Journalists like to think of themselves as skeptics, but when it comes to their own trade they lean toward romance. TV journalists are especially susceptible, since their particular subclass of the profession, where the reach can be so vast, the depth so shallow, and the pay so large, carries with it a certain insecurity; TV people are often considered the spoiled, slow-witted kid brothers of the Big Boys in newsprint. (And with reason: Consult the card catalogue under Broadcast Journalism and you’ll find entries like Connie Chung — Broadcast Journalist.)

Through every indignity, TV journalists hold tight to the mythic figure of Edward R. Murrow — “the spiritual leader,” in Jim Lehrer’s phrase, “of everyone in serious broadcast journalism.” Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson’s The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism (Houghton Mifflin, $ 27.95, 445 pages) is yet another attempt to burnish the legend. The third Murrow biography in a decade, at least the fifth since its subject’s death in 1965, it concentrates on Murrow’s relationship with the team of journalists he recruited to cover Europe for CBS News during the Second World War, and tells the tale well. By the end of the book, though, the pull of sentiment proves too great and the moral of the story is uncorked.