Thanks for the tip, Loyal. I watched the CNN show. Enjoyed the theatre intermix of live and old newsreel footage. People forget how people viewed Murrow. My uncle got in one semester at Wazzu as London was being bombed. Ran out of money; went back to work; the war started; and they made him an officer because of one semester of college and his math level (he was a navigator on a bomber). He survived a pile of missions and went back to Wazzu on the GI Bill. Same frat as Murrow, got a journalism degree and a Canadian wife (apparently there were a lot of Canadians at WSU after the war). He and another guy started an illustrated/sketched magazine out of the journalism department (Fo Paws), but only lasted 2/3 of the year because it was “too racy”; the school shut it down; it was a different time, and all those late 20’s servicemen now in school were not your traditional students. Could not get a job that paid more than $50/week as a journalist, so after a year he went back to school and got an EE degree.
He picked journalism at least partly due to his view of Murrow. And he wasn’t alone; journalist salaries were low because so many people wanted to get into that field. The internet has heavily disrupted the field of journalism. Outside of the traditional sources, you don’t know what you are reading. We are in a different time, as the play made clear, yet there are still those who would try to demagogue & bully their way forward. McCarthyism is not dead.
