Monday, March 03, 2008

WALTER WINCHELL vs. EDWARD R. MURROW



Doggone it! The YouTube video I uploaded still hasn't appeared on YouTube yet. I'll post it here when it does. In the meantime here's a post devoted to two of my favorite news stylists, Walter Winchell and Edward R. Murrow.

I'm not aware that either one of them had a serious newspaper background before going into radio. Murrow arranged educational lectures and interviews, and Winchell was a vaudevillian and a gossip columnist. You could say that both were like actors who played the role of journalists and managed to beat the real journalists at their own game, at least where presentation was concerned. They both were good, but I'll start with my favorite, Walter Winchell (above), maybe the greatest news stylist in broadcast journalism.





Winchell (above, introducing the characters about a minute into the show, then leaving) saw the radio news as an entertainment medium. That's common today when when lots of people get their news from Comedy Central, but it was a relatively new thing in the twenties when Winchell did it. He had a fast, ratatattat way of speaking, and he combined serious news with gossip and human interest stories, giving equal emphasis to both.

They say that watching Winchell broadcast was a real experience. He'd prepare for every show like it was the most important thing in the world. He paced up and down, deliberately psyching himself into a nervous state, not allowing himself even the relief of using the bathroom. During the show he'd tap on a disconnected telegraph key, sit on his knee, throw papers on the floor...anything to sustain the mood of urgency. He frequently referred to the busy Jergens Newsroom, which is funny because Jergens was a lady's hand lotion and there was no newsroom. I love the way he started his show: "Good morning Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea!" Now THAT'S style!







Murrow was the master of understatement, of the pauses between words. He had a grave way of speaking yet his delivery had a note of self-parody in it, even when he was in earnest. It was a killer style that demonstrated that restrained under the top can be almost as drastic and surreal as wild over-the-top.

Murrow spawned a whole school of imitators including David Brinkley and Eric Severeid. The trick was to give every bit of the news that grave, measured, metronome beat. My guess is that Murrow's style came about as a reaction to Winchell's magnificent hysteria. Murrow decided to inhabit the silences that Winchell ignored.





Murrow was the kind of guy you'd watch compulsively. There was something magnificently awkward about him, the kind of awkwardness that translates into charisma. He had a thin, lanky body which required deliberate and thoughtful control to make it do the simplest things of life. He had to work at crafting facial expressions and he chain smoked to the point where he became a sort of patron saint to smokers everywhere. Cartoonists should study guys like this.


The "Person to Person"interview with Marilyn Monroe (above) is one of Murrow's best TV shows. You could argue that he didn't do very much in the interview but that would be a mistake. Murrow accomplishes a lot by simply transferring his awkwardness to other people. Marilyn was really spooked by it and so, apparently, were the other people in the room. We got to see a side of her that nobody else brought out.

8 comments:

Michael Sporn said...

That's an excellent commentary. I'd never have compared the two - probably because of their opposing styles and politics - but your writing makes a lot of sense. Of course, the role of J.J. Hunsacker in Sweet Smell of Success (played by Burt Lancaster) was modeled after Walter Winchell and the dirty style he used in his gossip column. Murrow, I think, personified all that was positive about TV journalism.

Thanks for getting me to think about and remember these two icons.

Lester Hunt said...

Great post, Eddie! There's much food for thought here. The Winchell/Murrow duality can probably be applied to all the arts. They represent two fundamental styles or strategies. I guess you could call them the overwhelming and the underwhelming.

Anonymous said...

Edward R. Murrow had the most awkward birth name for an urbane radio personality on earth: Egbert Roscoe Murrow. Smartest move he ever made was to change it. His dumbest move was to chain smoke, which killed him.

pappy d said...

Murrow gets a lot of lip service in broadcast journalism, but it's Winchell who was the real visionary. News as entertainment & the hyped-up sense of urgency/crisis are everywhere in TV news.

He was also involved with the Syndicate & as a booster for the FBI, kept the heat off J. Edgar Hoover for ignoring organised crime. He also used to run messages from Frank Costello to Hoover at the racetrack to let him know when the fix was in. Hoover would occasionally bet at the $2 window, but he brought g-men with him who'd place bets at the $100 window.

The thing about Winchell that really sticks in my craw is that he got to bang Marilyn.

Anonymous said...

Hey Uncle Eddie, this is off the topic but while I was browsing youtube for some old Tex Avery cartoons, I came across this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZANtnV66rVQ

I recognized your style, but what was this cartoon all about?

EOCostello said...

Actually, I don't think there was all that long a period in between Winchell starting for the New York Mirror and his debut in radio. One of the oldest surviving NBC clips is of a "Lucky Strike Hour" broadcast of 1931, in which Winchell is a player. (Winchell introduces the NBC "chimmies," one of the oldest versions of the 3-note chmes.) I'm not sure how long he was a journalist, but it certainly wasn't more than about 6-7 years before radio.

The New Yorker once did a devastating survey of Winchell's columns on accuracy, showing that only a small fraction of his output was true and verifiable. This led to Winchell having New Yorker editor Harold Ross barred from the Stork Club, an episode discussed in "Genius in Disguise."

Murrow's interesting contribution may have been his hard push for what eventually became the CBS World News Roundup. At the time it debuted for the Anschluss in early 1938, it was a technological marvel, having live broadcasts from around Europe, each hitting in sequence. It was what led directly to his famous broadcasts from London a few years later.

Trevor Thompson said...

Great post today, Eddie! I love Edward R. Murrow, and long to see Ted Koppell with a cigarette in hand... or better yet a joint!

Also, Marilyn looks more natural and out of her element than I've ever seen her. Of course, I get a little sentimental whenever I see her. . . but what fella doesn't?

And way to go on conquering iMovie and YouTube! Now, maybe the Smoker can be a live action drama... or a radio drama with pictures!!!

Oh, I can't wait!

- trevor.

Anonymous said...

KEITH OLBERMANN IS BETTER THAN THESE OLD GUISE.

Just kidding, I like that Murrow guy. Eddie, did you see the movie George Clooney directed about Murrow? It was so liberal even its credits had bleeding hearts, but the cinematography was spectacular. The guy who did the cinematopgraphy for it won the Oscar this year for another film.