During World War Two, Edward R. Murrow flew twenty-five combat missions as a broadcast journalist. His first combat mission involved 500 planes, of which 50 were lost, but the novelty of his reporting won him even more fame and respect than his rooftop reporting during the London Blitz. He had become so valuable to CBS that they didn’t want him doing any more missions. His bosses told him that he’d already experienced the terror of combat and gotten the story that he’d set out to produce. Murrow responded that he’d only experienced the terror once, but the airmen were experiencing it over and over again. The real story, he said, was in living through this recurrent dance with death. So, he did another twenty-four missions.
I mention this because I can’t imagine today’s broadcast journalists doing anything of the kind. I do not completely dismiss the courage of today’s breed of journalist. Many took risks and some even lost their lives reporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Journalists have been kidnapped in Afghanistan, and Daniel Pearl was beheaded in Pakistan. But I cannot picture Brian Williams or Charlie Gibson or David Gregory or George Stephanopoulos or Chris Matthews playing Russian Roulette with their lives twenty-five times.
But more than a lack of courage, I notice a lack of any sense of public service. If today’s broadcast journalist did take such risks, I sense that they’d do it strictly for ratings. Maybe part of the problem is we fight wars we don’t need to fight. If the cause is at all controversial, a reporter feels no obligation to report with the same reckless abandon as our soldiers use in fighting the enemy. In fact, they feel it’s suspect to identify with our soldiers at all. We feel it, too.
I don’t know whether it’s a deterioration of our media or, more likely, the fallout from 40 years of fighting wars that need not have been fought. The whole spectacle has really taken a toll.
