so urbane they called him Bonnie Prince Charlie. Whatever they looked like, plain (William Shirer) or handsome (Collingwood and Larry LeSueur), they were equally cutthroat and vain. They were masters of the subterfuge, not above stooping to unethical tricks to scoop a story. Some had been commies and one was even a spy. One was not even a boy but a woman--Mary Marvin Breckinridge--a socialite hired by Murrow against the objections of his sexist CBS bosses to report hard front-line battle news instead of the fashion and society trivia expected of women reporters of the time. The boys mostly came from modest American stock and lifted themselves by dint of moxie into celebrities, finding themselves blurring the line between journalism and entertainment in a time when such distinctions mattered. When they began their run in 1937, radio news was considered the vaudeville and whorehouse of journalism. Professional news societies shunned them. By the middle of the war, they had become so revered that Murrow was named president of a press club that had once turned him away. Despite the camaraderie the boys eventually and perhaps inevitably succumbed to the pull of conflicting loyalities, egos, goals and outlooks in the McCarthy era and afterward, reflecting a brother-against-brother story as old as Cain and Abel. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, they had a collective pride over what they had achieved and the legacy they had left.
I bought this book for several reasons and partly because of the inevitable pull I have toward the many facets of World War II. One, Ed Murrow has always seemed a fascinating media icon of heroic proportions and the CBS news empire that he spawned under CBS president William Paley had a profound and legendary impact on 20th century American journalism, becoming the standard of quality for decades (though now decimated by trends inside and outside the company). Most of the TV journalists I watched as a youth (Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, etc.) were the spawn of the Murrow Boys, either as direct members of the group or closely related colleagues of it. Second, I wanted to know more about one of the group's charter members, Eric Sevareid (died 1992), who in the 1960s and 1970s was the intellectual editorial commentator on Cronkite's CBS Evening News. I would sit transfixed watching this great grey eminence whose monotonal authority greatly impressed me but whose 10-gallon words and complex sentences seemed to me as impenetrable as the Icelandic tongue. Sevareid was, indeed, a cogent and highly intelligent commentator--which can still be seen in the few clips of him that exist for viewing on Youtube, for example--but after his retirement from the airwaves in 1977 he seems to have fallen off the earth, another victim of the vicissitudes of fleeting fame. It's a shame because his likes are as foreign and remote as, well, Iceland, to a radio/TV wasteland now populated by the ignorant likes of pseudo-commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or inane talk show juveniles like Jimmy Fallon.
As it turns out, this book seems mainly to source Sevareid's own autobiography Not So Wild a Dream in telling his part of the story, and perhaps someday I will read that. In lieu of that, this is a well-told, well-balanced, and (far less than my review) non-hyperbolic account of an exciting and influential time in broadcast journalism and the motley crew who raised the field to a new level.
They were men's men; former loggers and surveyors and canoers and sailors. More than one of them had stowed away in oceanic freighters, Jack London-style, prior to their news days. They evaded everything from bombs and shrapnel to Himalayan headhunters. They were rough-hewn and elegant, Teutonic-maned and bald. One, the golden-locked Charles Collingwood, was so urbane they called him Bonnie Prince Charlie. Whatever they looked like, plain (William Shirer) or handsome (Collingwood and Larry LeSueur), they were equally cutthroat and vain. They were masters of the subterfuge, not above stooping to unethical tricks to scoop a story. Some had been commies and one was even a spy. One was not even a boy but a woman--Mary Marvin Breckinridge--a socialite hired by Murrow against the objections of his sexist CBS bosses to report hard front-line battle news instead of the fashion and society trivia expected of women reporters of the time. The boys mostly came from modest American stock and lifted themselves by dint of moxie into celebrities, finding themselves blurring the line between journalism and entertainment in a time when such distinctions mattered. When they began their run in 1937, radio news was considered the vaudeville and whorehouse of journalism. Professional news societies shunned them. By the middle of the war, they had become so revered that Murrow was named president of a press club that had once turned him away. Despite the camaraderie the boys eventually and perhaps inevitably succumbed to the pull of conflicting loyalities, egos, goals and outlooks in the McCarthy era and afterward, reflecting a brother-against-brother story as old as Cain and Abel. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, they had a collective pride over what they had achieved and the legacy they had left.
