What the hell has happened to CBS news?

[longship]

4. Edward R Murrow is rolling in his grave.

I have hundreds of hours of WWII broadcasts from CBS. The reportage was great. Murrow, William Shirer, Robert Trout, and their whole team set the standard for on the scene reportage.

Shirer, who reported from Berlin, always under Goebbels' jaundiced eye, later wrote a history of Nazi Germany, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His first person accounts were crucial in turning the tide in an isolationist USA.

Murrow's "This is London" reports brought the reality of continental warfare to radio sets across the nation. What the British sacrificed leaked into living rooms across the USA. His reporting was always personal, often with literary flourishes. It brought a continental war to the Western Hemisphere before anybody considered that there'd be another world war.

Robert Trout was forced into another CBS innovation in broadcasting on the very early morning of June 6, 1944 when he was woken up and told to get to the CBS studios in New York as fast as he could. The result was an incredible nine hour broadcast by Trout, the first anchored news broadcast where Trout was the focus, but not the news. I have audio of the 24 hours of that day, and Trout literally kept the news coming live as it happened. Eat shit, Wolf Blitzer.

How far the great have fallen.