You and Television
Lyman Bryson
Edward R. Murrow
Lyman Bryson, educator and CBS counselor on public affairs, was joined by Edward R. Murrow, CBS news analyst and commentator, in discussing television on CBS's regular fifteen-minute series (6:15 E.S.T.) devoted to topics of popular interest. Edited excerpts from the ediphone script of the discussion appear below.
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BRYSON:Some of my colleagues in the educational world have asked me recently: What are you going to do with television? What are you going to do to make the world a more enlightened and pleasant and intelligent place with this new weapon? If you accept my theory, Ed, that news is one of the most important branches of education—and you do, I believe …
MURROW:
Yes, enthusiastically, Lyman.
BRYSON:
Then, let's start out with what television is going to do to news coverage.
MURROW:
Well, I have strong opinions on television and news. It seems to me that finding either pictorial or animated material to support or sustain the news broadcast is emphasized at the expense of sound news judgment and therefore that television is in some danger of failing to present the news fully and in perspective.
BRYSON:
Do you mean that the pictorial devices used to maintain interest will distort the meaning of the news, or that news is more effectively broadcast without the distraction of visual material, or do you mean both?
MURROW:
I mean both. For example, several times at the Philadelphia conventions of 1948 the television camera suddenly focused on a weary delegate who was sitting there with his mouth open, sound asleep, while a speech was being made. This certainly detracted at least somewhat from the impact of the speech, and although it may not have been deliberate, it was certainly an editorial distortion.
BRYSON:
Does this mean, then, that the cameraman suddenly enters the news field as a commentator and an analyst, in effect?
Well, I think the cameramen must learn news values, and the newsmen, on the other hand, must learn something about pictorial values. How this is to be brought about I don't know, but I am convinced that it is necessary. Basically, however, the news must come first and pictorial support second. I believe in pictures, but they should not be allowed either to dominate or to distort the news content.
BRYSON:
You don't expect much help from pictures, then, in trying to tell people what the news means?
MURROW:
Oh, yes; certainly. There are whole vast areas of news that cannot be covered effectively in sound broadcasting alone. For example, I doubt that anyone can make a national budget understandable or meaningful through a microphone. I think that with the proper charts and graphs it could be made more meaningful in television. In spot news and eyewitness reports also, certainly, television pictures are a tremendous advantage.
BRYSON:
What about television's effect upon politics in general, upon political destinies? Are persons who aren't "telegenic" going to be handicapped politically? You remember when we started saying that no one could be President of the United States again unless he had a good baritone voice.
MURROW:
Well, we were wrong there, it seems. I would think, Lyman, that television is not going to change political fortunes, political oratory, or voting very much, although there are many who say that it will. I am not certain that the individual voter will make a better appraisal of a candidate just because he has an opportunity to see him, nor do I believe that the individual viewer will be wiser or better informed just because his eyesight, his vision, is extended so that he can see things the breadth of the country …. But you are especially interested in the educational impact of new techniques. What do you think the educational impact of television will be?
BRYSON:
I can be a little more optimistic about television in the classroom than you are about its effect upon politics and upon news, Ed. I should think that it is one more device that a good teacher can use to change the pace of the classroom, to interest the students, because, after all, kids that are tied to seats—and they are, more or less, even in the most advanced schools—like something that gives them a new way of getting at information. But television won't make good teachers out of bad, any more than
MURROW:
What is going to happen to group relations? Are we all going to sit at home and look at receivers?
BRYSON:
I think we will use television as we learned to use radio—as one more extension of our senses. We'll use it to get entertainment. We'll use it to find out what's going on. We'll use it in education, in politics, and for news reporting. But there is a basic problem here that I'd like to ask you about. You know perfectly well that as a reporter you can select a fact which is unquestionably a fact, and you can state it as a fact, and you can completely distort and misrepresent a situation. But with pictures you can do it far more effectively than you can with words; that is, you can completely deceive people about what actually happened or about a condition by publishing a picture that is a camera picture, and you can say, "This is what happened," and it isn't what happened at all. There is no illusion like the illusion that, being an eyewitness, you know everything that happened. Now, do you think there is even more danger of manipulation of the stream of information than there has been?
MURROW:
I don't know. I should think that as the power of a medium increases, its possibilities of distortion increase, and that the possibility of distortion in both pictures and the spoken content will have to be watched very carefully in television. But I don't know the relative dangers, Lyman.
BRYSON:
Well, isn't it true that the more tools we have, the more possibilities there are for us to misuse them and the easier it is to do so? With television, we have a more delicate and complex tool than we have had before —and therefore a more dangerous one.
MURROW:
Unquestionably.
BRYSON:
Surely, you have never believed that the microphone in front of you had any wisdom of its own …
No, I've maintained all along that a speaker whose voice reaches from one end of the country to the other is no wiser or more prescient than he was when his voice would carry only across the living room or from one end of a bar to the other.
BRYSON:
It seems to me that at a time like this, when television is beginning to take its place alongside the other great media of mass communication, we have to remind ourselves that wisdom and nonsense are found in human beings and not in the machines that they use.