I bought this book for several reasons and partly because of the inevitable pull I have toward the many facets of World War II. One, Ed Murrow has always seemed a fascinating media icon of heroic proportions and the CBS news empire that he spawned under CBS president William Paley had a profound and legendary impact on 20th century American journalism, becoming the standard of quality for decades (though now decimated by trends inside and outside the company). Most of the TV journalists I watched as a youth (Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, etc.) were the spawn of the Murrow Boys, either as direct members of the group or closely related colleagues of it. Second, I wanted to know more about one of the group's charter members, Eric Sevareid (died 1992), who in the 1960s and 1970s was the intellectual editorial commentator on Cronkite's CBS Evening News. I would sit transfixed watching this great grey eminence whose monotonal authority greatly impressed me but whose 10-gallon words and complex sentences seemed to me as impenetrable as the Icelandic tongue. Sevareid was, indeed, a cogent and highly intelligent commentator--which can still be seen in the few clips of him that exist for viewing on Youtube, for example--but after his retirement from the airwaves in 1977 he seems to have fallen off the earth, another victim of the vicissitudes of fleeting fame. It's a shame because his likes are as foreign and remote as, well, Iceland, to a radio/TV wasteland now populated by the ignorant likes of pseudo-commentators like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or inane talk show juveniles like Jimmy Fallon.
As it turns out, this book seems mainly to source Sevareid's own autobiography Not So Wild a Dream in telling his part of the story, and perhaps someday I will read that. In lieu of that, this is a well-told, well-balanced, and (far less than my review) non-hyperbolic account of an exciting and influential time in broadcast journalism and the motley crew who raised the field to a new level.
July 23, 2020
I approached this book with more than academic interest since I knew Janet Murrow well, Fred Friendly to a lesser extent, and, at one time or another, met Sevareid, Cronkite, Marvin Kalb, and a few others. I entered TV journalism at a time when they were leaving it and worked in the same building as the CBS News Washington Bureau.
The book is an excellent tale of the lives of the men and women Ed Murrow corralled at the start of World War II, their invention of radio news reporting, and the manner in which television and the management of CBS ultimately destroyed broadcast journalism. There are no happy endings here, but the next time you turn to the nightly network news and see the slapdash manner in which the most important stories are presented ... or to local news and see matters of important not addressed at all, you will recognize the result which Stanley Cloud describes.
My one criticism is that Cloud ignores one of the most important pieces of journalism Murrow and Friendly managed to air during the declining years of Murrow's career, "Harvest of Shame." It's a serious omission, for it set the standard for documentary television journalism of the sort now only presented by PBS and struggling independent producers.
The book is an excellent tale of the lives of the men and women Ed Murrow corralled at the start of World War II, their invention of radio news reporting, and the manner in which television and the management of CBS ultimately destroyed broadcast journalism. There are no happy endings here, but the next time you turn to the nightly network news and see the slapdash manner in which the most important stories are presented ... or to local news and see matters of important not addressed at all, you will recognize the result which Stanley Cloud describes.
My one criticism is that Cloud ignores one of the most important pieces of journalism Murrow and Friendly managed to air during the declining years of Murrow's career, "Harvest of Shame." It's a serious omission, for it set the standard for documentary television journalism of the sort now only presented by PBS and struggling independent producers.
June 22, 2024
Outstanding history chronicling the early days of broadcast journalism. It focuses, somewhat, on the magnetic, brilliant figure of Murrow himself, and his ability to spot and/or develop talent pretty much on the fly. Voices were secondary, depth of knowledge was foremost in front Murrow's microphone. And it's a diverse crowd he gathered: the frequently fired (and slightly older than Murror) William Shirer, gloomy, handsome, poetic Eric Severeid, fiery liberal Eric K. Smith, mysterious Winston Burdett (who would turn out to be, briefly, a spy for the Soviets), suave golden boy, Charles Collingwood, and others, all get significant time in this history. World War 2 and its lead up would make them all famous, seemingly part of a team. But at heart they were all individuals, idealistic romantics forged in the Depression years, and all horrified over the rise of the Nazis. The use of radio for hard news was in its early days. As to be expected, these are the days that Cloud and Olson focus on. That said, a good third of the book covers the post-war period (up through Watergate). It is the post-war period where many of "Murrow's boys" struggled. Oh, they still had successes, but they mostly all hated the new medium: television. They didn't understand it, but one could argue they never fully understood radio. Where the conflicts usually arose with their CBS corporate bosses was with the line between informed commentary and "objective" news reporting. There is of course no such thing a truly objective reporting, but an informed reporter can move the listener or viewer closer to the truth of matters. Sometimes the suits will buy it, other times its too uncomfortable for them an their complaining sponsors. Compounding this is the sense that something is lost with TV. Depth of reporting is lost to the visual. Murrow himself, now a "suit," uncannily, was able to make the transition for a while, not totally understanding the new medium, but making it work and making it compelling. He was (as some complained) too late to sounding the alarm regarding Sen. Joseph McCarthy, which is true. But when he struck, he struck deep, helping to the end the terror of McCarthyism. Probably the saddest individual in the book is William L. Shirer. An important figure in those early days, reporting from darkest Berlin. Both he and Murrow understood the stakes. But he was always a pompous man, one who loved the good life. He turned his back on Murrow a few times, and seemed surprised years later when Murrow didn't back him in his fight with CBS. His refusal to reconcile with a dying Murrow years later speaks for itself.
