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World War II and
the Invention of
Broadcast Journalism

You could hear it in the very way that H

V. Kaltenborn, in 1939 and1940, reported the news from Europe: he used words like lugubriousalient, and temporize; he pronounced at all “at tall,” and chan
“chahnce.” Yet in the next breath he would become much more colloquial,
saying of the Germans, “All their stuff is censored,” or that French lines were
holding except for “a couple of unimportant spots.” He frequently prefaced
information from foreign communique’s with “what this means is” or “what
this shows.” Upper-class pedant or guy next door—what should the radio
newscaster be?

When people listen to old-time radio, they don’t listen to old news
shows; most are lost forever. Only CBS seems to have made a systematic ef-
fort to preserve their war coverage (which they did on acetate disks, mag-
netic tape not yet having been invented), and you’ve got to go to the
National Archives to hear the full collection of broadcasts.1 With the excep-
tion of Edward R. Murrow, television reminds us of its history with the
news: John Cameron Swayze, Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite. And
as Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson point out in The Murrow Boys, thei
rousing account of the invention of broadcast news at CBS, CBS itself did
little, after the advent of television, to keep the memory of its own pioneer
radio correspondents alive.

Yet by the fall of 1938 radio coverage of the Munich crisis had rendered
the newspaper “extra” all but obsolete—people didn’t run out to the street
for the news; they tuned their dials, and they listened. “Radio,” wrote
Kaltenborn, “became of itself one of the most significant events of the cri-
sis.” More radio sets were sold during the three weeks in September that

/ 161

Douglas, Susan J.. Listening In : Radio and the American Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail.action?docID=310845.
Created from berkeley-ebooks on 2018-08-14 16:19:22.

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radio broadcast the crisis than during any previous three-week period. One
year later over 9 million new sets were sold, a new industry record. In 1935,67
percent of American families had radio; by 1940,81 percent did. “Glued to the
set” became a national clicheV

With the seemingly endless documentaries made, and still being made,
about World War II, and the success of the History Channel (nicknamed by
some the Hitler Channel), we tend to think of this as a highly visual war, expe
rienced by Americans back home primarily through pictures. And certainly,
with 85 million people going to the movies each week, Americans saw the
progress of the war through newsreels, as well as through photographs in
newspapers and magazines. But the way we have come to remember the war—
through this visual record—misrepresents how people followed and imagined
this war on a daily basis. This was a war that people listened to. The media’s c
lective memory of this war, which serves the programming needs of television,
suggests that the visual was more important than the auditory, when just the
opposite was true. And especially with the advent of gasoline rationing, radio
listening increased as people were forced to stay closer to home. World War II
was a radio war.

With the loss of so many news broadcasts, it is not easy to write about what
was, quite simply, a total revolution in American life: the bringing of national
and international news, with the actual sounds of political rallies, air-raid
sirens, or gunfire, right into people’s living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens.
Broadcasts included daily accounts of the Lindbergh trial, commentary on the
New Deal, sentimental human-interest stories like the funeral for a blind man’s
Seeing Eye dog, and, of course, World War II. Listeners were transported to di
ferent places and times by radio. As Popular Mechanics gushed in 1938, “T
rapid strides of radio during the past few years have made possible world-
girdling hook-ups which, in the space of an hour, will take you into yesterday,
today and tomorrow.”3

Fortunately, some commentators wrote memoirs about the emergence of
broadcast news. Still, there is so little left to listen to today, to hear what it a
tually sounded like. So much has been lost or destroyed that radio news from
the 1930s remains severely underrepresented in histories of the press, and in
histories of the period. Major books on the period, like Paul Fussell’s Wartime
or Alan Brinkley’s recent analysis of the New Deal, The End of Reform, don’t
even have the word radio in their indexes. Miraculously, enough has survived
from transcriptions made at the time that we can get some idea of the inven-
tion of broadcast news.4

And this is what we hear: a struggle over how men would deliver the
news—which included a struggle over radio oratory—and a pushing out of

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 163

horizons as listeners added new maps to their mental geographies. There were
experiments with the use of sound—the use of ambient sound from the scene
of the news story, the more contrived use of sound effects in the studio—to
convey a sense of immediacy and urgency. News listening on the radio, as
broadcasting styles were being invented, moved people between cognitive reg-
isters—informational listening, which was more flat and less imaginative as
people took in brief, factual reports, and dimensional listening, as people were
compelled to conjure up maps, topographies, street scenes in London after a
bombing, a warship being dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe. We also hear certain
radio reporters subtly leading public opinion toward a less isolationist stance,
a worldview more sympathetic to mobilization and, eventually, engagement.
They weren’t supposed to do this, however, and most historical accounts of the
rise of radio news in the late 1930s emphasize reporters’ objectivity and net-
work policy against editorializing.

But if you listen to the news broadcasts from 1938 on, you hear an insis-
tence that Americans become much more aware of the world around them and
understand that democracy itself was at risk. The Munich crisis as broadcast
on radio made Americans much more interested in and knowledgeable about
news from Europe: a public opinion poll from November 1938 asserted that
this story was twice as interesting to the public as any other event of the year.
Radio news in the 1930s and ’40s played a central part in shaping a new vision
of America’s role in world affairs, a vision with considerable consequences for
American foreign and domestic policy since World War II. As the radio histo-
rian David Culbert put it, “Radio emerged as the principal medium for com-
bating isolationism in America.”5

Indeed, Kaltenborn had no compunctions about asserting in I Broadca
the Crisis, the collection of his Munich crisis broadcasts published in the fall o
1938, that radio made “the blind, head-in-sand isolationist view of foreign af-
fairs . . . no longer tenable.” More to the point, after June 1940—after
Churchill became prime minister of Britain and approached Roosevelt for
help, after Dunkirk, after the fall of France—radio commentators supported
Roosevelt’s “preparedness” policies, helping to sway public opinion toward
support of American intervention abroad. They implied and helped construct
what seemed like a consensus about U.S. involvement in the war.6 What we
hear, as part of the radio industry’s conscious and unconscious efforts to con-
struct a sense of nationhood and national unity in the 1930s, is the evocation
by commentators and newsmen of the national “we,” the “we” that was united
despite our differences, the “we” that was allegedly monolithic in its outlook
and will.

At the same time, during this decade we hear the evolution of what would

164 \ LISTENING IN

become the standards for objectivity in broadcast news. Although such stan-
dards began to be more firmly encoded in the print media during the 1920s,
especially with the separation of commentary from news stories, they did not
instantly, or even easily, migrate to radio.7 Radio also sparked special concerns
about the dangers of opinion or bias, because it was felt that the timbre and
tone of the human voice alone could be used to unduly influence listeners.
With the sainthood accorded Edward R. Murrow, and the loss of so many of
the news broadcasts that preceded his legendary reports, it’s easy to think of
“objectivity” as appearing, somehow full-formed, out of the CBS studios in
1939. It’s equally easy to forget that radio news and commentary were, for ten
years before that, anything but “objective.” Demagogues flourished on the air
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and news commentators—who were in the
mid-1930s more common than actual broadcast reporters—felt no compunc-
tion to be unbiased or neutral. Father Coughlin and Huey Long were not the
only men with strong opinions on the air. Much of early radio commentary
was openly partisan, as when Boake Carter referred to administration officials
as “fat New Dealers” while Walter Winchell fawned all over FDR. By 1945 wha
counted as objectivity, what the public and opinion leaders accepted as objec-
tivity, became established in broadcasting. Newsmen, the networks, the gov-
ernment, and advertisers battled over what exactly constituted objectivity,
until the fight spilled onto the front pages in 1943.

During the 1930s, when broadcast news was being socially constructed and
fought over, we hear a genre being invented, and we hear that male arche-
type—the newsman—being designed as well. Only a few women—Dorothy
Thompson, Mary Marvin Breckenridge, Betty Wason—got on the air in a
deeply sexist industry in which it was gospel that people did not like and would
not trust the female voice over the air. Radio commentators and war corre-
spondents became national celebrities—sometimes overnight stars—their
voices instantly recognizable, their public images often carefully crafted. In the
evolution from the pretentious announcer Boake Carter—who actually said
“Cheerio” at the end of his broadcasts—to the no-nonsense and conversa-
tional approach of Ed Murrow, Bill Shirer, and Bob Trout, we hear men who
sounded like they came from middle America dethroning their pseudoaristo-
cratic predecessors. Scribner’s in 1938 reported Murrow as saying that h
wanted CBS’s foreign broadcasts “to be anything but intellectual. I want them
to be down to earth, in the vernacular of the man on the street.”8

We also hear these men praising simple heroism and denouncing cow-
ardice during World War II, and reaffirming the centrality of American man-
hood to the survival not just of the nation but of the world. After the giggling
of Ed Wynn, or Jack Benny’s effete pretentiousness, or Edgar Bergen’s being

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 165

put in his place by a prepubescent dummy, or George Burns’s frustration at
being trapped by Gracie Allen’s illogic—all played for laughs, of course—
here were serious men sometimes risking their lives to deliver the news, men
confident in the American man’s place in the world, men affirming that
knowledge, rationality, stoicism, courage, and empathy, and an utter disdain
for upper-class pretentiousness, were what made men “real” men. By 1941
the apotheosis of American manhood wasn’t Boake Carter or Eddie Cantor,
it was Edward R. Murrow, the radio version of Humphrey Bogart’s “Rick” in
Casablanca.

Few events in the history of radio have been more notorious than the
Halloween Eve broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Even people who kno
absolutely nothing about the history of radio know about this episode: peo-
ple fleeing their homes around the country to escape the invading Martians
so realistically portrayed by the Mercury Theatre that Sunday evening in
1938. We don’t have reliable figures on how many people actually fled, but
Hadley Cantril, Herta Herzog, and Hazel Gaudet in their study of the panic,
estimated that about 1 million Americans were scared by the broadcast.9

Orson Welles, director and star of the program, had to hold a press confer-
ence the next day to apologize and insist he meant no harm. Dramatizations
of simulated news bulletins became verboten. And the broadcast was taken,
in many circles, as an indisputable demonstration of the “hypodermic nee-
dle” theory of radio’s power to instantly inject an unsuspecting people with
unchecked emotions that would produce irrational responses. There is good
reason to believe that the panic was less extensive than initially sensational-
ized in the press; after all, it made for great headlines. In the first three weeks
after the broadcast, newspapers around the country ran over 12,500 stories
about its impact.10 But what mattered was the new perception of radio’s
power. And many in the industry took the panic as evidence of the intellec-
tual simplicity of much of the audience, and the need therefore to speak to
them in simple language.

It has become a commonplace to explain the panic as a result of people’s
newfound dependence on radio news, which, in the fall of 1938, had been
bringing Americans increasingly urgent and disturbing bulletins about Hitler’s
conquests in Europe and particularly about the Munich crisis and Neville
Chamberlain’s capitulation. This explanation still makes sense. After all, War o
the Worlds aired just one month after the crisis had been temporarily resolve
one month after Americans had been glued to their radio sets, used to having
programs interrupted by the latest news from Germany. But how had radio
news evolved, and why did a dramatic rendering of an alien invasion resonate
so with it? What were people hearing on the radio that was different from what

166 \ LISTENING IN

they read in the papers, and how did listening to the news—as opposed to
reading it—reorient Americans toward current affairs?

