Edward R. Murrow: It Will Be A Dangerous Day

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

It will be a dangerous day for American broadcasting if we ever reach the point where they who have the most money are allowed to dominate the marketplace of ideas.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion — a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. 

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices. 

The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions. 

I simply cannot accept that there are on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument. 

We cannot make good news out of bad practice. 

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.

There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor's yard and stampedes us to burn down this house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt, doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we had long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong.

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.

Of this be wary. Honor and fame are often regarded as interchangeable. Both involve an appraisal of the individual. . . but I suggest this difference. Fame is morally neutral. 

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. 

I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything; by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation.

I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers. 

Our history will be what we make of it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge and retribution will not limp in catching up with us. So, just once in a while let us exhault the importance of ideas and information. 

I was greatly influenced by one of my teachers. She had a zeal not so much for perfection as for steady betterment — she demanded not excellence so much as integrity.

If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. 

I have always been on the side of the heretics, against those who burned them, because the heretics so often turned out to be right....Dead, but right. 

When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it. 

— Edward R. Murrow