June 8, 2015
This is a book that focuses on Edward R. Morrow and the men (and one woman) who pioneered radio news broadcasting for C.B.S. during WWII. It is an eye-opening book about war and its aftermath when new enemies put in an appearance. Television changed everything as did politics which played an important part in the story.
May 24, 2012
The first half of this book--set in the years before and during World War II--is fascinating. The evolution of Murrow and his boys into the core of CBS radio news is engrossing when set against the backdrop of the war.
For me personally, the second half of the book is less compelling. I enjoyed learning about these men and how their lives and careers proceeded in the post war years, but it was more fragmented. As some of them left CBS I found myself loosing the thread of each story. I don't think that is a weakness of the book, but an indication of my level of interest as the events moved into my lifetime.
The first half is strongly recommended to those with an interest in World War II.
The total book is recommended to those who have an interest in the history of broadcast journalism or these men in particular.
For me personally, the second half of the book is less compelling. I enjoyed learning about these men and how their lives and careers proceeded in the post war years, but it was more fragmented. As some of them left CBS I found myself loosing the thread of each story. I don't think that is a weakness of the book, but an indication of my level of interest as the events moved into my lifetime.
The first half is strongly recommended to those with an interest in World War II.
The total book is recommended to those who have an interest in the history of broadcast journalism or these men in particular.
September 5, 2025
Lots to consider, in this group biography of the WW2 correspondents.
Planning to return to this, in context of newer insight into this generation, including the women who covered stories, like Dorothy Thompson, who appears here.
Murrow's influence is wide - and I wonder what he would remark in 2025 - and beyond. Especially with his network settling cases with big payments.
This begins historical books by Lynne Olsen. I like the coverage here of the CBS team and their peers.
Highly recommended.
Planning to return to this, in context of newer insight into this generation, including the women who covered stories, like Dorothy Thompson, who appears here.
Murrow's influence is wide - and I wonder what he would remark in 2025 - and beyond. Especially with his network settling cases with big payments.
This begins historical books by Lynne Olsen. I like the coverage here of the CBS team and their peers.
Highly recommended.
April 12, 2025
„…broadcast news seemed to have little interest in helping viewers and listeners make sense of the bits and pieces of information it put on the air in providing illumination or explanation or context. For broadcast reporters it was more important to know about satellites and stands-ups than about history and economics and literature.“
A expansive, balanced look at the age of radio journalism at its height during WWII and during the onslaught of television when thanks to Edward R. Murrow and the Boys, they cared to help the listeners make sense of a story. The authors bring to life the dedication, hardships, rivalries, fights with censorship and the networks the Boys battled (as well as their own demons and personal standards) to make the listener understand the story. This isn’t rose-colored glasses, nostalgia book putting the journalists and their typewriters on a pedestal. It is an honest depiction while still illuminating the impact true journalism can have.
A expansive, balanced look at the age of radio journalism at its height during WWII and during the onslaught of television when thanks to Edward R. Murrow and the Boys, they cared to help the listeners make sense of a story. The authors bring to life the dedication, hardships, rivalries, fights with censorship and the networks the Boys battled (as well as their own demons and personal standards) to make the listener understand the story. This isn’t rose-colored glasses, nostalgia book putting the journalists and their typewriters on a pedestal. It is an honest depiction while still illuminating the impact true journalism can have.
September 18, 2019
A LO./SC. Factual Account of The Mirror Boys (PITFLOBJ)
LO./SC. Have collaborated on a factual account of the Murrow. Boys, as they were known, before, during and after World War II. These men were the father's of journalism, written journalism, not what you see today. The gentlemen presented the facts and let the truths speak for themselves. In the early 50's television broadcasting began and if you knew what yellow journalism is you would see it daily on TV. The days of the Murror. Boys were becoming a thing of the past. Unfortunately. Edward R . Murror.
Was reduced to a weekly news program and the rest became the top news persons in CBS. This work of the two authors is an excellent read for the genre.....DEHS
LO./SC. Have collaborated on a factual account of the Murrow. Boys, as they were known, before, during and after World War II. These men were the father's of journalism, written journalism, not what you see today. The gentlemen presented the facts and let the truths speak for themselves. In the early 50's television broadcasting began and if you knew what yellow journalism is you would see it daily on TV. The days of the Murror. Boys were becoming a thing of the past. Unfortunately. Edward R . Murror.
Was reduced to a weekly news program and the rest became the top news persons in CBS. This work of the two authors is an excellent read for the genre.....DEHS
February 29, 2020
A very good book that chronicles the life of Edward R. Murrow in WWII and how he created the CBS news bureau and became the voice that America and the World heard from 1939 to 1945. Murrow set up a news service with reporters scattered across Europe during the conflict and provided reports from the front lines on the war and its progress. Many of the those who Murrow hired during this time were well known when I was growing up. Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith and William L. Shirer are well known to those of my days and provided a much needed service to supplant the BBC who was merely a mouth piece for Whitehall. Their stories after WWII leaves much to be desired as their character flaws and immoral lifestyles were nothing anyone would want to emulate. They were very brave during the war but in most cases very selfish afterwards. I have never been much of a fan of the media and this book provides nothing to change my opinion. They provided a necessary service during the war and we can be thankful for that.