KDKA’s “inaugural” broadcast was a news program—coverage of the pres
idential election returns of 1920. But news remained an afterthought in early
radio, which was dominated by talks, music, and fledgling variety shows. Lis-
teners could hear the Democratic and Republican conventions on the air in
1924, and WGN in Chicago paid $1,000 a day for a telephone line to Dayton,
Tennessee, so it could provide intermittent coverage of the Scopes “Monkey”
trial. And radio was able to scoop the newspapers on the progress of Charles
Lindbergh’s flight and his safe arrival in France. But as the networks formed,
and advertisers came not just to sponsor but also to produce radio shows, the
overwhelming emphasis was on entertainment. One of the earliest quasi-news
shows was Floyd Gibbons’s highly popular The Headline Hunter, which pr
miered on NBC in 1929. Gibbons didn’t report the news; with an orchestra
backing him up, he recounted his adventures covering past news stories. Prob-
ably the most popular “news” program of the early 1930s was The March o
Time, in which actors impersonated famous newsmakers like FDR, Huey
Long, or Benito Mussolini. As late as 1938 a CBS executive would assert that
“none but the most urgent or important news would displace temporarily a
program designed to entertain.”11

Nonetheless, with major breaking news, such as election returns, radio
brought instantaneous coverage of the latest tallies, making such stories irre-
sistible to the networks and their listeners. And even listening to something as
dull as a Hoover campaign speech in 1932 was much more gripping on the
radio. It wasn’t just that the announcer evoked the scene by telling you that
“more than 30,000 people packed and jammed every available seat” in this au-
ditorium in Cleveland—you heard the sounds of people milling around, talk-
ing, yelling, and applauding. When the announcer described the “huge
audience, standing as one man, greeting the president,” you heard the ovation
and the rousing band music. Listening on the radio brought you to the hall and
allowed you to participate vicariously in this large event, to be part of this
crowd, and to envision a thriving public sphere consisting of thousands of
everyday people.12

Two events in 1932 proved to be turning points in the evolution of broad-
cast news. At 11:35 on Tuesday night, March 1, WOR in New York interrupte
its programming to announce that the Lindbergh baby had been kidnapped.
Forty minutes later CBS interrupted a dance program on its network with the
same bulletin. By the next morning CBS and NBC had both established specia
lines to reporters in Hopewell, New Jersey, near the Lindbergh estate. Both net
works kept a constant vigil for seventy-two days until the baby’s body was

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 167

found.13 On-the-spot radio reporting had been established technically and
journalistically. That November the networks’ coverage of the Hoover-
Roosevelt election returns scooped the nation’s newspapers. What came to be
known as the press-radio war was on.

Meeting at their annual convention in April of 1933, the American News-
paper Publishers Association voted to stop providing the networks with news
bulletins and to discontinue publishing daily schedules of radio programs un-
less the stations paid for them, as if they were advertising. At this time NBC an
CBS had skeletal news staffs and only a few regularly scheduled news pro-
grams. In 1930 Lowell Thomas and the News premiered, airing on NBC in t
eastern half of the country and on CBS in the western half, and moving to NBC
the following year.14 H. V. Kaltenborn, an editor at the Brooklyn Eagle who h
been doing weekly commentaries on WEAF since 1922, signed with CBS in
1930. These men read and commented on the news, drawing from newspapers
and the wire services. After the ANPA resolutions, both NBC and CBS began
building their own news departments, with CBS’s efforts being especially am-
bitious. Newspapers began a CBS boycott, which included a publicity blackou
of many of its sponsors.

The media historian Robert McChesney gives the best behind-the-scenes
account of this “war,” which, as he emphasizes, was not between radio and
newspapers so much as it was between some newspapers and others. Many
radio stations were owned by newspapers, and those that weren’t were often af-
filiated with a paper in their town. One-third of the stations in the CBS net-
work, for example, were by 1932 owned by or affiliated with newspapers,
which were more interested in cooperation than in war. Network executives,
for their part, were concerned about an ongoing campaign by educators and
reformers to limit—or even eliminate—advertising over the air, a campaign
some newspapers had already endorsed because they felt radio was stealing
clients from them. Broadcasters did not want to give any newspapers reason to
support such regulation, especially as Congress was preparing to deliberate
over what would become the landmark legislation governing broadcasting, the
Communications Act of 1934.

In December of 1933, broadcasters signed on to the Biltmore agreement,
in which they pledged not to broadcast any news that was less than twenty-four
hours old. The news agencies would supply the networks with brief news
items, which would be broadcast in two five-minute newscasts daily—one
after 9:30 A.M., the other after 9:00 P.M., to “protect” the morning and evening
papers. Each broadcast had to end with the line “For further details, consult
your local newspaper.” Commentators were not allowed to touch spot news.
And CBS was to disband its fledgling news-gathering organization. Kaltenborn

168 \ LISTENING IN

described this as a “complete defeat for radio,” and the chairman of the
Scripps-Howard chain was congratulated for coming out of the negotiations
“with the broadcasters’ shirts, scalps, and shoelaces.”15

Such postmortems were premature. Once the Communications Act was
passed, and the commercial basis of American broadcasting was assured,
broadcasters had little to fear from the press. Besides, the public hadn’t liked
the outcome of the war, telling pollsters in 1934 that they wanted more news
over the air. Renegade stations, like WOR in New York, had refused to honor
the agreement and aired the very sorts of news broadcasts the agreement for-
bade.16 And several upstart news agencies, most notably Transradio Press,
began competing with the wire services to provide breaking news to radio sta-
tions. Within a year the Biltmore agreement was being widely ignored, and
radio news was poised for revitalization.

Besides, in January of 1935, radio was all too happy to provide coverage of
one of the decade’s most sensational stories. The media circus in the mid-
1990s surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial—including the endless hype that it
was the trial of the century—made it hard to remember that another trial,
equally shameless in its exploitation by the press, remains a contender for that
title. The Lindbergh kidnapping trial was the first nationally broadcast murder
trial, and it made relatively unknown announcers national celebrities. Boake
Carter was, in 1932, a print journalist who was also doing two five-minutes-
day broadcasts over Philadelphia’s WCAU. His boss, the owner of WCAU, wa
also William Paley’s brother-in-law and persuaded CBS to send him to
Hopewell, New Jersey, to cover the kidnapping. The exposure helped Carter
land a daily program of commentary on the CBS network. Gabriel Heatter, an-
other unknown, also became a star through his coverage of the trial, especially
when, on the night Bruno Hauptmann was put to death, he was forced to ad-
lib on the air for fifty-five minutes because of a delay in the execution. In a fiv
year period he went from making $35 a week to earning $130,000 a year.17

But one of the biggest radio stars of the trial was Walter Winchell, who had
been on the air since 1930 and in 1932 had begun his Jergens Journal, whi
aired on Sunday night at 9:30 on NBC-Red (one of NBC’s two networks) and
made him one of the highest rated commentators on the air. Listeners recalled
being able to walk down the street at night and hear WinchelPs trademark
rapid-fire “flashes” coming out of nearly every house on the block.18 Winchell
had made his name as a gossip columnist for the New York Graphic and the
the Mirror and, as his biographer Neal Gabler emphasizes, turned gossip into
a commodity that coexisted on the same pages—or in the same broadcast—
with news. In the process, then, he helped—for better or for worse—to rede-
fine what was news and stirred up heated debate about who had the right to

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 169

shape listeners’ tastes in and expectations of broadcast news. Here was another
contest over the invention of broadcast news in the 1930s—would it be infor-
mation, entertainment, or some hybrid of the two?

Since the “radio boom” of the early 1920s, educators, reformers, and com-
mentators in the press had envisioned the social impact of radio through a
Utopian lens, seeing a future in which “the masses” were “uplifted” through
radio, made better educated, more appreciative of classical music and intellec-
tual engagement, more rational and deliberative. These were class-bound,
bourgeois hopes, and in many ways they would be dashed. For they were coun-
tered by another vision of radio—as a profit-making vaudeville house on the
air—which corporations and federal regulators ensured would be institution-
alized.19 This was the vision Walter Winchell brought to the air, and his intu-
itions about how to translate his newspaper column to radio were brilliant.

Already Winchell had seized on the post-World War I delight in slang, lac-
ing his column with gaudy, inventive wordplay: “made whoopee” meant “had
fun”; “Reno-vated” or “phffft” meant “divorced”; “Adam-and-Eveing it” meant
“getting married.” On the air—at 200 words a minute—such language inter-
mixed with sound effects and WinchelPs personal, direct address to the audi-
ence. Gabler perfectly captures Winchell’s voice—”clipped like verbal tap
shoes”—and reports that his voice went up an octave when he was on the air.
Winchell opened the show with the urgent tapping of a telegraph key, which
wasn’t really tapping out anything resembling the Morse code but which did
signify news “hot off the wire.” “The big idea is for sound effect,” Winchell
noted, “and to set the tempo.” The tapping bracketed the beginning and end of
each story, and was coded to let the listener know what was coming: low-
pitched clicks for domestic news, high-pitched beeps for international news.
Winchell then greeted “Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea,” sug-
gesting, in his classic telegraphic form, that his broadcasts spanned oceans and
that Mr. and Mrs. America was a national category all his listeners fit into. “I
want to create as much excitement as a newsboy on the streets when he yells,
‘Extry, extry, read all about it,'” he declared.20

At first the program focused almost exclusively on celebrity marriages, di-
vorces, and love affairs, but gradually it combined a mix of celebrity and gang-
ster gossip and national and international news. Winchell would open with an
urgent “flash,” often a train wreck, murder, or other disaster story. An assistant
combed foreign newspapers for his “By Way of the High Seas” segment, which
he introduced with the beeping sound of wireless dots and dashes.21

Critics of “mass culture” past and present have emphasized its appeal to the
emotional, its cultivation of the irrational, its emphasis on romance, lost love,
and melodrama in general. In other words, they have—sometimes quite con-

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sciously, sometimes not—derided mass culture as “feminine” and as contami-
nating more elite, allegedly intellectually based, masculine culture with femi-
nized values and attributes. His contemporaries leveled such criticisms at
Winchell, who was attacked for being too emotional and too corny, and for
bringing gossip into the realm of serious journalism. After all, his program was
sponsored by Jergens, and his news items were interspersed with messages
about “the importance of charming hands to a girl.” But if we accept these cul
tural constructions of what is “feminine” and what is “masculine,” Winchell
did represent a different kind of radio commentator than Kaltenbom, or Low-
ell Thomas, and certainly Murrow. Winchell fused male power, authority, and
interest in the political with hysteria, irrationality, and an interest in the inter-
personal and romantic. His appeal came in part from his emotionalism and
urgency, from the permission he gave men to be passionate and even irrational
about issues and events. Gabler very rightly points out that the controversies
surrounding Winchell in the 1930s stemmed from class-based biases about
who had the right to shape the nation’s cultural agenda, an educated intellec-
tual like Walter Lippmann or a scrappy rabble-rouser from New York’s Lower
East Side like Walter Winchell. But there were also tensions here about mas-
culinity, about what kinds of men deserved such power, and about what kinds
of things such men should discuss and how they should discuss them. These
tensions, too, shaped the evolution of broadcast news in the 1930s.

