Sam Smith - Ann Loikow sent me a fine article on Edward R. Murrow. What I suspect she didn't know was how important Murrow was in my choice to become a journalist. His nightly radio news broadcast was on every evening in my house when I was a teenager and I found few people, at home or in the rest of the world, who impressed me as much. He would gain much greater fame by taking on Joseph McCarthy but his spirit was there in everything he took on. For example, in my junior year of high school, he said, "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history 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 which were for the moment unpopular."
I once wrote of listening to him:
I especially liked Murrow, and when I thought of him he was always on a London rooftop calmly broadcasting through the flak-fractured dark. He sat atop the world -- much as I, in my third floor room, sat atop the garden -- looking out his window and telling everyone what he saw. Murrow saw important things and made even things that weren't important sound that way. I couldn't think of any more impressive work in which to engage. Politicians came and went; besides people said bad things about them. But Murrow was permanent, wise and omnipotent
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