January 2, 2020
Another great read by Lynne Olson. Murrow was a man of great vision for radio, this new medium, but it took scrappy reporting from dangerous corners of the globe to bring Murrow's vision to fruition. And what a cast of characters!
October 30, 2013
This may be my favorite book of the year. Which is a bit funny because it was a freebie I got from the Kindle Lending Library, of which I am a big fan despite the large amounts of cruddy books you have to wade through to find the interesting stuff. Nevertheless, this is one of the good ones.
The Murrow Boys is effectively a history of broadcast news, distilled through the lens of the few men, led by Ed Murrow, who changed the way it was delivered. Tracing their ascent as the first celebrity reporters for CBS in the late 30s, The Murrow Boys details the amazing stories of roughly half a dozen men very different from the kind of "correspondents" we generally know today. Nearly all of them ivy league educated, hired not primarily for the timbre of their voice and certainly not for their looks, reporters like Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingsworth, Bill Downs and Howard Smith were brilliant analysts who also happened to survive sinking ships, plane crashes and the D-Day landings in the course of their work, becoming famous and rich along the way as CBS's golden generation of radio newsmen.
But The Murrow Boys doesn't limit itself to an account of their success. Following the war, television began its inexorable rise as the primary medium for news and entertainment in the world, and the Murrow Boys are shown as, at best, reluctant passengers. Despite the ability of some of the boys to transition to television news, a number simply refused to accept the changing times and were left by the wayside, exiled either literally to an overseas bureau somewhere, or metaphorically to a quiet role somewhere deep in the CBS offices, dusted off for the odd presidential debate or international event but otherwise left to moulder. The authors are not shy about detailing the shortcomings of each of the reporters, including Murrow. Affairs and alcoholism were de rigeur, and while they were indeed a "band of brothers," like any family there were ongoing rivalries, disagreements and outright fights. Nearly every man died sick from years of tobacco and alcohol abuse, and most died unhappy. The last few of the Boys, who lived to the turn of the century, are shown by the authors as having their memorial services turned into cynical marketing ploys, linking their careers to the struggling 3rd-place news division CBS had become in the years since.
The Murrow Boys is organized as a series of chronological phases, beginning before the war and running through the 1990s, that "checks in" on each of the Boys and recounts their escapades. The authors also present a larger assessment of the trajectory of the broadcast news industry over the years, from its wild-west beginnings to its refinement into the money-driven, entertainment-first machine we are familiar with today. In the epilogue NPR is presented as the last bastion of the kind of reporting Murrow and the Boys would be proud to support, while particular scorn is reserved for flaky talking heads and men like Dan Rather, hired for their ability to read scripts rather than any skill at uncovering or interpreting news.
If you have Amazon Prime and a Kindle, this is a no-brainer. Even if you don't, it's worth finding.
The Murrow Boys is effectively a history of broadcast news, distilled through the lens of the few men, led by Ed Murrow, who changed the way it was delivered. Tracing their ascent as the first celebrity reporters for CBS in the late 30s, The Murrow Boys details the amazing stories of roughly half a dozen men very different from the kind of "correspondents" we generally know today. Nearly all of them ivy league educated, hired not primarily for the timbre of their voice and certainly not for their looks, reporters like Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingsworth, Bill Downs and Howard Smith were brilliant analysts who also happened to survive sinking ships, plane crashes and the D-Day landings in the course of their work, becoming famous and rich along the way as CBS's golden generation of radio newsmen.
But The Murrow Boys doesn't limit itself to an account of their success. Following the war, television began its inexorable rise as the primary medium for news and entertainment in the world, and the Murrow Boys are shown as, at best, reluctant passengers. Despite the ability of some of the boys to transition to television news, a number simply refused to accept the changing times and were left by the wayside, exiled either literally to an overseas bureau somewhere, or metaphorically to a quiet role somewhere deep in the CBS offices, dusted off for the odd presidential debate or international event but otherwise left to moulder. The authors are not shy about detailing the shortcomings of each of the reporters, including Murrow. Affairs and alcoholism were de rigeur, and while they were indeed a "band of brothers," like any family there were ongoing rivalries, disagreements and outright fights. Nearly every man died sick from years of tobacco and alcohol abuse, and most died unhappy. The last few of the Boys, who lived to the turn of the century, are shown by the authors as having their memorial services turned into cynical marketing ploys, linking their careers to the struggling 3rd-place news division CBS had become in the years since.
