Thanks to a recent donation, Tufts' Edward R. Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy has bolstered its collection of primary source material.
The Center, located in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, has received a large collection of Murrow's WWII-era telegrams and articles donated by Kyle Good, widow of late CBS producer Mark H. Harrington III, a colleague of Murrow's.
Murrow was one of broadcast journalism's pioneer figures, perhaps best known for his reporting from London during World War II, some of the first radio international broadcasts ever.
Murrow's career was the subject of last year's major motion picture "Good Night, and Good Luck," directed by George Clooney, which focuses on Murrow's role in protesting 1950s McCarthyism.
Although Oscar buzz surrounding the film (it has been nominated for six Oscars, including Best Director, Actor and Picture) has focused much attention on Murrow's career during the McCarthy era, the recently-acquired articles shed light on his earlier career of international reporting.
According to Fletcher Media Relations Manager Terri Ann Knopf, the Murrow Center is "one of the best-kept secrets of Tufts." The center includes the most complete collections of Murrow's work, including articles, letters, books, and household items, almost all donated by his widow, Janet Murrow.
"Tufts and Fletcher are very fortunate to have Murrow's professional papers and archives," said Crocker Snow, Director of the Murrow Center and founding editor of the World Paper. "It is a great resource for students, researchers and contemporary historians of journalism. The new acquisition fills in some important gaps."
Many of Murrow's papers were lost between office moves or were destroyed by German bombings in WWII. Harrington was able to rescue the donated batch before an office clean-up at CBS London in the 1980s.
The papers range from telegrams reporting early WWII statistics to intimate articles detailing the daily lives of Londoners under fire from German bombings.
According to Snow, "Murrow set a new standard for radio journalism during the Battle of Britain with reporting that combined a vivid sense of being there with an equal sense of his own moral and ethical reactions to what he was reporting on."
Murrow exhibited less objectivity than expected in journalism today, calling for the British government to reconsider its request for Czechoslovakia to appease Germany's advances.
The papers also show Murrow on the offensive against the British government's censorship of the press during WWII, referring to it as "well-mannered though sometimes stupid."
"He ... served as the eyes, ears and to some degree interpreter for his radio listeners. He carried this on to a new medium of television in the immediate postwar years. He didn't therefore pioneer a new form of advocacy journalism so much as 'interpretive journalism,'" Snow said.
According to the Associated Press, Murrow was unique in his often unapologetic depictions of the horror of war, lamenting that people had "lost the ability to feel." He questioned what he perceived to be the tendency of the public to care less for atrocities committed by states on a large scale and more for isolated incidents committed by individuals.
According to Knopf, in 1965 then-Fletcher Dean Edmund A. Guillon coined the term "public diplomacy." This term refers to the use of communication to advance the national interest of the United States, reflectiveof the increasingly important international media in which Murrow had played such an important role.
Gullion had asked Murrow to collaborate Fletcher School on a center that could create collaboration between Murrow's network of journalists and Fletcher's network of diplomats. Unfortunately, Murrow died only a short time later, and the center was established as a memorial that has since housed Murrow's professional papers and promoted research and dialogue on public diplomacy.
Renewed public interest in Murrow with "Good Night and Good Luck"'s Oscar buzz and the recent donation of additional papers has spurred the organization of a panel discussion to take stock of the state of international reporting today.
The high-profile discussion will be take place Apr. 3 and will be moderated by Ted Koppel, former anchorman for ABC's "Nightline."
