Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 127

Live Coverage of War

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On September 22,1940, Murrow reported from the top of BBC
Broadcasting House as the Luftwaffe conducted yet another bombing
attack on London: "Off to my left, far away in the distance, I can see
just that faint, angry snap of anti-aircraft bursts against the steelblue sky" (Sperber, 174). The next night he described another air
raid: "Out of one window there waves something that looks like a
white bedsheet, a . . . curtain swinging in this night breeze. It looks
as if it were being shaken by a ghost.. . There's a three quarter moon
riding high. There was one burst of shellfire almost straight in the
Little Dipper" (Sperber, 174).
Other networks soon followed suit by placing their
correspondents on rooftops for live reports, but it was Murrow who
reaped the glory for being the first. On October 15,1941, seven people
were killed at Broadcasting House in a bombing raid. The BBC
eventually built a complete underground studio operation after all 20
of its above-ground studios were damaged.
In 1942, a United States government survey revealed that
radio had become the main source for news for most Americans. In the
same year broadcasting was established as an essential occupation by
the Selective Service System. On October 20, 1944, General Douglas
MacArthur broadcast from a Signal Corps ship to inform the
Filipinos that he was returning. General Dwight Eisenhower
broadcast a world-wide announcement of the surrender of Italy. The
radio networks pooled their coverage for reports during the D-Day
invasion and the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri.
The August 20,1945 issue of Broadcasting magazine reported that the
Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, James
Lawrence, had commented that "broadcasters have done a whale of a
job in keeping us informed on war news" (Beatty, 17).
The Korean conflict was not a site of extensive live broadcasts
for several reasons, chiefly a lack of communications facilities plus a
stricter military censorship. There were notable instances of
important radio coverage, such as the retreat of the U.S. and South
Korean forces to the Pusan perimeter, or ABC's Lou Cioffi, who was
wounded in action and awarded the Purple Heart. Murrow did a few
radio broadcasts from Korea, but no real-time coverage of battle.
Once again he set a standard, this time for television, as he produced
documentary film projects for the CBS series "See It Now."