And how prescient those bolded words truly were. For as we sit here nearly fifty years since those words were spoken, we are still sinking into the abyss where corporate profits and political backscratching (as it is also reported that the "presidential campaigns" for 2008 will be the most expensive on record with candidates wasting more money for their political beauty and popularity contest) takes precedence in our media over informing and fighting that ignorance, intolerance and indifference. Therefore, at what point does media even stop getting all of the blame, with that blame also including us the longer we allow its hold on information and Democratic discourse?
Television is not something we use to educate and inform on the whole. It is merely a box to turn on after a long day of paying dues to those who buy our time and our votes to anesthesize us to what they then do with that time and vote for their own purposes. Some may think that to say that television is evil is going too far. But I don't think so. For as we have seen, after all that has transpired in that last fifty years and after all we have accomplished, we are still fighting that battle searching for illumination and inspiration. But that will only happen if we seek it out, and we have yet to do so on a scale large enough to turn the tide.
Edward R. Murrow knew that and spoke those words at a time when they were most needed to be heard, and they are once again the crux of all we now strive for: TRUE DEMOCRACY. And to me, Democracy is more than wires and lights in a box, it is this country's lifeblood which has slowly been sucked out along with the marrow of our country's soul by those who continue to protect their own feathered nests. Will we then, should we be so lucky to still have this United States Of America in fifty years, look back on this as a time when Edward R. Murrow's words were actually taken to heart? Only we can now decide that. We must prove Edward R. Murrow right.
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EDWARD R. MURROW/RTNDA Convention/Chicago/October 15, 1958 This just might do nobody any good. At the end of this discourse a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest, and your organization may be accused of having given hospitality to heretical and even dangerous thoughts. But 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 have no technical advice or counsel to offer those of you who labor in this vineyard that produces words and pictures. You will forgive me for not telling you that instruments with which you work are miraculous, that your responsibility is unprecedented or that your aspirations are frequently frustrated. It is not necessary to remind you that the fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other. All of these things you know.
You should also know at the outset that, in the manner of witnesses before Congressional committees, I appear here voluntarily-by invitation-that I am an employee of the Columbia Broadcasting System, that I am neither an officer nor a director of that corporation and that these remarks are of a "do-it-yourself" nature. If what I have to say is responsible, then I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Seeking neither approbation from my employers, nor new sponsors, nor acclaim from the critics of radio and television, I cannot well be disappointed. Believing that potentially the commercial system of broadcasting as practiced in this country is the best and freest yet devised, I have decided to express my concern about what I believe to be happening to radio and television. These instruments have been good to me beyond my due. There exists in mind no reasonable grounds for personal complaint. I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.
Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But 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.
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This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful. The rest of this speech can be found at the link.
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