The Murrow Boys is organized as a series of chronological phases, beginning before the war and running through the 1990s, that "checks in" on each of the Boys and recounts their escapades. The authors also present a larger assessment of the trajectory of the broadcast news industry over the years, from its wild-west beginnings to its refinement into the money-driven, entertainment-first machine we are familiar with today. In the epilogue NPR is presented as the last bastion of the kind of reporting Murrow and the Boys would be proud to support, while particular scorn is reserved for flaky talking heads and men like Dan Rather, hired for their ability to read scripts rather than any skill at uncovering or interpreting news.
If you have Amazon Prime and a Kindle, this is a no-brainer. Even if you don't, it's worth finding.
June 28, 2010
To me, Murrow has always stood out as "The Man Who Took On McCarthy." I knew about his history of reporting from London during the Blitz and "creating broadcast journalism," but put more weight on the McCarthy pieces he did. This book not only presented a more rounded view of Murrow for me, but I also gained a much-needed understanding of the people Murrow put together during the war; the people who made a name for Murrow more than he did for himself. These were people who lived an adventure, and mostly got shoved aside and forgotten in the days of television.
The writers seemed to cover a wealth of documentary evidence to put this picture together of The Murrow Boys, but they were also able to present the material in a way that kept me turning the pages. The stories were often intertwined, and the way the authors covered the different threads, quickly transitioning to another perspective of the same events, made the read seem more narrative than documentary, but without seeming to compromise the quest for accuracy.
If you have an interest in broadcast journalism, I highly recommend this book.
The writers seemed to cover a wealth of documentary evidence to put this picture together of The Murrow Boys, but they were also able to present the material in a way that kept me turning the pages. The stories were often intertwined, and the way the authors covered the different threads, quickly transitioning to another perspective of the same events, made the read seem more narrative than documentary, but without seeming to compromise the quest for accuracy.
If you have an interest in broadcast journalism, I highly recommend this book.
May 19, 2025
5+ stars. This offers such valuable insight into the history and evolution of journalism, and the impact of Edward R Murrow’s vision, grit, determination, ethical standards and lasting legacy. It takes you through the golden age of journalism - when households consumed news primarily through the radio, and how the craft drastically changed (for better or worse, though the Murrow Boys clearly had their perspective) with the invention of television. I absolutely loved reading all the details behind their WWII reporting, and it was pretty sad/disappointing to read how they were treated by CBS brass post-WWII in favor of profits and ratings. This really takes you back to the time when journalism was thoughtful, synthesized and held to high standards of respect and ethics - a far cry from the 24 hour noisy, clickbait-worthy, at times blatantly propagandist junk we’re subject to now.
July 6, 2015
A must read
I remember a lot of these reporters at the end of their careers. Fascinating to read how they all started and what happened throughout their long careers. I think the news anchors and reporters today could learn a great deal from this book. I agree with this book that today's news broadcasts are totally lacking in reporting the news. I want news NOT celebrity gossip. Why are things happening, what are the implications, is there a history behind it. That's what I want.
I remember a lot of these reporters at the end of their careers. Fascinating to read how they all started and what happened throughout their long careers. I think the news anchors and reporters today could learn a great deal from this book. I agree with this book that today's news broadcasts are totally lacking in reporting the news. I want news NOT celebrity gossip. Why are things happening, what are the implications, is there a history behind it. That's what I want.
November 18, 2012
Well written, but so hard to finish. I fell in love with Lynne Olsen's later work "Citizens of London" and was disappointed that this didn't have the same magic. After the war ends, this book loses steam. It picks up a bit with McCarthyism and the fight with CBS over truth vs. objectivity in reporting. A great resource for anyone studying the history of broadcast journalism, but anyone else should run out and get "Citizens of London" if they want a great read.
March 30, 2023
Hearing Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London during the Blitz as German bombs fell and buildings burned and crumbled around him is as gripping and emotional an experience for those listening to those recordings today as it was for radio audiences who were transfixed by them in 1940. The same can be said for the work of William L. Shirer, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, Winston Burdett, Larry LeSeuer and others as they reported in from all over the world over the next five years with not only the headline war news, but also with analysis, commentary and reflection as they tried to make sense of the conflict convulsing the world and convey their understanding to an eager audience wondering what it all meant.
Through their eyes, Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, in their first book, tell the story of broadcast journalism from its beginnings in the late 1930’s through the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and follow the careers of these journalists as their profession evolved and changed around them, showing how they reacted and adapted (or didn’t!) to these changes, and revealing how and why broadcast journalism became what it is today. Although the early accomplishments of the “Murrow Boys” were indeed proud and inspiring, the overall picture is, sadly, a discouraging one as it relates how the early idealism of the radio journalists, and their vision of how radio and later television (though some of them intensely disliked the medium) had a limitless potential to promote the public good and increase its understanding of world events, evaporated as they saw the medium degenerate into crass commercialism, mindless chatter, vapid features and “banter” among reporters, and solely entertainment-oriented programming as network executives pursued profits and ratings above all else, since that was what sponsors and the public, in their view, apparently wanted. The CBS network and William Paley are particularly singled out in this regard.