By the time of the Lindbergh trial in 1935, Winchell had become a national
celebrity, and he claimed that several of his broadcasts had helped police ap-
prehend Hauptmann. With the Biltmore agreement ban on radio news all but
defunct, and with over 100 photographers and between 300 and 350 reporters
swarming over Flemington, New Jersey, the Lindbergh trial marked another
turning point in radio news. It also embodied the term media circus. The loc
sheriff sold tickets to the trial; vaudeville impresarios offered witnesses con-
tracts to go onstage; tourists by the busload descended on the small town.
There was daily coverage of what went on in court, and NBC, the network that
carried Winchell, struggled to prevent him from convicting Hauptmann on
the air. Winchell ignored the network’s directives and insisted that he was not
“partial or biased” but simply in possession of the facts, all of which pointed to
Hauptmann’s guilt. In the courtroom he was as much an actor as a reporter,
giving tips to the prosecution, mouthing comments to Hauptmann, sitting
next to Hauptmann’s wife during testimony. After this trial, writes Gabler, “the
media would be as much participants in an event as reporters of i t . . . turning
events into occasions, national festivals.”22

In none of these stories was Winchell a dispassionate, unbiased conveyor
of information. His notorious staccato style conveyed a barely repressed hyste-

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 171

ria. He was a shameless self-promoter, determined to make the news as well as
announce it. By the early 1940s, the announcer for the show opened the Jerge
Journalby reminding listeners that Winchell’s column was “in 725 newspapers
from New York to Shanghai.” Winchell positioned himself, whenever possible,
as omniscient. In kidnapping stories he appealed to the kidnappers on the air;
in murder stories he implied he might have evidence for the police. “Ladies and
gentlemen, here’s the absolute lowdown,” he would announce, and he often re-
ferred to predictions he had made that had turned out to be true—”I was
right”—or speculative tips he had passed on that were subsequently verified,
to reaffirm his credibility and access to inside sources.23

Nor was Winchell politically neutral. Roosevelt had called him to Wash-
ington for a brief meeting shortly after the 1932 election, and Winchell became
a die-hard fan, always praising FDR in his broadcasts. He also began advocat-
ing economic social justice by berating the way the police and petty bureau-
crats often harassed and discriminated against the poor and unemployed. By
the late 1930s the administration fed Winchell news tips, inside information,
and angles on FDR’s policies, which Winchell happily translated into his rat-a-
tat-tat, everyman’s argot, wrapped up in a pro-Roosevelt spin.

Winchell was, much earlier than other commentators, an outspoken critic
of Hitler and the Nazis, and a harsh critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement. Yet
he was at first opposed to U.S. involvement in another European war because
Europe was “morally bankrupt,” a frequent charge of isolationists at the time.
He did, however, support U.S. preparedness. And after the fall of France he
changed from isolationist to interventionist and made this clear on the air. So
in 1940, with the country still divided between isolationist and international-
ist sentiments, Winchell advocated a military buildup, expansion of the navy,
and increased aid to the Allies. He also attacked isolationist congressmen on
the air as Nazi sympathizers and announced, straight out, “I believe [the] Sen-
ator is wrong.” He called his isolationist listeners “Mr. and Mrs. Rip Van Win-
kles” and taunted their complacency: “Don’t worry about it happening over
here Don’t forget we have two lovely oceans—one on each side To
drown in.” By early 1941 he was mocking critics of his interventionist stance
with the “Walter Winchell War Monger Department.” He broadcast the names
and addresses of people like “Maj. Johnnie Kelly” from New Jersey, a “dear, dear
pal of the Nazis” or “a rabble-rouser with the initials D.S.—who really does the
dirty laundry for big-name Nazi lovers in the U.S.”24

Once France and England declared war on Germany, Secretary of State
Cordell Hull and Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle, knowing Winchell’s politics,
asked his assistant if Winchell might “help prepare the country for war,” which
he happily did, continuing to take the lead from the administration. Winchell’s

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assistant also fed him propaganda and intelligence supplied by the British Se-
curity Coordination office, a front for a covert propaganda organization de-
signed to help bring the United States into the war. This is hardly insignificant,
since by late 1940 Winchell was tied with Bob Hope for the highest rated pro-
gram on radio. Thus Winchell, as one of radio’s most popular commentators,
helped “to destroy the opposition to preparedness and soften the public toward
intervention.”25

Winchell had proven indispensable to the Roosevelt administration. Boake
Carter—Mr. “Cheerio”—had not. By the late 1930s Carter, sponsored by
Philco on CBS, had developed a national following of people who tuned in
specifically to listen to his broadcast at 7:45. In 1936 he was heard over twenty
three CBS stations; the next year he was heard on sixty. In Boston and Cincin
nati in 1938, nearly a third of the radio audience listened to him, while over
half of those in St. Louis did. In larger cities like Chicago and New York, with
more stations to choose from, he was less popular, but still one-fifth tuned in
to Carter. Evidence suggests that he was more popular among lower-income
and rural listeners, and he was favored by Republicans and isolationists. By thi
time Carter—whose publicity photos featured him in jodhpurs and riding
boots—broadcast from his studio-equipped estate outside of Philadelphia.
Larry LeSueur, who would soon become one of the “Murrow Boys,” was the
poor guy back at CBS who fed Carter information about the day’s events from
a Teletype machine in New York.26

Carter had the classic deep radio voice, and he affected upper-class pro-
nunciations, as when he pronounced military “mili-tree.” He asserted that
Arthur Morgan, the head of the TVA, had been fired for being “contumacious.”
Purple prose and cliches often dominated his reports: “Thus when the shad-
ows of two mailed fists etched their dark outlines across war-torn, fire-ridden
Madrid today, there stretched another dark shadow across the whole of Eu-
rope.” His reading of the news was rapid, urgent, and dramatic, yet filled with
the appropriate timing and pauses, as if he were reading a story to a bright
child. Then he would segue into reading an ad for his sponsor, first Philco and
then Post Toasties, as if there was no distinction between performing the news
and performing a commercial. Another famous news commentator of the
time, Edwin C. Hill, billed as “the best dressed newspaper man in New York,”
wore pince-nez with a black silk ribbon fluttering from them.27 These were faux
upper-class fops who did no reporting but who often voiced strong opinions.

Carter can be thought of in some ways as the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s.
He was popular, in part, because he was controversial. He hated Roosevelt and
liberal politics, views he happily shared with his radio audience. In addition to
reading predigested news, Carter repeatedly unburdened himself of his

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 173

anti-New Deal and isolationist sentiments on the air, even supporting, for ex-
ample, Nazi Germany’s invasion of Austria in March of 1938, the Anschluss, a
a welcome corrective to the Versailles Treaty. In the Russo-Japanese border dis-
pute in 1938, he sided with the Japanese.28 But, most important, whatever the
international crisis, he advocated that America focus on itself and stay out of
foreign affairs. Carter accused the president of trying to pay less income tax
than he owed and of causing a senator’s fatal heart attack. The Roosevelt ad-
ministration, whose members referred to him as “Croak Carter,” were incensed
by his increasingly virulent attacks on New Deal initiatives.

But Carter’s partisanship wasn’t his only problem. His commentary was
often filled with “innuendo, invective, distortion, and misinformation” instead
of facts, and by the winter of 1938 he sounded not like a newsman but like a
shrill demagogue. He didn’t act as a reporter; he didn’t check his sources; he
often deliberately misinformed his audience. This didn’t upset just those po-
litically opposed to him. It upset important General Foods stockholders, gov-
ernment officials, and other corporate leaders.29 Like Father Coughlin, Carter
became more extreme in his views, and more deluded about his invulnerabil-
ity, the longer he stayed on the air.

By 1937 the White House had three agencies investigating Carter, and ad-
ministration officials put pressure on William Paley to pull him off the air.
That same year, during the Little Steel strike, Carter began attacking the CIO,
and the union responded by voting to boycott Philco products. Philco canceled
its contract to sponsor Carter in February 1938, but CBS received so many
angry letters from listeners that when General Foods—whose chairman of the
board hated the New Deal and organized labor—offered to step in as sponsor,
Carter got a temporary reprieve. Now the administration went straight to
Paley, suggesting that it might be time for the FCC to seriously investigate mo-
nopoly practices in the broadcasting industry. Paley pulled Carter off CBS for
good in August 1938.30

The timing could not have been better for CBS. The kind of news that was
gripping the nation’s attention now was breaking news about the crisis in Eu-
rope, news that required reporters to be on the scene and witnessing with their
own eyes what was going on in Poland, Vienna, Berlin, and London. In August,
as Hitler made it clear that the Sudetenland belonged to Germany, Chamber-
lain warned that an invasion of Czechoslovakia would mean world war. As the
crisis evolved in September, Americans were riveted to their radio sets. As
Sudeten Germans held mass rallies in favor of union with the Reich, and
20,000 rallied in Madison Square Garden in support of the Czechs, Chamber-
lain met with Hitler on September 15 and again one week later, finally signing
the Munich accord on the thirtieth.

174 \ LISTENING IN

By this time listening to the radio was the nation’s favorite recreational ac-
tivity, according to a Fortune poll. And nearly a quarter of the respondents no
got most of their news solely from the radio, while another 28 percent relied
on both radio and newspapers. News broadcasts were listeners’ third favorite
type of program, and “the combined popularity of the two leading commen-
tators, Boake Carter and Lowell Thomas [this was just before Carter’s sacking],
nearly equaled that of the two leading entertainers.” These news commentators
had national audiences, and each was “capable of becoming the most potent
voice in the land.” “By an inflection of the voice, a suggestive pause, he may
nearly as effectively color the meaning of the news as by rigorous editing of the
script from which he reads.” In another poll published in 1940, Fortune re-
ported that when asked, “Who is your favorite radio commentator?” 38.0 per-
cent said they had no favorite. Of those who did, Lowell Thomas was the
favorite; he was chosen by one-quarter of all those polled. H. V. Kaltenborn wa
next, chosen by 20.0 percent of respondents, but he was the favorite of those
from the upper-income brackets and the professional classes. Carter, once so
popular, was now chosen by only 6.0 percent of those polled and was beaten b
Edwin C. Hill (9.3 percent) and Walter Winchell (6.8 percent), who was cho-
sen as people’s favorite syndicated columnist, especially if they were lower mid-
dle class or poor. The audience for news shows was greatest on the Pacific coas
with those in the Northeast coming in second, and these listeners often listened
to more than one news show. Those in the “isolationist Midwest,” as Business
Week put it, were the least likely to tune in to the news.31

Those who preferred radio news offered the obvious reasons: they got the
news more quickly, it took less time to find out what was going on, and they
found it more interesting and entertaining. As Fortune wrote, those who in th
past might have gone out for a newspaper extra now “are likely instead to watch
the clock for the hour to turn on the world’s routine news And what they
hear,” enthused the magazine, “is likely to sound so authentic, and personal,
and vibrant, and final, that the next day’s paper will seem like warmed over
Monday hash not worth bothering with. This is an aggressive faculty of radio
that is not likely to weaken with the years.”32

In Radio and the Printed Page, published in 1940, the ORR also examin
the extent to which radio news might be supplanting newspapers. By this time
there were regularly scheduled fifteen-minute news shows, plus five-minute
news bulletins. The study reminds us how much of this history has disap-
peared—while it’s possible to hear a few surviving broadcasts of the major
network reporters and commentators, the local newscasters, who dominated
the air in the late 1930s, are lost to us. So it is important to remember that there
were four times as many locally originated news programs as national ones: 80

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 175

percent of news reports came from local stations and featured local commen-
tators. Of the more than nine hundred stations on the air in the early 1940s, 43
percent were not affiliated with any of the networks, and three-quarters used
1,000 watts or less.33

By 1939, according to the ORR, 61.5 percent of Americans listened regu-
larly to radio news shows and were deliberately tuning in to them. Radio had
not yet replaced the newspaper, but people were using a mix of both to get their
news. As the war in Europe intensified, most people were poised between two
media with distinct but overlapping qualities. Radio had obvious advantages:
it was often first with breaking news, it was “free,” you could get the news whil
doing something else, and listeners often felt transported to the scene of the
event. Newspapers, by contrast, provided pictures of many people and events,
allowed readers to pick and chose what they wanted to read, and choose the
time to read as well, provided more in-depth coverage, and offered specialized
coverage of financial news, society, and so forth.

