As the 1950s began, Murrow began appearing on CBS Television, in editorial "tailpieces" on the
CBS Evening News and coverage of special events. This came despite his own misgivings about the new medium and its emphasis on pictures rather than ideas.
On
November 18, 1951, the
Hear It Now format Murrow and Friendly pioneered on radio moved to television as
See It Now. After the pre-title sequence and introduction, viewers saw and heard host Murrow, with a knowing smile, explain,
This is an old team, trying to learn a new trade.
See It Now focused on a number of controversial issues in the 1950s, but it is best remembered as the show that criticized the
Red Scare and contributed to the political downfall of Senator
Joseph McCarthy.
In 1953, Murrow launched a second weekly TV show — a series of celebrity interviews entitled
Person to Person. Just as Murrow had nearly single-handedly pioneered TV news journalism, with
Person to Person he also set the standard for celebrity interviews, producing a format that is still followed.
The Best of Person to Person is currently being distributed under the
Koch Vision label.
On
March 9, 1954, Murrow, Friendly, and their news team produced a 30-minute
See It Now special entitled "A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy." Murrow used excerpts from McCarthy's own speeches and proclamations to criticize the senator and point out episodes where he had contradicted himself. Murrow knew full well that he was using the medium of television to attack a single man and expose him to nationwide scrutiny, and he was often quoted as having doubts about the method he used for this news report.
Murrow and his
See It Now co-producer,
Fred Friendly, paid for their own newspaper advertisement for the program; they were not allowed to use CBS' money for the publicity campaign or even use the CBS logo. Nonetheless, this 30-minute TV episode contributed to a nationwide backlash against McCarthy and against the Red Scare in general, and it is seen as a turning point in the history of television.
The broadcast provoked tens of thousands of letters, telegrams and phone calls to CBS headquarters, running 15 to 1 in favor of Murrow. In a Murrow retrospective produced by CBS for the
A&E Network series
Biography, Friendly noted how truck drivers pulled up to Murrow on the street in subsequent days and shouted "Good show, Ed. Good show, Ed."
Murrow offered McCarthy a chance to comment on the CBS show, and McCarthy provided his own televised response to Murrow three weeks later on
See It Now. The senator's rebuttal contributed nearly as much to his own downfall as Murrow or any of McCarthy's other detractors did; Murrow had learned how to use the medium of television, but McCarthy had not.
Murrow's hard-hitting approach to the news, however, cost him influence in the world of television.
See It Now occasionally scored high ratings (usually when it was tackling a particularly controversial subject), but in general it did not score well on prime-time television.
When a
quiz show phenomenon began and took TV by storm in the mid-1950s, Murrow realized the days of
See It Now as a weekly show were numbered. (Biographer Joseph Persico notes that Murrow, watching an early episode of
The $64,000 Question air just before his own
See It Now, is said to have turned to Friendly and asked how long they expected to keep their time slot).
The weekly version of
See It Now ended in 1955, after sponsor
Alcoa withdrew its advertising, but the show remained as a series of occasional
TV special news reports that defined
television documentary news coverage. Despite the prestige, CBS had difficulty finding a regular sponsor, since the program aired intermittently in its new time slot and could not develop a regular audience.
In 1956, Murrow took time to appear as the onscreen narrator of a special prologue for
Michael Todd's epic production,
Around the World in 80 Days. Although the prologue was generally omitted on telecasts of the film, it was included in home video releases.
Murrow's reporting brought him into repeated conflicts with CBS and especially Paley, a contretemps that Friendly summarized in his book
Due to Circumstances Beyond our Control.
See It Now ended in summer 1958 after a clash between Murrow and Paley in Paley's office. Murrow had complained to Paley he could not continue doing the show if the network repeatedly provided (without consulting Murrow) equal time to subjects who felt wronged by the program.
According to Friendly, Murrow asked Paley if he was going to destroy
See It Now, into which the CBS chief executive had invested so much. Paley replied that he did not want a constant stomach ache every time Murrow covered a controversial subject.
See It Now's final broadcast, "Watch on the Ruhr" (about postwar Germany), aired
July 7, 1958. Three months later, on
October 15, 1958, in a speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago, Murrow blasted TV's emphasis on entertainment and commercialism at the expense of
public service.
[D]uring 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.
The harsh tone of the Chicago speech seriously damaged Murrow's friendship with Bill Paley, who felt Murrow was biting the hand that fed him. Before his own death, Friendly said that the RTNDA address did more than the McCarthy show to break the relationship between CBS's chairman and its most-respected journalist.
Beginning in 1958, Murrow hosted a
talk show entitled
Small World that brought together political figures for one-to-one debates.
After contributing to the first episode of the documentary series
CBS Reports, Murrow took a sabbatical from summer 1959 to mid-1960, though he continued to work on
CBS Reports and
Small World during this period. Friendly, executive producer of
CBS Reports, wanted the network to allow Murrow to again be his co-producer after the sabbatical, but he was eventually turned down.
Murrow's last major TV milestone was reporting and narrating the
CBS Reports installment "
Harvest of Shame", a report on the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States. Directed by Friendly and produced by David Lowe, it ran in November 1960, just after
Thanksgiving.
Murrow portrayed himself in the British film production of
Sink the Bismarck! in 1960, recreating some of the wartime broadcasts he did from London for CBS.
Murrow resigned from CBS to accept a position as head of the
United States Information Agency, parent of the
Voice of America, in 1961. President
John F. Kennedy offered Murrow the position, which he viewed as "a timely gift". CBS president
Frank Stanton had reportedly been offered the job but declined, suggesting that Murrow be offered the job.
On
September 16, 1962, Murrow introduced educational television to
New York City via the maiden broadcast of WNDT, which became
WNET.