The Murrow Boys experienced varying degrees of success as they tried (or refused) to adapt to the changing broadcasting landscape, but in an overall sense they came to be regarded by network executives as relics of the past, obsolete, “strangers in a strange land”, and were gradually pushed out completely as their places were taken by younger “journalists” (the Boys would not have considered them as such) who were told that their job was to give the sponsors and public what they wanted and not place the news they read in any context, analyze it, or uncover any deeper meaning. For many of them, their declining years were marked by bitterness and disillusionment, both professionally and personally. Some, such as Sevareid and Smith, continued on as commentators, though they were not free to choose what stories to cover, or express their own opinions, as they once were. William L. Shirer enjoyed success as a writer; his early “Berlin Diary” was followed by “The Nightmare Years”, “Midcentury Journey”, “The Collapse of the Third Republic” and the monumental “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” which became a runaway bestseller in 1959.
Murrow himself, always a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer in 1965 and thus did not live to see the place he and his fellows once occupied, and the analysis they provided, largely taken over by public broadcasting and the cable news networks, while major-network reporters covered the news in a far more superficial sense compared to the way the pioneers did it. In the last analysis this book is a stunning, searing indictment of broadcast executives for allowing that to happen and for the way they treated the pioneers who made their success possible; and a needed reminder of the potential for good the media of radio and TV still have—a potential today largely unfulfilled.
***** review by Chuck Graham *****
Through their eyes, Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, in their first book, tell the story of broadcast journalism from its beginnings in the late 1930’s through the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and follow the careers of these journalists as their profession evolved and changed around them, showing how they reacted and adapted (or didn’t!) to these changes, and revealing how and why broadcast journalism became what it is today. Although the early accomplishments of the “Murrow Boys” were indeed proud and inspiring, the overall picture is, sadly, a discouraging one as it relates how the early idealism of the radio journalists, and their vision of how radio and later television (though some of them intensely disliked the medium) had a limitless potential to promote the public good and increase its understanding of world events, evaporated as they saw the medium degenerate into crass commercialism, mindless chatter, vapid features and “banter” among reporters, and solely entertainment-oriented programming as network executives pursued profits and ratings above all else, since that was what sponsors and the public, in their view, apparently wanted. The CBS network and William Paley are particularly singled out in this regard.
The Murrow Boys experienced varying degrees of success as they tried (or refused) to adapt to the changing broadcasting landscape, but in an overall sense they came to be regarded by network executives as relics of the past, obsolete, “strangers in a strange land”, and were gradually pushed out completely as their places were taken by younger “journalists” (the Boys would not have considered them as such) who were told that their job was to give the sponsors and public what they wanted and not place the news they read in any context, analyze it, or uncover any deeper meaning. For many of them, their declining years were marked by bitterness and disillusionment, both professionally and personally. Some, such as Sevareid and Smith, continued on as commentators, though they were not free to choose what stories to cover, or express their own opinions, as they once were. William L. Shirer enjoyed success as a writer; his early “Berlin Diary” was followed by “The Nightmare Years”, “Midcentury Journey”, “The Collapse of the Third Republic” and the monumental “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” which became a runaway bestseller in 1959.
Murrow himself, always a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer in 1965 and thus did not live to see the place he and his fellows once occupied, and the analysis they provided, largely taken over by public broadcasting and the cable news networks, while major-network reporters covered the news in a far more superficial sense compared to the way the pioneers did it. In the last analysis this book is a stunning, searing indictment of broadcast executives for allowing that to happen and for the way they treated the pioneers who made their success possible; and a needed reminder of the potential for good the media of radio and TV still have—a potential today largely unfulfilled.
***** review by Chuck Graham *****
October 20, 2025
One thing the authors of this book did well was limit their scope. Who are the "Murrow Boys" is apparently debatable. The authors explained why they picked who they picked and for three or four others explained why they were not "Murrow Boys." So the authors were able to write a cohesive story that I found more compelling than another book I read recently on WWII correspondents, The Women Who Wrote the War. The "Boys" in the book (including one woman) were a fairly diverse lot but they all seemed to crave adventure and were all, of course, good reporters. I did not realize how lionized this first group of radio war correspondents were. How they reacted to their fame and what they did with it was nearly as good a story as how they got CBS to be the premier news station in the age of radio.
Good reporters or not, they were not always admirable. They had numerous faults which the book details. It seems many were insecure, egotistic, womanizing and selfish. During the waning days of McCarthyism, one of the boys went before the unamerican committee, telling them every reporter he knew that had been a communist. This was at least 15 years after their involvement, the reporter, Burdett, was secure in his job despite his past, and by 1956 you knew if you named someone, they would lose their job. It set me to wondering why someone who had little to gain other than to assuage his own conscience, would take that step knowing he was ruining the careers of 23 people.