Again, using class as a way to categorize listeners, ORR researchers found
that radio news was preferred over newspapers as the listeners’ economic sta-
tus went down, and women greatly preferred hearing the news over the radio.
So did young people, who constituted the first “radio generation,” and those
who lived in rural areas. The ORR also found that over 50 percent of high-
income and professional men listened to political radio commentators, but
only 37 percent of unskilled workers and men on relief did so. Fortune, in it
1938 survey, put it slightly differently: “News is welcomed by twice as many of
the poor as of the prosperous Housekeepers (who like to listen while they
work), wage earners, and the unemployed rank by occupation at the head of
radio news fans.”34 While researchers sought to neatly demarcate those who
preferred getting their news from newspapers and those who preferred radio,
they found considerable overlap, especially during political campaigns, when
radio seemed, to voters, “to give more clues about the personality of a candi-
date.”

Using Cincinnati as one case study, the ORR documented that by the late
1930s radio was giving much more attention to international news than news-
papers did, and more than 90 percent of those the ORR polled said that radio
news had increased their interest in foreign affairs. Another study, of listeners
in Buffalo, found that the five commentators people listened to most were
Boake Carter, H. V. Kaltenborn, Lowell Thomas, Edwin C. Hill, and Walter
Winchell. As the CBS commentator Elmer Davis heard from his friend Bernar
De Voto, who was traveling in the West, “Everybody was listening to you, learn
ing from you, and applying you. The radio had completely repaired the failure
of the press, which appalled m e . . . the war news in the local papers would av-

176 \ LISTENING IN

erage between a half and three quarters of a column.” Radio listeners, he re-
ported, “had the most astonishing amount of information about the war.”35

Without images, there was a need for the newscaster to use his voice to dra
matize events, and this often made broadcast news more emotional. The ORR
claimed that in radio news there was an emphasis on conflict and more focus
on crime and its prosecution. Radio, of course, was ideally suited to breaking
news about natural disasters and accidents, and about the latest events in the
European and Sino-Japanese wars.

Broadcast news created a sense of intimate participation in “a larger
world.” “The radio signals, coming instantaneously often from the very scenes
of events and entering directly into the home, gave listeners a feeling of per-
sonal touch with the world that possibly no other medium could provide.”36

Radio relieved suspense about “what happened” in the course of a news story’s
narrative, and it did so faster than newspapers. Thus it intensified excitement
about the news. One thing was clear: radio cultivated, especially among
women, people of lower-income levels, and those living in rural areas, a greater
interest in the news, and for many of these groups an interest they didn’t pre-
viously have.

By 1938, especially in the aftermath of the Anschluss, NBC and CBS wer
competing to scoop each other with breaking news in Europe. (By comparison,
radio before 1941 devoted very little coverage to China, Japan, and the rest of
Asia.)37 This was a very new development—”news,” such as it was, directly fro
Europe had previously consisted of coronations, debates at the League of Na-
tions, or speeches and concerts transmitted from abroad. The job of the for-
eign correspondent was to find and book such events. But now the networks
were setting up news divisions: CBS hired Edward R. Murrow, who in turn
hired Bill Shirer, Larry LeSueur, Eric Sevareid, and the others who came to be
known as the Murrow Boys.

Max Jordan of NBC, known as Ubiquitous Max, had signed exclusive con-
tracts with various state-owned radio systems, including those in Germany
and Austria, which gave NBC access to their broadcast facilities. CBS re-
sponded by initiating, in March of 1938, the first of its news roundups, which
brought the reports of foreign correspondents directly into Americans’ living
rooms. By 1940 MBS—the Mutual Broadcasting System, established in 1934—
devoted much of its evening programming to news. NBC provided at least
seven news summaries through the day, from 7:55 in the morning until 1:57
the following morning. And now, on a regular basis, Americans could hear,
live, speeches by Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, or Daladier, translated on the
spot, if necessary, by network announcers. Fifty years later listeners recalled
vividly what it was like to hear Hitler’s frantic, sometimes screaming voice live

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 177

on the radio, often, given the time difference, first thing in the morning as they
were going to work, and how the sound of his voice alone convinced them that
danger was ahead.38

Shortwave transmission, pioneered by the hams, was now invaluable to the
networks: it was the only way such news bulletins could travel from Berlin or
London to New York. The networks also had “shortwave listening posts” in
New York, where those fluent in foreign languages monitored international
shortwave broadcasts. NBC correspondents in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome,
and Geneva broadcast via shortwave to RCA’s enormous receiving facilities at
Riverhead, Long Island. If the correspondent wasn’t in or near a studio, he
would phone in his report, which was then carried by phone lines and possi-
bly even cables to the shortwave transmitter before crossing the Atlantic.39

From Riverhead the reports were sent by telephone line to a master control
room in Radio City, from where they went out by wire to NBC affiliates around
the country. Those affiliates then broadcast the transmissions on the AM band.

CBS’s technical challenge in doing the news roundup involved even more
than getting the shortwave broadcasts across the Atlantic; technicians also
needed to connect the various correspondents to one another. Murrow in Lon-
don, Shirer in Berlin, Trout in the New York studio, and the others had to be
able to hear one another—which required multiple shortwave channels—but
not to hear themselves, which would have produced lag and interference. The
frequency that each correspondent would use—a CBS report from Berlin in
1938, for example, broadcast on 25.2 meters, or 11,870 kilohertz—had to be
cabled to New York in advance.40 Everything had to be timed to the second as
New York shifted from one European city, and one frequency, to another.

But shortwave transmission had its problems. Precisely because short-
waves were reflected back to the earth by the ionosphere, they were subject to
its seasonal, weekly, even hourly vagaries as the ionosphere billowed, ebbed
and flowed, and responded to magnetic pushes and pulls no one could see or
predict. Engineers would test and clear a frequency only to find that, a few
hours later, transmissions no longer came through. Shortwave sounded tinny
and remote. Worse, it was subject to interference from bad weather and
sunspots, and was sometimes accompanied by whines and crackles. Some
correspondents sounded like they were underwater. Or there was an under-
current of quasi-musical tones that sounded like slowed-down and muted
jack-in-the-box music. Often a constant undercurrent of high-pitched Morse
code accompanied the broadcast. Sometimes the broadcasts didn’t come in at
all, or cut off in the middle. Trout, from the studio in New York, would in-
troduce a report from Finland by saying, “Go ahead, Helsinki,” only to hear
nothing in reply. “This is Bob Trout calling Helsinki, go ahead Finland.”

178 \ LISTENING IN

Nothing. “Apparently we shall be unable to contact Finland.” This was not an
unusual occurrence. During the Munich crisis, Bill Shirer broadcast for two
days from Prague, only to learn later that Atlantic storms, as well as govern-
ment interference for official messages, prevented nearly all of his dispatches
from coming through.41

This actually heightened the romance of hearing the New York an-
nouncer’s voice imploring the ether with “America calling Prague; America
calling Berlin; come in, London” and to hear Shirer answer, “Hello, America,
hello, CBS, this is Berlin,” as if the announcer embodied the city itself. The ver
auditory drawbacks of shortwave made this news listening all the more com-
pelling as an auditory experience. You were inclined to lean closer, to try to use
your body to help pull him in yourself. And listeners came to understand a
semiotics of sound, as different sound quality itself signified the genre, the ur-
gency, and the importance of the broadcast. Between 1933 and 1937 the sales
of “all-wave” receivers, which allowed listeners to tune in European broadcasts
for themselves, had soared from 100,000 to over 3 million.42

What did listeners to the first CBS roundup hear on March 13,1938? They
heard an act of interruption—”We interrupt our regularly scheduled broad-
cast”—that broke up the easy, patterned flow of radio entertainment and an-
nounced the urgency of the news program, the importance of world affairs,
and the credibility of the reporters standing by. In the wake of the Anschlus
Bob Trout in New York announced, “The program of St. Louis Blues, normal
scheduled for this time, has been canceled.” Instead, “To bring you the picture
of Europe tonight, Columbia now presents a special broadcast which will in-
clude pickups direct from London, from Paris, and other capitals in Europe.”
His tone was urgent yet conversational. “Tonight the world trembles, torn by
conflicting forces. Throughout this day, event has crowded upon event in tu-
multuous Austria News has flowed across the Atlantic in a steady stream.”
His language was straightforward and anchored in facts as he outlined troop
movements and anti-German demonstrations in London, but he shifted easily
to the colloquial, as when he noted that Chamberlain and his aides “put their
heads together” to consider the crisis. And Trout’s language was hardly neutral.
“Right at this moment, Austria is no longer a nation Austria and Germany
are being welded together under one command… the Nazis are driving with
all their might to bring Austria under complete Nazi domination.” He an-
nounced that Jews and Catholics were being jailed.

He used language that helped listeners see and even hear what it had been
like, and related the recent events to those that Americans might remember or
have participated in. “The Associated Press says you have to visualize what hap
pened in every city, town, and hamlet of the United States in 1918 on Armistic

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 179

Day” to get a sense of the celebrations that accompanied the Nazi march into
Vienna. “Masses of shouting, singing, flag-waving Viennese milled around,
marched through the streets saluting and yelling the Nazi call ‘hail victory’
[which Trout delivered as a cheer]. Truckloads of men, women, and children—
there were even mothers with babies in their arms—rolled through the streets
setting up a terrific racket. It seemed as if the whole population was in the
streets.” How did the takeover sound? There was a “switch of coffeehouse
music from the old, graceful Viennese waltzes to new, German, brisk martial
airs.” Trout acknowledged that it was hard to know how the Austrians really felt
and told his listeners that the Nazis had taken over the press and radio: “They
are out to control everything.”43

“And now,” announced Trout, “Columbia begins its radio tour of Europe’s
capital cities, with transoceanic pickup from London We take you now to
London, England.” The word tour suggested a visual experience and
transoceanic an almost physical vaulting over the Atlantic. Throughout the w
the network made a point of presenting itself as the agent of transport to Eu-
rope, to the site of news in the making, as its announcer declaimed, “We take
you now to …” Bill Shirer, who had witnessed the Anschluss and had just flow
in to do the broadcast, compared what he’d seen in Austria and London. “What
happened was this,” the easygoing translator explained. Describing the anti-
German demonstrations in London, Shirer noted, “I must say, that after the
delirious mobs I saw in Vienna on Friday night,” the demonstrations in Lon-
don “looked pretty tame.” After Edward R. Murrow’s report from Vienna, from
which he promised an “eyewitness account” of Hitler’s entry into the city the
next day, he said, “We return you now to America.”

As the war spread, with the Nazis conquering Czechoslovakia in March of
1939 and Poland that September, and France and England immediately de-
claring war on Germany, radio correspondents became reporters and teachers,
providing essential instruction in geography and in how to read and decon-
struct government communique’s. This was especially critical because all the
news coming out of Germany was heavily censored.

And while we may know these reporters today as Edward R. Murrow,
William Shirer, or Robert Trout, on the air they introduced themselves, at least
at the beginning of their radio careers, before they became institutions, as Ed,
Bill, and Bob—regular guys who didn’t need or want pretentious names like
Boake or Edwin or Gabriel. And, tellingly, the New York anchor, when intro-
ducing Murrow or one of the others from overseas, did not say “Here’s our cor-
respondent in London” but rather “Here’s our man in London, Ed Murrow.”
According to Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson in The Murrow Boys, Murro
was determined that CBS newsmen not come across as upper-class pedants, or

180 \ LISTENING IN

as breakneck-speed hysterics selling an artificial sense of urgency. They were to
be neither in the mansion with Carter nor in the gutter with Winchell.

