Get Off Your Fat Surplus

...the elaborate structure of networks, advertising agencies and sponsors will not be shaken or altered. It is my desire, if not my duty, to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening to radio and television...I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage...during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER...Editorials would not be profitable; if they had a cutting edge, they might even offend. It is much easier, much less troublesome, to use the money-making machine of television and radio merely as a conduit through which to channel anything that is not libelous, obscene or defamatory. In that way one has the illusion of power without responsibility...One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news...and when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles...Sometimes there is a clash between the public interest and the corporate interest. A telephone call or a letter from the proper quarter in Washington is treated rather more seriously than a communication from an irate but not politically potent viewer. It is tempting enough to give away a little air time for frequently irresponsible and unwarranted utterances in an effort to temper the wind of criticism...I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation. Heywood Broun once said, "No body politic is healthy until it begins to itch." I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers...But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

-Edward R. Murrow, October 15, 1958

How so much more true today. Kudos to George Clooney and Grant Heslov for bringing back to light what Mr. Murrow heralded in regards to news and television. You can read his entire speech to the RTNDA Convention here: http://www.rtnda.org/resources/speeches/murrow.shtml