The "Boys" had other challenges. During the war, all news was censored by the military. After the war, the battle for ratings made CBS and other networks skittish about letting the "Boys" broadcast their opinions. Nevertheless, the "Boys" were influential. They kept Americans informed during the war, they had a hand in ending McCarthyism, and they reported from the United States' southern states during the battle for civil rights there.
Their lives had many ups and downs, they did not always handle the downs well, but it made for quite an interesting story.
Good reporters or not, they were not always admirable. They had numerous faults which the book details. It seems many were insecure, egotistic, womanizing and selfish. During the waning days of McCarthyism, one of the boys went before the unamerican committee, telling them every reporter he knew that had been a communist. This was at least 15 years after their involvement, the reporter, Burdett, was secure in his job despite his past, and by 1956 you knew if you named someone, they would lose their job. It set me to wondering why someone who had little to gain other than to assuage his own conscience, would take that step knowing he was ruining the careers of 23 people.
The "Boys" had other challenges. During the war, all news was censored by the military. After the war, the battle for ratings made CBS and other networks skittish about letting the "Boys" broadcast their opinions. Nevertheless, the "Boys" were influential. They kept Americans informed during the war, they had a hand in ending McCarthyism, and they reported from the United States' southern states during the battle for civil rights there.
Their lives had many ups and downs, they did not always handle the downs well, but it made for quite an interesting story.
January 10, 2022
It's supremely ironic to think that Ed Murrow wasn't initially trained as a journalist, nor did CBS News hire him as such in the late 1930s. Europe was clearly heading toward a major war, but there was no plan for the network to broadcast from the major capitals as events moved from the unnerving to the unpleasant to the disastrous. As Director Of Talks, Murrow found himself going on the air with his journalist friend and mentor William L. Shirer during a hastily-arranged 'news roundup' from multiple European capitals in 1938. It led to a stellar 22-year career in radio and in television, and to the hiring of a disparate group of writers, scholars, and reporters (most of whom came to the medium with no more broadcast experience than Murrow had in the beginning). Author Stanley Cloud has included interviews with the surviving participants and with the families of those who'd passed on---some of whom had very mixed feelings about trading print journalism for the show-biz atmosphere attendant to radio news. Nearly all became household names, and influenced how world events were covered for decades to come. An amazing story, well-researched and written.
April 17, 2018
I am so reliant on National Public Radio to keep me up-to-date with news these days that it’s hard to imagine a time when broadcast journalism did not exist.
But there was. The Murrow Boys is a well-written, moving –sometimes gripping – true story that helped me better understand the huge role Edward R. Murrow and the American writers he recruited to cover events in Europe and Asia had in shaping public opinion about our involvement in WWII.
The authors of this book worked in print journalism and lived overseas, too, and you can tell they enjoyed working on The Murrow Boys and appreciated the courage and professionalism of these radio broadcasters. Some of the writers in the memoir classes I lead in Chicago remember those times, I’m eager to recommend The Murrow Boys to them now. Other writers in those classes might also identify with ageism many of the Murrow Boys experienced. They were celebrated as stars when they came home after WWII, but later on, when TV hit the scene, many of them were cast off as, well, old news.
But there was. The Murrow Boys is a well-written, moving –sometimes gripping – true story that helped me better understand the huge role Edward R. Murrow and the American writers he recruited to cover events in Europe and Asia had in shaping public opinion about our involvement in WWII.
The authors of this book worked in print journalism and lived overseas, too, and you can tell they enjoyed working on The Murrow Boys and appreciated the courage and professionalism of these radio broadcasters. Some of the writers in the memoir classes I lead in Chicago remember those times, I’m eager to recommend The Murrow Boys to them now. Other writers in those classes might also identify with ageism many of the Murrow Boys experienced. They were celebrated as stars when they came home after WWII, but later on, when TV hit the scene, many of them were cast off as, well, old news.
March 14, 2025
I have enjoyed all of Lynne Olsen's books about Second World War history--this one was also good, but not as riveting as some of her other works. This book will appeal most to people interested in the history of broadcast journalism, perhaps also to those who know a lot about World War II and already have a good idea of who the Murrow Boys were, also those who have been fans of CBS News (Walter Cronkite; 60 Minutes). I am all of those people, so perhaps I should have enjoyed the book more than I did. As a thorough history of each main character and every detail of their careers, this is a great achievement, but more like a dissertation in some ways than simply an informative read. The first part of the book, which describes what pioneers Murrow and the Boys were and how they reported on the war, changing how journalism was done, was much more interesting to me than the later part of the book, which details what happened after the war and their relationships with each other, with CBS News, and with their personal relationships.
July 10, 2019
I am a Lynn Olson stan going back to 2010, so I thought it was time I read one of her earliest collaborations with Stanley Cloud. This is a fascinating look at the development of news programming, first in the golden age of radio through the transition to network television. The story focuses primarily on the careers of 8 journalists, the original members of CBS's team founded by Ed Murrows & Bill Shirer. The beginning of the book discusses radio as the exciting new medium challenging the old newspaper businesses, and there are some fascinating parallels to consider with today's media landscape and the introduction of social media platforms as a way of reporting news. Aided by a myriad of captivating war stories with each correspondent, the book manages to diligently contextualize the evolution of news. It does an excellent job at painting a vivid picture of the times, challenges, triumphs and short comings of this generation of reporters.