These men spoke to and for everyday Americans in a conversational, per-
sonal style, often using /, which some of their counterparts in the print media
could not. Murrow’s hallmark, and the one he wanted his “boys” to adopt, was
to create concrete mental images—of what shopping for food was now like, or
sleeping, or crossing the street—of how the war was affecting everyday people.
Such details made a story told with words but not pictures more vivid and im-
mediate; they also cultivated identification and empathy in the listener. Mur-
row especially hated purple prose and instructed one reporter, “Don’t say the
streets are rivers of blood. Say that the little policeman I usually say hello to
every morning is not there today.”44 Nor did their voices have to be standard
radio issue—Shirer’s voice was actually somewhat thin and nasal by radio an-
nouncer standards, but by the standards of how a lot of everyday men
sounded, his voice was refreshingly natural. Nor did Eric Sevareid have the
classic baritone radio voice. As he and Shirer broadcast from European capitals
in the throes of war, the very timbre of their voices affirmed the bravery of reg-
ular guys.

Although these men were becoming experts in European politics and
warfare, they made it seem normal to discuss such things in everyday terms.
They used the first and second person to address their listeners directly and
involve them in what the war felt like. Shirer, whose account of his broadcasts
from Germany, Berlin Diary, became an immediate best-seller, was the mo
adept at and comfortable with assuming a relaxed and intimate style of re-
porting. He told listeners that the Germans’ bombing an undefended town in
Poland “reminded me of the coaches of champion football teams at home,
who sit calmly on the sidelines and watch the machines they created do their
stuff.” You could hear papers rustling and a chair creaking in the studio dur-
ing his broadcasts, yet you felt he was really chatting, not reading a script.
“I’m afraid I cannot arouse much interest by going through the German
press with you tonight,” he told his listeners on November 1, 1939, referring
familiarly to his ritual of sharing with Americans what was being reported in
the German newspapers so they’d understand what government control of
the press meant and how thorough the Nazi propaganda machine was. Shirer
introduced reports with “Incidentally” or “Well” or “What happened was
this,” just as you would at the dinner table. He spoke to the audience as if
they were equals, explaining what they couldn’t know because they were in
the States but also addressing them as informed adults, with asides such as
“the official position, as you know.. “45

Murrow could be informal too, and, like Shirer, he often reported what was

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 181

being said in the British press. Citing an item from the newspaper he was about
to read, Murrow admitted, “I don’t know why I give it to you, it just caught my
eye. Here it is,” as if he were reading it to you in your living room. Murrow also
moved between being a teacher and acting as if his audience was already well-
informed. He would preface his reports with “You’re already aware” or “As you
know.” But he also educated. For example, he explained that there was a possi-
bility in England of compulsory evacuation of people and animals; “in other
words, if the government says ‘go,’ you’ve got to go whether you like it or not.”
Compulsory billeting meant that if “you had a house in the country with an
extra room, the government might billet, without your consent, two or three
people in that room.” In commenting on Soviet foreign policy, Murrow noted,
“Those surprising Russians keep handing out surprises.” The Murrow Boys’
broadcasts were sophisticated and simple at the same time. They were also si-
multaneously ethnocentric and international in their language and viewpoint.
And Murrow himself couldn’t resist reminding his listeners of what CBS was
providing. “I’m not boasting when I tell you that you’re getting as much infor-
mation as the average Britisher.”46

By the standards of Boake Carter, these broadcasts were much more objec-
tive. And Ed Klauber, William Paley’s personal assistant, had imposed certain
guidelines for CBS news. In the aftermath of the Carter contretemps, Paley as-
serted that CBS “must never have an editorial page.” Klauber elaborated: “Co
lumbia . . . has no editorial positions about the war.” Thus, its reporters “must
not express their own feelings.” Commentators should “not do the judging” for
the listener. The voicing of opinions should be confined to political round ta-
bles and other similar broadcasts where opposing views could be aired. “An un
excited demeanor at the microphone should be maintained at all times,” added
Klauber.47 He was especially emphatic about emotionalism in the news: this
was a male preserve, and real men did not show their emotions; they conveyed
“the facts” without revealing what might be in their hearts.

Again, such standards did not emerge from any high-minded ideals about
objectivity. FDR had hardly ignored the fact that in the 1936 campaign most of
the country’s editorial pages had opposed his reelection. Support for him and
for the New Deal had been achieved very much through his administration’s
adroit and calculated use of radio. But by 1940 more than one-third of the
country’s radio stations were owned by newspapers. FDR regarded this as a di-
rect threat to his policies. The FCC in 1938 began an investigation into mo-
nopoly practices—what was called chain broadcasting—in the industry.
Privately, the president in 1940 asked the new FCC chairman, Lawrence Fly,
“Will you let me know when you propose to have a hearing on newspaper
ownership of radio stations?” Publicly, through his press secretary, Steve Early,

182 \ LISTENING IN

Roosevelt told broadcasters that “the government is watching” to see if they air
any “false news.” Radio, Early warned, “might have to be taught manners if it
were a bad child.” Network executives understood “false news” to be news crit
ical of the administration’s policies.48

Commentators were now called analysts, and they were not to indulge in
editorializing on the air. Nor were CBS reporters to reveal any emotion or bias
They were not supposed to say “I believe” or “I think” but instead to use
phrases like “it is said” or “there are those who believe” or “some experts have
come to the conclusion.” Nonetheless, Bill Shirer “made radio history” The
New York Times noted in 1943, “by editorializing in his broadcasts from Na
Germany.” And H. V. Kaltenborn, who thought the distinction between “com-
mentator” and “analyst” preposterous, continued to express his opinions. He
couldn’t say “I think” or assert that some German communique” was an out-
and-out lie? Well, then, he would say, “No one who has the slightest idea of the
facts of this war believes these German propaganda claims.” Kaltenborn also
got pressure from his sponsor’s ad agency to tone down his opinions so as not
to alienate listeners.49

Once France and Britain declared war on Germany in the fall of 1939, the
networks agreed that their commentators would not discuss how the United
States should respond to Hitler. In May of 1941 the FCC, in what came to be
called the Mayflower decision, ruled that “the broadcaster cannot be an advo
cate,” thereby forbidding editorializing on the air. In practice this was impos-
sible, especially as Shirer, Kaltenborn, Murrow, and others were deeply
antifascist and anti-isolationist. They didn’t have to say “I think” to convey a
very decided point of view. Happily for the networks, their views supported
Roosevelt’s policies. But even tone of voice was to be regulated: Eric Sevareid
was reprimanded when his voice cracked during a broadcast. The CBS news-
man, warned Paul White from New York, should not “display a tenth of the
emotion that a broadcaster does when describing a prizefight,” even if thou-
sands had just died.50

The struggle over what objectivity meant and how it was to be achieved
constituted an ongoing experiment during the years before America’s entry
into the war. And let’s keep in mind that it wasn’t just government officials,
network executives, and reporters who participated in this struggle—so did
politicians, owners of local radio stations, the general public, and, notably,
sponsors. Corporate executives who had their products advertised on the air
were more likely to be conservative than liberal, and they were extremely wary
of antagonizing listeners with isolationist attitudes. When they didn’t like the
opinions or slant they heard on “their” newscast, they first tried to reason with
the newsman and his bosses. If that failed they would simply terminate their

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 183

contract to sponsor the show, which often meant that the newsman in ques-
tion lost his time slot.

What counted as opinion, and which kinds of opinions were more accept-
able on the air, plagued newsmen who had been to Europe and felt they had a
crucial perspective that most Americans did not. Eric Sevareid, after he re-
turned from Europe in late 1940, found that his anti-isolationist bias provoked
repeated outcries from congressmen, station managers, and his bosses. Edward
R. Murrow confessed to a friend as early as 1938 that “I am finding it more an
more difficult to suppress my personal convictions.” On the air he insisted that
he and Shirer in Berlin were “both trying to do the same thing. Trying to bring
you as much news as we can, avoiding so far as is humanly possible being too
much influenced by the atmosphere in which we work.”51 So, while bowing to
the ideal of objectivity, he also suggested that any reasonable person would
find it impossible to maintain a stance of pure unbias under the circumstances.

One way Murrow got around the rules was to read to his American listen-
ers excerpts from the British newspapers, which he carefully chose as Congress
launched its neutrality debate in the fall of 1939. For example, on September
20 he read an editorial from the Evening Standard predicting that England an
France could be facing a “Nazi-Bolshevik Bloc stretching from the Rhine to the
Pacific Ocean. If this is so, we shall be justified in hoping that the rest of the civ-
ilized nations, and among them, the greatest, who want us to destroy this men-
ace, will lend us aid more material than their prayers.” During the same
broadcast Eric Sevareid reported how the French, once armed with “the new,
fast, American planes, the Curtis planes with the Pratt and Whitney motors,”
were able to down German Messerschmitts, thus flattering Americans into see-
ing the merits of military aid. David Culbert in News for Everyman argues tha
the period between September 1939 and September 1940 marked a crucial
turning point in what was considered objective. In 1939 the networks refused
to allow the broadcast of an air-raid alert because it was “unneutral.” One year
later, in one of his most famous broadcasts from London, Murrow took his mi-
crophone outside so that Americans could hear the sirens warning of another
imminent bombing by the Luftwaffe. Variety, ridiculing some of the rules go
erning broadcast objectivity, asked, “Who doesn’t want England to win?”52

American correspondents in Berlin before America’s ê ntry into the war
had their scripts previewed at least thirty minutes before broadcast by censors
representing the military, the German Foreign Office, and the Ministry of Pro-
paganda. Because CBS, NBC, and Mutual broadcast from the same tiny studio,
a fourth censor in the control room, following their preapproved scripts, could
cut them off the second they deviated from the text. Nonetheless, broadcasts
critical of the Nazis got through. Bill Shirer, reporting from Berlin in January

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of 1940, read an official German communique—a common practice for cor-
respondents—announcing that a Dutch airplane had “violated German terri-
tory” Shirer, as usual, addressed his audience as if he and they were sitting in a
living room together. “Reading this communique’ a few minutes before I went
on the air this morning, I was struck by that last sentence,” he said, letting lis-
teners in on his own thoughts. “Note that the communique does not specify
whether the Dutch plane was a military or a civil machine,” he instructed his
listeners. He gave those back home a geography lesson, describing the alleged
flight plan of the plane. He tried to get clarification, but “being a Sunday, it wa
difficult to contact” German officials. Listeners felt they were getting an inside,
eyewitness account. Shirer had to struggle not to yell “bullshit” into the mike
after reading most German communique’s.53

When he was done, Bob Trout in New York suggested, “Now let’s call in
our correspondent in London for a report.” Here listeners heard the famous
introduction “This [pause] is London.” Murrow was interviewing an RAF
pilot who, for security reasons, could not give his name. Murrow’s purpose
was clear—to showcase the bravery and endurance of the British military,
particularly of the pilots, whom Murrow held in special awe, and to bring
alive what American supplies meant to the British a full year before Lend-
Lease. The pilot described his engagement with German planes, several of
which he downed. He told his American audience that he was especially
happy with the plane he flew, which was American and heated. Murrow then
praised the pilot’s “sheer gallantry and courage.” Murrow was an interna-
tionalist who believed America had moral obligations to democracies abroad.
He was up against a recent poll in which 66 percent of respondents had an-
swered no to the question “Do you think the United States should do every-
thing possible to help England and France win the war, even at the risk of
getting into the war ourselves?”54

