The rules and rituals governing American journalism began shifting in the 1950s. At the time, former radio reporter John Daly hosted the CBS network game show What’s My Line? When he began moonlighting as the evening TV news anchor on ABC, the network blurred the entertainment and information border, foreshadowing what was to come.
“It’s the job of journalists to make complicated things interesting. The shame of American journalism is that [PBS’s] Frontline, with its limited resources, has been doing infinitely better, more thoughtful, more creative reporting on places like Afghanistan or Rwanda than the richest networks in the world. If it is a glory for Frontline, it is a shame for those big networks and the [people] at the top of the corporate structure who run them.”
DAVID HALBERSTAM,JOURNALIST, OCTOBER 2001
In the early days, the most influential and respected television news program was CBS’s See It Now. Coproduced by Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow, See It Now practiced a kind of TV journalism lodged somewhere between the neutral and narrative traditions. Generally regarded as “the first and definitive” news documentary on American television, See It Now sought “to report in depth—to tell and show the American audience what was happening in the world using film as a narrative tool.”36 Murrow worked as both the program’s anchor and its main reporter, introducing the investigative model of journalism to television—a model that programs like 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline would imitate. Later, of course, Internet news-gathering and reporting would further alter journalism.