February 6, 2022
Reading this book was like what it must have been to be on the forefront of the beginning of radio and television news gathering. Although I am a bit young to have remembered Ed Murrow. His name was often referenced while growing up. Names such as Sevareid, Collingwood, Hottelet, Trout and Burdett were still active in news reporting as I was coming of age while watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in my teen years in the early 1970s.
One of the interesting sides of reading the book is the fact, if anyone doubts, is that news people then, as they are now, are biased in their news gathering and interpretation of the news although they would never admit it publicly. And for some reason it was not too shocking to read that Winston Burdett was a member of the Communist Party USA and later became one of the Murrow Boys. Leaving this aside, the book was still interesting and informative to read.
One of the interesting sides of reading the book is the fact, if anyone doubts, is that news people then, as they are now, are biased in their news gathering and interpretation of the news although they would never admit it publicly. And for some reason it was not too shocking to read that Winston Burdett was a member of the Communist Party USA and later became one of the Murrow Boys. Leaving this aside, the book was still interesting and informative to read.
October 31, 2022
Best Of A Lost Breed Of Reporters
My Dad was a life-long Republican, a WWII combat veteran and largely self-sufficient man who thought all reporters - most of all those on national network TV - were, as he put it, “commies, pinkos or do-gooders.”
So I willfully became a print journalist and more or less dared him to call me a commie.
Born in 1950, I was too late to hear Murrow and the boys do radio war reports. But many of them, Murrow leading the way, formed my earliest recollection of TV news, and indirectly influenced my career choice.
Yes, they were often fallible and sometimes full of themselves to some degree, but they worked hard to inform and offer perspective that defined what a news “correspondent” should be. And words counted for them, a far cry from the fluff and gore we see these days.
This book does a good job of recalling that early reporting that made these guys legendary, informing a generation.
My Dad was a life-long Republican, a WWII combat veteran and largely self-sufficient man who thought all reporters - most of all those on national network TV - were, as he put it, “commies, pinkos or do-gooders.”
So I willfully became a print journalist and more or less dared him to call me a commie.
Born in 1950, I was too late to hear Murrow and the boys do radio war reports. But many of them, Murrow leading the way, formed my earliest recollection of TV news, and indirectly influenced my career choice.
Yes, they were often fallible and sometimes full of themselves to some degree, but they worked hard to inform and offer perspective that defined what a news “correspondent” should be. And words counted for them, a far cry from the fluff and gore we see these days.
This book does a good job of recalling that early reporting that made these guys legendary, informing a generation.
October 31, 2018
Free | Mixed feelings | I watched a YouTube video of What's My Line featuring Murrow as the celebrity guest, and it got me interested in him and his Boys. This book happened to be free at the time, so I picked it up and read the first half in a couple days. It was a little overpopulated, but that isn't something it can help: there were a lot of people involved, and none could rightfully be left out. The WWII years were fascinating, and I just devoured that section, but after the war my interest waned. The politics of CBS just didn't hold my interest as well, and I put the book down for months. When I finally decided to just finish it, I burned through the rest in an afternoon, but it never did capture me as the beginning had. That said, the whole story needed to be told as a single narrative, it wouldn't have been right to stop in the mid40s. It simply wasn't as compelling.
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April 25, 2022A fascinating look at the origins of radio and TV news, and a very sad one too. Eric Severeid, in his later years, said ".. the news is delivered by newsmen turned actors -- very bad actors. They grin, they laugh, they chuckle or moan the news ... and any day now, one of them will sing the news while doing a buck-and-wing stark naked." (p373) The author goes on to say that Local anchors were increasingly chosen for their looks and charm. "Happy talk" among the news team became the norm. And .. "the stories that were put on the evening news focused on violence and death: bombings and wars and killings .... NBC John Chancellor said "What makes it worse is that we know this is not an accurate picture of the world around us." (p389) In 1996, PBS NewsHour was an exception. Today maybe not so much an exception.
November 12, 2020
What a moving story of the lives of those who pioneered broadcast journalism. This book is an intertwined set of biographies set like a wheel with spokes connected to the hub, Egbert Murrow. (I can understand why he changed it to Edward). Morrow’s boys were highly ambitious and intelligent as well as hard-working. Each wanted to make a name for himself; in some ways it is glorious and in other ways sad that they felt so needy for appearing to be great in the eyes of others. There is much I can learn from their courage and devotion to the truth in broadcast journalism. There is also much to learn to avoid with regards to their selfish ambition and destructive personal behaviors. Overall, I appreciate how the authors presented the story and its characters, warts and all.
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