By the fall of 1940 Murrow was less circumspect and insisted that Amer-
ica become Britain’s “fighting ally.” Yet he also made periodic efforts to con-
form to the network’s guidelines about objectivity. In December of 1940 he
reported that the British overwhelmingly had wanted Roosevelt to win the
election and, more to the point, wanted the country to abandon its neutral-
ity since most agreed that victory couldn’t be achieved without American
help. “There are no indications that any British minister is going to urge you
to declare war against the Axis,” advised Murrow, but the British believed that
“a democratic nation at peace cannot render full and effective support to a
nation at war.” Of course, this is what Murrow believed. But he added, “As a
reporter I’m concerned to report this development, not to evaluate it in
terms of personal approval or disapproval.” Nonetheless, at the height of

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 185

Murrow’s coverage of the Blitz, public opinion had turned around, with 52
percent favoring more aid to Britain.55

Until 1940, when Kaltenborn moved to NBC, the news roundup was fol-
lowed by his commentary and analysis. Although Kaltenborn had been a reg-
ular commentator on CBS since 1930, it was his round-the-clock coverage of
the Munich crisis in September of 1938 that made him famous. In eighteen
days he made somewhere between eighty-five and one hundred broadcasts,
bringing thousands of new listeners to CBS and receiving 50,000 fan letters.
Kaltenborn was also known for his simultaneous translations and analyses of
Hitler’s speeches to the Reichstag as they came to America live via shortwave.
He so embodied the archetypal radio commentator that the following year he
played himself in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Kaltenborn, along with R
mond Gram Swing at Mutual, added another element to the construction of
journalistic objectivity on the air: unlike Boake Carter and Gabriel Heatter,
they refused to read the commercials sponsoring their shows. They insisted
that the news be separated from the ads, and that a newsman could not be ex-
pected to report a fact-based story one minute and sell a product the next.56

Since Murrow and his “boys” were foreign correspondents, writing and re-
porting the news and not, at first, tied in with sponsors, the separation of the
news from sales pitches became institutionalized by the early 1940s.

Although he was raised in Milwaukee, Kaltenborn had just the slightest
hint of what sounded like a Scottish accent, which added a tone of authority
without sounding upper-class. He sometimes rolled his fs, and Russia became
“R-rush-shee-ia.”57 His broadcasts had a rhythmic cadence to them, and his
language constantly moved between the academic and lofty on the one hand
and the conversational and colloquial on the other. His approach was to have
his listeners hear him sort out the wheat from the chaff, as when he would in-
troduce a story with “Here’s an important piece of news.”

On June 3, 1940, after the Germans had conquered Belgium and the
Netherlands and were on their way to Paris, which they would occupy on the
fourteenth, Kaltenborn analyzed the meaning of a rumor that Hitler was ready
to talk peace with France. An official communique from Berlin denounced the
rumor as absurd. “What this suggests,” instructed Kaltenborn, was the exis-
tence of a faction in the government or the military that did want peace and
sought to leak it as a possibility. “All their stuff is censored,” he explained.
“When they talk peace over the radio, or over the cables, it’s because someone
in Germany wants them to talk peace and lets them talk peace.” Each commu
nique” or government statement was followed by an explanation, which began
with “What this shows” or “it means,” so that listeners understood behind-the-
scenes strategies, learned how to see beyond the surface content of commu-

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niqu6s, and grasped the often subtle ways propaganda worked.58 Kaltenborn
then discussed Charles Lindbergh’s recent neutrality speech, which he cast as
“unfortunate,” and reported that “reaction in the United States was not favor-
able.” To drive home his point, he read an extensive denunciation of the speech
by a U.S. senator.

As the Germans advanced on Paris, Kaltenborn (now on NBC) drew the
audience in. “Hitler has no time to lose, that’s the thing to bear in mind,” he in-
structed. While the Allies—which Kaltenborn pronounced “M-lies”—still had
time on their side, Kaltenborn lectured, “Obviously, they don’t have as much
time as they thought, and certainly we know now that they did not utilize their
time to the greatest advantage.” Then he really built up steam and raised his
voice: “They wasted it in keeping a man like Chamberlain in office who co
tinued to temporize and hope for the best while the situation was developing.”
He added hopefully that “man for man, the French army is as good, if not bet-
ter, than any in the world,” and thus France wouldn’t collapse overnight the
way Poland and Czechoslovakia had. Relying now on a direct, personal address
to his listeners, he said, “Don’t expect to get the same decisive results that we
got in the earlier part of the German drive on the western front when they
were, after all, tackling an enemy very much inferior to themselves.”

Newsmen drew maps in listeners’ heads, describing the geography of a re-
gion to help people understand where they were. French pronunciations were
sometimes mangled, as when Seine was pronounced “sane” or Le Havre be-
came “Le Hah-vera.” But what mattered was the way these countries became
less remote, less easy to push out of one’s mental landscape. Kaltenborn—who
gave away maps of Europe to listeners so they could locate the places he men-
tioned on the air—described where the Somme was in relation to the English
Channel, and after mentioning the town Noyon added, “That’s only sixty miles
north of Paris.” He adored radio’s capacity to induce a powerful feeling of psy-
chic and geographic transport. In / Broadcast the Crisis, he wrote to his au
ence, “I look upon most of you who are reading this book as old traveling
companions. We traveled far together in September.”59 Newsmen would lay out
the route of the Loire River and describe “the ancient and picturesque city of
Rouen.” When an announcer said, “I return you now to Columbia, New York,”
he was the listeners’ vehicle of transport.

Commenting on the recent tax increase to support the defense effort,
Kaltenborn chastised his countrymen, but note that he used the third person
instead of the second, so that his listeners were not implicated. “Americans are
rather insensitive to what’s going on in the world, a great many of them. Per-
haps if they can begin to feel it in their tax bills immediately they may become
a little more concerned, a little less sure that we can do what we please in the

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 187

new world without paying attention to the old.” By June of 1940 many of
Kaltenborn’s broadcasts urged more U.S. aid to Britain.60

It was commentary like this that led isolationist groups in America to at-
tack Kaltenborn for trying to stir up war hysteria. America First, one of the pre-
miere isolationist groups, reportedly approached his sponsor to try to mute his
opinions. The isolationist magazine Scribner’s Commentator charged that “h
broadcasts are as packed with Go To War jingoism as any on the airwaves.”61

Before U.S. entry into World War II, Murrow, Shirer, and Kaltenborn ad-
hered narrowly to network directives or developed their own methods to ap-
pear objective. But what they chose to bring to the nation’s attention, and their
subtle but persistent assumption of a “we” that shared a national consensus
naturalized an internationalist point of view as obvious. When Kaltenborn an-
nounced, during the Lend-Lease debate in Congress, “We are committed ir-
revocably to helping the British cause—that is a major fact,” he wasn’t just
stating his opinion. He was asserting the existence of a national consensus and
embedding that consensus in a framework of “common sense.”62

This was, of course, radio’s first war, and once the Japanese bombed Pearl
Harbor, the government was going to have to figure out its relationship with
broadcast news. The timing was rotten. Industry-government relations were at
a new low: in May of 1941 the FCC issued its Report on Chain Broadcasting
attack on monopoly conditions in the industry. Among other things the report
ordered that RCA, which operated two networks, NBC-Red and NBC-Blue, di-
vest itself of one. It gave stations more power when negotiating with the net-
works they were tied to: an affiliate could reject any network show it felt did
not serve the public; affiliates were bound to a network for only a year at a time,
instead of five as previously mandated by the networks; affiliates could air pro-
grams from other networks if they wanted. The networks were also forbidden
from owning more than one station in the same “service area,” which meant
that NBC would have to sell stations in New York, Chicago, Washington, and
San Francisco. The networks were outraged, claiming the new rules would
“threaten the very existence of present network broadcasting service.” NBC
and CBS filed suit in October to have the regulations struck down.63 (In 1943
the Supreme Court upheld the FCC.) In this acrimonious atmosphere, two
months later the industry and the government found themselves in the first
radio war.

It was radio that flashed the news across the country on that Sunday after-
noon less than three weeks before Christmas. Sunday afternoon programming
usually consisted of public affairs shows and classical music. NBC-Red, for ex-
ample, was about to broadcast its University of Chicago Roundtable. CBS
just finished a talk about labor sponsored by the CIO. Fans listening to the

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Dodgers-Giants football game over Mutual got the news first, at 2:26. At 2:31
John Daly broke into the CBS network, stumbling over the pronunciation of
Oahu as he announced, “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by
air, President Roosevelt has just announced. The attack was also made on naval
and military activities on the principal island of Oahu” At 2:39 Albert Warner,
at CBS’s desk in Washington, announced the attacks on bases in Manila. Sta-
tions all over the country abandoned their scheduled programming, many
staying on the air around the clock. CBS continued airing its Sunday concerts
but interrupted them incessantly. The FCC immediately ordered the shutdown
of all amateur stations, and some stations on the West Coast went off the air
for fear their broadcasts could be used by the enemy to home in on targets. The
Naval Observatory stopped broadcasting weather forecasts. Some stations
hired extra guards to protect their transmitters. On Monday 79 percent of all
homes in the country tuned in to hear Roosevelt’s famous “day that will live in
infamy” speech, requesting a declaration of war. The next day an estimated 60
to 90 million Americans—the largest audience up to that time—listened to
Roosevelt’s fireside chat as he told the country, “We are now in this war. We ar
in it—all the way.”64

Given that radio was indispensable to getting out urgent information, to
generating and sustaining support for the war effort, and to keeping up
morale, how would the government handle its management? The precedents
set during World War I by the Committee on Public Information, America’s
first ministry of propaganda, had not been happy. Then the government took
over all commercial wireless stations. Censorship of journals and magazines,
especially as imposed by the overzealous postmaster general, Albert Sidney
Burleson, was draconian. News was tightly controlled by the government, and
the CPI manipulated information as it saw fit, leading George Creel, its direc-
tor, to write a book in the early 1920s boasting How We Advertised the W
Postwar revelations about the distortions and lies involved in British propa-
ganda, and about the cynical way the CPI represented the progress of the war
to Americans, meant that a similarly tightfisted control now would actually be
counterproductive.

Despite the fears of many in the industry, the government did not take over
radio but instead sought a close, cooperative relationship based on voluntary
codes of censorship. The National Association of Broadcasters developed such
a code, which included instructions not to broadcast anything “which might
unduly affect the listener’s peace of mind.” And CBS updated the Klauber
guidelines of 1939, insisting on an “unexcited demeanor” before the mike. Yet
obviously pretenses to strict objectivity were silly now; on the contrary, as one
CBS memo advised its news staff, the American people must constantly be re-

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 189

minded that “this is a war for the preservation of democracy,” and listeners
must “always be kept vividly aware of this objective.”65

In January of 1942, Roosevelt appointed Elmer Davis, a news commenta-
tor for CBS, as head of the Office of Censorship; that June, Davis became head
of the Office of War Information, which was meant to coordinate the efforts of
a range of media—film, advertising, radio—in the selling of the war, and par-
ticular war initiatives, to the public. Newscasts were, of course, subject to mil-
itary censors, who were at first deeply anxious that radio reporters not
inadvertently give valuable information to the enemy.66 Walter Winchell, for
example, whom the army had tried to remove from the air for fear he would
reveal sensitive military information, had his scripts reviewed by his own as-
sistant, two attorneys for Jergens, his sponsor, and one attorney for the net-
work. They sought to delete not just sensitive military information but
politically biased stories as well, an effort Winchell vehemently fought.

