A typewritten quotation on a yellowing 3- x 5-inch index card, now framed, has occupied a place on my desk since I was a bright-eyed newbie in TV production. It is from Edward R. Murrow, one of a group of radio journalists who became a household name by broadcasting from WWII London during the blitz. You could call him an early adopter, as he grasped right away the enormous impact that the medium of radio could bring to war reporting. He even pioneered "embedding" by riding along on bombing runs over Berlin and giving his report the next day. It got him into trouble with his network, but the "Orchestrated Hell" broadcast that came out of it painted his vision of war for the folks back home.

After the war, Murrow migrated over to TV, which was rapidly replacing radio as the in-home entertainment appliance, pumping out 1950s conformity along with ads for Winston cigarettes and Wrigley's chewing gum. He took on the challenge of covering some of the big issues of the day—McCarthyism, the Middle East, the tobacco industry—which won him awards and got him into trouble with his network again. Murrow disagreed with the idea that news should be sanitized and that the public was incapable of handling unpleasant subjects. He was alarmed at the role commercial sponsors played in propagating uncontroversial content and how much broadcast news had become commercialized. He said:

"This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to
those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful."

What would Murrow think of our round-the-clock, multiple-channel cable, broadcast, and online war news? Surely the scope and variety of coverage is unprecedented. Hundreds of embedded and free-floating journalists with digital cameras, satellite phones, gas masks, and email, each witnessing and reporting a piece of the whole story, filtered to some degree through personal bias, political leanings, cultural background, and not enough sleep.

A few reporters did start war blogs, but that got them in trouble with their networks. