Seeing It Now

Small wonder, then, that Friendly- vision, Ralph Engelman’s new biography of Fred Friendly, should have been published not by a trade house but by Columbia University Press. Friendly was one of the most influential figures in the history of broadcast news, the producer of See It Now, the first TV newsmagazine, a program whose name continues to be spoken in hushed tones by aficionados of the golden age of television. Not only did George Clooney make a movie about Edward R. Murrow, the host of See It Now and the best-known TV newsman of the 1950s, but Clooney himself played Friendly.

But just as Good Night, and Good Luck fizzled at the box office, so has Friendly become the answer to a trivia question, known only to a soft core of fast-graying admirers who knew him when.

Why is Fred Friendly forgotten? Because he resigned from CBS in 1966 and spent the last three decades of his long life spinning his wheels at the Ford Foundation and (surprise) Columbia University. Insofar as he is remembered by anyone under the age of 50, it is as the moderator of a stagy series of PBS “seminars” on public affairs whose prestigious panelists were invited to speculate at endless length on how they might conduct themselves in hypothetical high-pressure situations of the utmost implausibility.

It was a long way from the glory days when the producer and host of See It Now had jointly controlled a weekly half-hour of commercially sponsored prime time on CBS that they were free to use in whatever way they saw fit, be it to chat with Carl Sandburg or to inform their viewers that Joe McCarthy was evil incarnate.

Therein lies part of the problem with Friendlyvision. Because it is a biography of Friendly rather than a history of his years at CBS, the last third of the book is necessarily devoted to what he did after he left the network, a subject into which I doubt that even the flashiest of celebrity biographers could pump life. Nor does Ralph Engelman come close to filling the latter bill: Friendlyvision is a plain-Jane academic biography that tells Friendly’s story accurately but without flair.

On the other hand, Engelman has interviewed many of the people with whom Friendly worked at CBS, and though there are some odd lapses in his command of the literature of golden-age TV–he seems unaware, for instance, that Harry Reasoner devoted a whole chapter to Friendly in his 1981 autobiography–Friendlyvision does a decent job of explaining who Fred Friendly was and why, once upon a time, it mattered.

The key to understanding TV news in the early 1950s is that nobody watched it. Network radio was still the dominant broadcast medium, and the only newsmen who wanted anything to do with television were second-string reporters and would-be producers looking for a leg up. That left room at the top for hustlers with spotty backgrounds, and Fred Friendly filled the bill perfectly. Born in 1915, he was a gauche young man with a hair-trigger temper who fell in love with radio as a youngster but lacked the voice and personality necessary to establish himself on the air. What he had was energy, determination, and, above all, the willingness to do whatever he had to do to bulldoze his way into the broadcast business.

The fact that Friendly ended up in the news division of CBS seems to have been largely coincidental. His first network job was as the creator and producer of a news-based celebrity game show called Who Said That? Throughout his career in TV news, his enemies–and some of his friends–would claim that he was more interested in flash than facts. “Above all,” said Robert Trout, a veteran radio newsman who worked with Friendly early in his career, “Fred Friendly was a salesman.”

Enter Edward R. Murrow. No more a trained journalist than Friendly, Ed Murrow was a naturally gifted writer with a knack for turning out vivid descriptive prose who had turned himself into a celebrity by reporting on the Battle of Britain for CBS.

His stellar reputation was deserved: The scripts of several of his radio dispatches were reprinted in Reporting World War II, the Library of America’s anthology of wartime journalism, and they read as well as they sound. But it was the way they sounded that made Murrow a star, for he read them into the microphone in a dark-grained, casually dramatic voice that was made for radio. By war’s end he was as famous as Franklin Roosevelt–or Jack Benny.

By 1951, though, Murrow realized that TV was here to stay, and he also saw that the ability to write vivid descriptive prose was not the stuff of which small-screen stardom would be made. In order to make a go of it, he needed a producer who understood how the new medium worked. For his part, Friendly needed a polished front man to give him legitimacy, and the saturnine, elegantly-tailored Murrow was nothing if not respectable.

The two men joined forces, and See It Now was born.