But this was also, as Paul Fussell reminds us, a war very much guided by
shrewd public relations, and having radio reporters covering action in war
zones dramatized the heroism of GIs and officers alike. Military brass and gov-
ernment officials—not just American but British as well—wanted stories that
would boost public morale and the image of the armed forces and that were
not at odds with stated foreign policy. In theory this seemed fine, but in prac-
tice many of these reporters found that government news management really
meant censorship of the truth. It is important for us to remember that such
censorship—what was left out—also played a key role in the evolution of what
would come to be thought of as objectivity in radio news.

Between 1940 and 1944 the hours devoted to news increased by 1,000 a
year, up 300 percent. By 1944 news specials and newscasts constituted nearly
20 percent of the networks’ program schedules. The number of “pundits” in-
creased too, to approximately sixty on the four networks by 1943. Listeners
tuned in, on average, for four and a half hours every day. And the men they lis-
tened to—Eric Sevareid, William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Cecil Brown—
became heroes and celebrities, stardom fusing with journalism, and not
without help from the networks’ own ruthlessly efficient public relations de-
partments. Advertisers, too, wanted to capitalize on the success of radio news
and began sponsoring regularly broadcast shows. The first sponsor of CBS’s
World News Roundup was Sinclair Oil, which paid each correspondent a
seventy-five-dollar bonus every time he appeared on the air. By late 1943 on
CBS, it was not “We take you now to London” but “General Electric takes you
now to London.”67

Listeners moved between informational and dimensional listening, some-
times being compelled to shift cognitive gears quickly, often inhabiting both

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listening modes at the same time. Robert Trout, for example, in his Decem-
ber 7, 1941, broadcast from London, began his report with a rundown of
events fin Europe and of British efforts to monitor Japanese movements in
the Pacific. He then moved to a consideration of recent criticisms that
Britain’s war machine didn’t employ the same “modern war techniques” that
Germany’s did. Suddenly, we are taken into the war. There had been com-
plaints, reported Trout, “that while British tanks in the desert lay up at night
like a defensive circle of covered wagons out west, the desert darkness is lit
up with the flares of the Panzer repair squads patching up damaged German
tanks for the next day’s battle.” This we visualize—the depth, the lights, the
dark. Then a straight, factual deadline or report would move the listener out
of this mode.68

As a result of the Munich crisis and, later, the Battle of Britain, Edward R.
Murrow’s name was, as Variety put it, “up in lights for the first time.” In De-
cember of 1938, Scribner’s ran a profile and described just what kind of a ma
he was: “tall without being lanky, darkish without being swarthy, young with-
out being boyish, dignified without being uncomfortable.” More important, he
was a well-educated man who nonetheless had “no tea-time accent and no curl
to the small finger. He’s more a Scotch-and-story man.” Yet “he knows what the
big words mean.”69

Murrow’s wartime broadcasts, especially his coverage of the Blitz, became
legendary for the way that they conveyed what the war meant to everyday peo-
ple in England. His signature opening “This . . . is London,” and his emphasis
on details of everyday life that listeners could see and feel were shrewdly de-
signed for an auditory medium that encouraged listeners to imagine them-
selves in other situations, in other people’s shoes. As Archibald MacLeish put it
in a speech honoring Murrow in November of 1941, “You burned the city of
London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead
of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead… were
mankind’s dead.”70

What is also striking is how simply and vividly Murrow’s broadcasts show-
cased masculine courage and defined the basic elements of enviable manhood.
There was a honey-hued, Frank Capra sensibility here, romantic while appear-
ing to be antiromantic. RAF pilots were “the cream of the youth of Britain.” As
they discussed an upcoming bombing raid, “There were no nerves, no profan-
ity, and no heroics. There was no swagger about those boys in wrinkled and
stained uniforms.” The firefighters who doused the flames after bombs had hit
were equally unflappable and businesslike, focused on the job at hand. “Those
firemen in their oilskins and tin hats appeared oblivious to everything but the
fire,” even though many of them risked and lost their lives in the course of dut

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 191

In his famous rooftop broadcast in September 1940, Murrow described seeing
one of the spotters watching for incoming bombs. “There are hundreds and
hundreds of men like that standing on rooftops in London tonight, watching
for fire bombs, waiting to see what comes down,” evoking again the simple,
quiet, unseen courage of so many everyday men.71

In another broadcast in 1940 from the outskirts of London, Murrow talked
about “the little people . . . who have no uniforms and get no decorations for
bravery” and who had to deal with their houses having been bombed. “Those
people were calm and courageous There was no bravado, no loud voices,
only a quiet acceptance of the situation.” A few moments later he added con-
descendingly that “even the women with two or three children around them
were steady and businesslike.” And he was impressed by watching the Women’s
Auxiliary Air Force drill in formation. But Murrow was, as many of his friends
noted, a “man’s man,” and the heroism he celebrated was almost exclusively
male.72

One of his most famous—and stunning—broadcasts described an RAF
bombing mission over Berlin that Murrow went on in December of 1943. The
heroes here were barely men, “the red-headed English boy with the two weeks’
old mustache” and “the big Canadian with the slow, easy grin.” Jock, the wing
commander, was calm and quiet, even in the face of deadly attack. Once up in
the air and over the German coast, the gunners and the wireless operator “all
seemed to draw closer to Jock in the cockpit. It was as though each man’s
shoulder was against the other’s. The understanding was complete The
whole crew was a unit and wasn’t wasting words.” Courageous, taciturn, work-
ing in sync as a team—these were the young men of the war in Murrow’s eyes.
Murrow then described the hair-raising mission over Berlin and stated that
many men, including two journalists, did not make it back. “In the aircraft in
which I flew, the men who flew and fought it poured into my ears their com-
ments on fighters, flak, and flare in the same tones they would have used in re-
porting a host of daffodils.”73 Murrow confessed his own fright during the
mission, but primarily as a way to emphasize the sangfroid of the young air-
men. Besides, listening to his now steady, deep voice, you couldn’t help but
think he was being overly modest.

While it would be heresy to suggest that Murrow sought, in his broadcasts,
to showcase his own heroism, his accounts of what he and his colleagues wit-
nessed and experienced contributed significantly to the image of the foreign
correspondent as a daredevil with nerves of steel, defying danger to come his
way. Physical courage was of utmost importance to Murrow, who expected it
of his newsmen and praised it on the air. Describing his and Larry LeSueur’s
drive through London while an air raid was in progress, Murrow told his lis-

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teners that “an antiaircraft battery opened fire just as I drove past. It lifted me
from the seat and a hot wind swept over the car.”74

Murrow was hardly alone in celebrating the courage of everyday American
men. In December of 1942, Charles Collingwood, covering the African cam-
paign from Algiers, noted that there was not much official news. “I’m just as
glad, because I just got back a few hours ago from Tunisia, and I want to tell
you all about it.” Collingwood had visited an impromptu airfield set up in the
desert, where he encountered “some of the finest American boys I’ve ever met.”
The lucky ones slept in tents; the others, under the stars. “These boys, these
fresh-faced American kids in flying jackets, are up against the cream of the
German Luftwaffe,” Collingwood warned. The pilots flew from the airfield to
Tunis and Bizerte; “it’s just about as hazardous a trip as you can make these
days, and that’s why the boys call it the milk run It’s a very tough war these
men are fighting,” he reported; “it’s cold, it’s muddy, and it’s windy, and lots of
things they need aren’t there.” He reminded listeners that there was “nothing
gay or romantic about life at the front,” but that these boys were “fighting it
well.”75 In reports like this, these were everyone’s boys; ethnic and class divi-
sions were eradicated, invisible.

Webley Edwards, on the six-month anniversary of Pearl Harbor, gave an
account of the mood in Honolulu two days after the Japanese’s catastrophic
defeat in the Battle of Midway. His mixture of mid-American slang and praise
for the sailors’ courage was very much like the hokey, faux-conversational
newsreel narration people heard in the movies that sought to define the war,
rhetorically, as everyman’s war. The war was “this scrap”; at Midway “our force
threw everything in the book at them, yes, and some things that weren’t in the
book. The Jap couldn’t take it.” But it was Edwards’s equation of national
prowess—”might,” as he repeatedly called it—with masculine achievement
that was so striking. His incessant use of the word hard, and his emasculating
language when describing the Japanese, made it clear that manhood and na-
tionhood were one. After Midway, Japanese cruisers and transports “went
limping off to find a place to die.” The Japanese “crumbled”; they “couldn’t take
it.” “We still poured it out, with men gritting out harsh words between their
teeth, as they struck vengeance for Pearl Harbor.” In Honolulu ” ‘let ’em come’
seemed to be the general opinion” toward a possible strike by the Japanese,
“‘we’ll handle’em.'”76

Gripping eyewitness accounts from the front combined dimensional lis-
tening—you were vividly transported into the scene of the fighting—with por-
traits of male heroism. Cecil Brown gave one such account via shortwave from
Singapore when he described the sinking of the British battle cruiser Repulse
on December 7,1941. “Nine Japanese bombers flying at 10,000 feet dropped

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 193

twenty-seven bombs. I stood on the flag deck amidships and watched them
streaking for us . . . bombs exploded all around us . . . the flashes were blind-
ing, the guns deafening.” The gunner trying to shoot down the Japanese
bombers “was something like a cowboy shooting from the hip.” Brown contin-
ued with a blow-by-blow description of the attack until he, like everyone else,
had to abandon ship. “I jumped twenty feet into the thick oil surrounding the
ship. When I was fifty feet away, the Repulse went down, its stern kicked up in
the air, then disappeared.”77

With history-making events like Dday, the listeners were right there,
hearing and imagining the invasion, before they saw newsreel footage. By all
accounts this was one of the most complicated and spectacularly successful
newscasts in American history. Newsreels, and all those “World at War” doc-
umentaries, have made us forget this. George Hicks of NBC-Blue (which be-
came ABC during the war) recorded from a warship his eyewitness account
of German planes attacking the Allies’ landing craft; it became an instant
classic, airing on every network for days after the event.78 What’s striking is
how much the account resembles the play-by-play of a ball game. Hicks de-
scribes everything he can as it’s happening; gives a sense of distance, location,
and trajectory; and pauses to let listeners hear the battle. We hear the low
roar of airplane engines, and Hicks tells us, “That baby was plenty low.”
“Tracers have been flying up . . . the sparks just seem to float up in the sky,”
and we hear distant gunfire. Then, back to that German plane: “It’s right over
our heads now,” he announces, and we hear the plane engine, the bombs, and
the gunfire. “Here comes a plane!” and we hear men yelling. “There’s very
heavy ack-ack now,” and instantly you hear it, but you see it, too: the explo-
sions, the men rushing to shoot down the German plane, the ship rolling
in the sea. “The sound you just heard,” he tells us, came from 20-mm and
40-mm guns.

