Television: This Is Murrow

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Amid the trite and untrue that shed a honky-tonk glare from the nation's TV sets come moments that pierce reality and live up to television's magic gift for thrusting millions of spectators at once into the lap of history in the making. As television moved this week into its second decade, chances were that some of the best of such moments in the new season would come from a dark, high-domed man with a hangdog look, an apocalyptic voice and a cachet as plain as his inevitable cigarette. His name: Edward R. (for Roscoe) Murrow.

Many have come and many have fallen in TV's growth to immature maturity, but CBS's Ed Murrow, 49, marches on as TV's top journalist. Six years after his See It Now pioneered the technique for capturing the sights and sounds, persons and events that shape the news, it is unchallenged by any newer or better technique for exploiting TV's potential or overcoming its shortcomings. The combination of brains, integrity, attractiveness and showmanship that makes him such an effective journalist also establishes Murrow, in his role of star on the trivial but popular Person to Person, as one of TV's five top-rated entertainers.

By the Ears. From his pinnacle atop the nation's TV antennas, Murrow commands a huge circulation. The monthly See It Now, which starts its new season next week (Sun. 5 p.m.. E.S.T.), draws viewers in a Nielsen-estimated 3,850,000 homes; his Person to Person (Fri. 10:30 p.m.. E.S.T.), now in its fifth year, flickers weekly into more than 8,300,000 homes, and his ten-year-old radio broadcast, its audience shrunken by TV competition, still enables Murrow to get more than 1,000,000 Americans by the ears every weekday evening at 7:45, E.S.T.

In prestige and awards, he outrates anybody in TV. He has been laureled not only with eight honorary degrees, but four colleges (one of them: his alma mater, Washington State) have offered him their presidencies. In addition, he has been showered with nearly 100 assorted prizes and honors, including so many George Foster Peabody Awards for various feats that the Peabody judges gave him another just for "being himself."

The VIP's VIP. Murrow was the author of TV's most explosive telecast: the March 1954 show that indicted Joe McCarthy out of the Senator's own mouth in film clips. He did not bother to clear the show in advance with CBS. and in turn CBS decided retroactively that it had lent Murrow the network's right to editorialize. The network lists him only as one of its hired hands, but Murrow is something of a power in himself, with his own generously financed domain and the strong personal loyalty of key CBS news staffers. His unique status stems from 1) his close friendship with Board Chairman William S. Paley, with whom he deals directly, 2) his onetime role as a major architect of its news staff and policy, and 3) the hard fact that if CBS ever loses him, it will be NBC's gain. CBS pays him well over $300,000 a year. To a questioner who demanded at a stockholders' meeting why he got more money than Paley or CBS President Frank Stanton, the board chairman himself replied: "His value seems to be higher."