One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that merging entertainment, advertising, and journalism creates inherent challenges.
Edward R. Murrow highlights the fundamental issues in radio and television news by pointing out that the intertwining of show business, advertising, and journalism leads to conflicts and instability. These three fields, each with their unique demands, when combined, create a chaotic environment where true journalism may suffer in favor of entertainment value and commercial interests.
In practice
In a media literacy workshop, one could use this quote to discuss the importance of discerning news from entertainment.
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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
The best speakers know enough to be scared…the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.
Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence.
We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.
That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'er-reaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.
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