Hicks is brave, but he’s also human. After a close call with the first German
plane, he says, utterly conversationally and personally, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll
just take a deep breath for a moment and stop speaking.” In the pause we hear
more shots and explosions. Now Hicks is much more excited, sounding not
unlike Red Barber when someone on the Dodgers hit a homer. “There we go
again,” he yells, “another plane’s come over, right over our port side. Now it’s
right over the bow and disappearing into the clouds. Tracers are still going up,”
and he pauses so we can hear the shots. “Looks like we’re going to have a night
tonight,” he notes, which includes the listeners in the “we.” “Something’s burn-
ing, it’s falling down through the sky,” he reports; “they got one!” and we then
hear men cheering. “The lights on that burning Nazi plane are twinkling in the
sea and going out,” he concludes. Then, “to recapitulate,” he gives an instant re-

194 \ LISTENING IN

play of what just occurred, including bringing some of the gunners to the mike
to tell their names and where they are from.79

The image of these correspondents was of tough, competitive individuals
who did what it took to get the story and who seemed, to the public at least, to
enjoy vast reserves of physical courage. They were defiant, too, taking on cen-
sors, border guards, military police. But unlike the Nazi brutes who seemed in
capable of seeing those they conquered as human beings, the newsmen were
deeply empathetic with the victims of the war without being schmaltzy. They
were, in a word, noble. When the famous print reporter Ernie Pyle died in April
of 1945, the on-air obituary delivered by Robert McCormick emphasized how
Pyle forced himself to ignore his fears. Pyle had a premonition that he would
die in the war just as so many GIs he had covered. “He’d tell me how frightene
he was in Europe,” McCormick reported, and how he hoped he would never
see any more combat. But he went to the Pacific because “he felt it was his job
to be here. He never pretended to be a fearless hero, he never pretended he
liked shots and shells But he sincerely believed he had a duty to the 11 mil-
lion enlisted men . . . to tell Americans how they felt and acted during the
worst days they would ever go through . . . he kept at it because he felt it was
his job to keep at it.”80

This was the romantic image of the GI that would be so celebrated in pop-
ular culture for decades after the war: the strong, brave, everyday guy who wa
a team player and not a prima donna, understated instead of a braggart, altru-
istic and selfless to a fault except where American achievement was at stake.
Soldiers interviewed on the air, like Sgt. Herbert Brown of New York, also mod
estly yet stoically cast warfare as work: “We have a job to do over here, and the
quicker we do it, the quicker we get home.”81 But the correspondents had an-
other crucial element of masculinity: financial success.

This mantle of perfectly calibrated masculinity fell handsomely over the
shoulders of the new radio correspondents, but it did not just drop fully spun
from the ether. Every time a correspondent made history and then came home
for a brief rest, the network publicity departments made sure he got a hero’s
welcome. Eric Sevareid had covered the fall of Paris and, fleeing through
southwest France, was the first to break the story that France had surrendered
to Germany. When he returned to New York in the fall of 1940, he found him-
self hounded by autograph seekers, reporters, and photographers, all pumped
up by CBS press agents’ tales of hair-raising adventure and brushes with death.
CBS arranged a national lecture tour for him accompanied by a brochure that
made him sound like Superman. In 1943, after he had been forced to jump out
of a C-46 flying over Burma and live among headhunters while a rescue party
located him, CBS feted Sevareid again, featuring him for two weeks straight on

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 195

Dateline: Burma, making sure his derring-do became synonymous with th
network’s own image.82

The same treatment awaited Bill Shirer when he returned from Germany
in 1940: receptions, parties, a lecture tour, and a book contract for Berlin Diar
which became an immediate best-seller. Cecil Brown’s leap from the Repulse
turned him into an overnight celebrity, with Random House and Knopf vying
to land a book contract with him. Random House won the bidding, and Suez
to Singapore also became a best-seller. Motion Picture Daily’s list of top ra
stars now included journalists like Brown. He even got Elmer Davis’s prime
news slot of 8:55 to 9:00, for which he earned $ 1,000 a week, when Davis joine
the OWL83

But Brown quickly became a very public casualty in the struggle over ob-
jectivity in radio news. He was an especially outspoken critic of government
censorship—early on he was kicked out of Italy for his ridicule of Mussolini
and fascism. After his repeated efforts to report—quite accurately, it turned
out—how defenseless British-controlled Singapore was against the Japanese,
British authorities revoked his press credentials.84

Reporters were learning that it wasn’t just information about troop move-
ments and the like that they couldn’t report. Government officials wanted
happy news about how well the war was going—even if it wasn’t—and they
wanted no critical accounts, however accurate, of America’s allies. Sevareid,
whose stay in China in 1943 convinced him that Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was
corrupt and exploitative of* the Chinese people, found that Pleader’s Dig
would not publish a piece to this effect because State Department officials re-
fused to clear it. Nor, in 1944, was he allowed to describe the miseries that
American soldiers endured in the Italian campaign because he would allegedly
hurt troop morale—which Sevareid already knew to be at rock bottom.
Sevareid and others developed a deep contempt for the various generals whose
personal staffs were top-heavy with public relations officers. GIs, too, com-
plained to the correspondents they met about the rather glaring gap between
their experiences and what they heard over the radio. “Soldiers have huddled
in foxholes under heavy aerial bombardment while their radios told them that
U.S. forces had complete control of the air over that sector,” reported Time.
“They have come out of action, blind with weariness, just in time to get a
cheerful little radio earful about what they had just been through.” As a result,
many felt they couldn’t trust radio’s coverage of the war.85

Brown, however, made anticensorship a personal crusade, and one tactic
was to continually push the envelope in his new prime-time newscast by inter-
lacing the news with his own analyses, warnings, and advice. Brown was espe-
cially concerned about American complacency and, worse, about an erosion of

196 \ LISTENING IN

public support for the war. In a two-month tour of the country in the spring
of 1942, in which he broadcast reports from different cities, Brown castigated
his listeners for a “dangerous and serious overoptimism in the United States”
and was especially appalled to hear, repeatedly, that people thought the war
would be over by Christmas. This resulted from “hangover propaganda from
non-interventionists.” In commentary that could hardly have warmed hearts
in the Hoosier State, Brown asserted on the air that “such optimism is not jus-
tified by any of the facts, but a good many people in Indianapolis do not seem
to be concerned with the facts.”86 From St. Louis he spoke on behalf of “the
people,” saying, “They want to wipe Tokyo off the face of the earth. They want
a second front. They want an invasion of Europe…. They want an invasion of
Germany and, if necessary, the extermination of the German people.” Some
felt this wasn’t exactly the unanimous will of “the people.”

What Brown hadn’t counted on was the increased clout that advertisers
had over radio news now that it had become such a glamorous and profitable
commodity. By 1943 news programs were second only to dramatic shows in
drawing advertising. When commentators lost their sponsors, as Kaltenborn
did in 1939, when General Mills dropped him after Catholic listeners protested
his attacks on the Church of Spain, the networks became even more adamant
about prohibiting the airing of opinion. Cecil Brown’s sponsor, Johns-
Manville, unhappy in part with commentary that its executives found too pro-
Soviet, withdrew their sponsorship of Brown’s news program in the summer
of 1943. Paul White, the head of CBS news and an adamant opponent of any
editorializing by newscasters, was also unhappy with Brown’s continued ha-
rangues against alleged American apathy over the war. After a confrontation
with CBS executives over his failure to keep his own opinions to a minimum,
Brown resigned in September of 1943, asserting he was a victim of censor-
ship.87

The firestorm of controversy that surrounded Brown’s resignation re-
vealed that debates about what journalistic objectivity was or should be on the
air were hardly settled, especially when the main censor seemed to be corpo-
rate America. Magazines, newspapers, and NBC’s America’s Town Meeting
the Air all showcased the dispute. On the one hand, executives like CBS’s Whit
sensitive to criticisms from listeners, advertisers, and government officials, in-
sisted that commentators’ opinions be ruthlessly expunged from broadcasts.
He asserted this emphatically in a speech before the Associated Press, and CBS
even took out full-page ads in newspapers announcing, “We will not choose
men who will tell the public what they themselves think and what the public
should think.” This sounded high-minded but really sought to blunt mount-
ing criticism, including from the FCC chairman himself, Lawrence Fly, that

World War II and the Invention of Broadcast Journalism / 197

sponsors were exerting too much control over which kinds of stories and views
got on the air. (White was no doubt made especially nervous by Fly’s sugges-
tion that sponsorship be eliminated from newscasts.) Kaltenborn, founder and
head of the newly formed Association of Radio News Analysts, whose code of
ethics opposed censorship, responded derisively to White with, “No news ana-
lyst worth his salt could or would be completely neutral or objective.” Time
agreed. “If radio becomes guilty of making its commentators take sides—or
pull their punches—in order to curry favor with advertisers, it will have much
to account for. But it will also have much to account for if it abandons all edi-
torial views in order to put on a false front of impartiality.” But Time also con-
cluded that “much of the output of U.S. radio pundits is pontifical tripe.”88

Despite denunciations from Walter Winchell, Kaltenborn, Variety, an
even FCC Chairman Fly, CBS refused to compromise with Brown, in part, it
seems clear, because Brown had become an insufferable prima donna. Four
years later, when William Shirer’s sponsor withdrew from his news program,
there were new allegations that advertisers were wielding too much ideological
clout over radio news. Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson in The Murrow Boy
maintain that this was exactly the case—that both men, however irritating to
CBS, would have kept their jobs had they kept their sponsors. But with the new
stardom and wealth accorded radio newsmen—Brown and Shirer were earn-
ing over $50,000 a year, a staggering amount in the early and mid-1940s—
there were strings. By 1943 the CBS newsman Quincy Howe, writing in The
Atlantic Monthly, noted that liberal commentators were being replaced by co
servatives and that “sponsors snap up the news programs with a conservative
slant as they never snapped up the programs with a liberal slant.”89 Advertisers
had indeed emerged as the most powerful censors of broadcast news, a point
that would become even starker during McCarthyism.

As broadcast news was invented on the radio, listeners had the world put
before their feet, and they jumped around the country and the globe at will in
a way that flattered a certain sense of omniscience and omnipresence. The di-
mensional listening that Kaltenborn, Collingwood, Brown, Murrow, and the
others insisted upon in their broadcasts compelled people, in their minds’ eyes,
to look outward. Radio news, then, played a central role—both in its content
and focus, and in the kind of listening it encouraged—in shifting American
public opinion away from isolationism and away from self-absorbed paro-
chialism.

The radio war also powerfully reaffirmed middle-class, American mas-
culinity as intrinsic to the nation’s identity and to its geopolitical successes. The
manhood that had seemed so provisional, so fragile, so in danger of feminiza-
tion in the comedy of Ed Wynn, Joe Penner, and Jack Benny was powerfully re

198 \ LISTENING IN

cuperated by the drama of the war and the men who reported it. The RAF pi-
lots and the GIs that Murrow, Collingwood, and George Hicks portrayed for
listeners were not shaken by warfare; they didn’t complain; they were stoic;
they were everyday guys; they were united in purpose; they obeyed orders fro
above yet proved their dominance over the enemy; they didn’t brag, but they
won. It is here on the radio, through the storiesand voices of the newscasters
and their construction of a sense of consensus, that this image of middle-class
masculinity seemed to absorb and stand in for men of all classes (but not yet
men of all races).

Objectivity, as it evolved on radio news, was embodied in stories that did
not routinely displease the White House and those that did not routinely dis-
please corporate sponsors. The war brought public relations and news man-
agement into broadcast journalism, and the success of radio news imposed
commercial considerations on reporters and network executives alike. For the
networks, the ideal of objectivity sounded worthy enough, but it was a very ef-
fective tool for disciplining uppity newscasters, keeping further regulation at
bay, and keeping the sponsors happy. CBS stuck with its policy, which wasn’t
dramatically breached until 1954, when Edward R. Murrow on See It Now
voiced his famous denunciation of Joe McCarthy. But that was the exception,
not the rule.

At the same time—the late 1930s and 1940s—that radio news was helping
to redirect listeners’ attention outward and, in the process, promoting a sense
of national identity and purpose within, Americans, particularly the men, were
congregating around the radio to listen to an equally important nation-build-
ing genre: sports broadcasting. Here, images of disciplined men, standing
alone or together to vanquish opponents, resonated powerfully with news of
the war in a way that reaffirmed that, despite the Depression, this was a coun-
try of real men, of good men, after all.

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