At a time when TV news was still (in Charles Kuralt’s wry recollection) “sandwiched in among puppets and pet monkeys and cute weather reports,” See It Now was an anomaly, a wholly serious “Life magazine of the air” (Friendly’s phrase) whose cocreators knew that television wasn’t just radio with pictures. Friendly explained their method in a memo sent to the reporters who were working on a See It Now telecast about the Korean war:

Of such painstakingly shot “little pictures” was See It Now made. But it was Murrow whose on-camera presence charged them with dramatic significance. In the admiring words of a CBS director, “Ed Murrow had on a television screen what Gary Cooper and Spencer Tracy had on the movie screen, the same virility, the same cinematic eyes.” And Murrow was more than just a Savile Row dresser’s dummy: He was a respected news analyst whose nightly radio broadcast, Edward R. Murrow with the News, featured his editorial commentaries on the day’s events.

It was the combination of his journalistic savvy and Friendly’s producing skills that made See It Now the first TV news program to be embraced by the viewing public. But Murrow also had a contract that gave him absolute editorial control over See It Now–the show was jointly produced by Murrow and Friendly, not by the news division of CBS–and starting in 1953, he used it in a way that would lay him low.

Murrow was a standard-issue establishment liberal who, like most of his colleagues, was something of an anti-anti-Communist. He made no secret of his loathing for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whom he regarded as a reckless opportunist, and with Friendly’s enthusiastic cooperation, he used See It Now as a stick with which to beat the junior senator from Wisconsin, airing a string of anti-McCarthy programs whose climax was a 1954 broadcast in which he declared that McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade had “caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies.”

McCarthy’s career was already on the skids when See It Now aired “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” but the program stirred up hot controversy nonetheless, and CBS soon grew uncomfortable with the prospect of airing openly political commentary on its newscasts, even by so respected a reporter as Murrow. After See It Now lost its sponsor in 1955, the network pulled the show from its weekly prime-time slot and canceled it outright three years later. Murrow’s TV appearances became increasingly infrequent, and in 1961, he retired from broadcasting.

Friendly, unlike Murrow, survived the demise of See It Now–but on CBS’s terms. In the wake of the quiz-show scandals, the network sought to shore up its prestige by launching a new prime-time documentary series and inviting Friendly to produce it. The invitation came with strings attached: CBS Reports would be part of the news division, not an independent unit, and the invitation was extended to Friendly alone.

Eager to prove that the “unseen man behind See It Now” (as the New York Times had called him) could make a splash without his famous partner, Friendly spent the next five years making documentaries that steered clear of the explicit editorializing that had caused See It Now to be scuttled. CBS Reports was so well received that Friendly was made president of CBS News in 1964; but his abrasive managerial style was ill-suited to the task of running a corporate news division, and he quit in high dudgeon when network executives refused to give him air time to cover congressional hearings on the Vietnam war. His career in commercial TV was over.

Now that editorial comment of the most incendiary kind has become the stock in trade of cable news, it will doubtless make little sense to younger readers that “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” should have gotten Murrow in hot water. But TV news moved in a different direction after See It Now was cancelled, one in which signed commentary was replaced by a subtler form of editorializing in which liberal-minded newsmen claimed to report “objectively” while infusing their stories with an implicit point of view.

This cloak of pretended objectivity was necessary at a time when there were only three networks whose content was regulated by the FCC. In the long run, though, it devastated the credibility of broadcast news and created a market for the unabashedly opinion-driven programming of MSNBC and Fox News.

See It Now and CBS Reports have long since vanished into the memory hole of TV, just as Murrow has become little more than a vaguely remembered reputation. Television, it seems, can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate: Once you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, then vanish in a puff of smoke. So far as I know, there’s never been a TV star who stayed famous once he or she went off the air; as for prime-time documentaries, they’re a thing of the fast-receding past, while the narrative techniques developed by Murrow and Friendly have been watered down into the magazine format of 60 Minutes and its offspring, in which news is turned into an easily digestible species of entertainment.

Ralph Engelman, not surprisingly, considers all this to be bad news. He remains a true believer in the unrealized promise of See it Now-style TV news:

Maybe. I think it more likely that few Americans will henceforth be willing to take the good faith of TV newsmen for granted. It’s been a long time since anyone took network news seriously save for the senior citizens who grew up with it. Most of the rest of us no longer assume that the oracular voice of a Charles Gibson or a Brian Williams is necessarily telling the truth, or that the producers and writers whose job it is to make such men look and sound good are any more reliable.

Unlike our parents, we prefer our advocacy straight, and we trust only those reporters who tell us what we expect to hear. Never such innocence again, Philip Larkin said of England in 1914, just before World War I put an end to the illusions of a generation. The same might be said of those youthful cynics who will never know how it feels to sit down in front of the TV at 5:30 each night and believe what they see.

Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and chief culture critic of Commentary, is the author of the forthcoming Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).