Thursday, November 30, 2017

A Failure of the Network News Star System


Jim Rutenberg, New York Times; on the United States Information Agency (USIA, 1953-1999), headed by Murrow during the Kennedy administration, and which carried out public diplomacy during the Cold War, see.


Murrow image (not from article) from, with caption: "September 1961 issue of Newsweek with headline 'USIA's Murrow: Is Truth the Best Weapon'"

Excerpt:
The notion of anchor as authority — a stubbornly male prototype that goes back to the pre-feminist days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — was flawed to begin with. ...

The networks bear extra responsibility because they did so much to make them into the larger-than-life — and, therefore, not-true-to-real-life — characters they became.

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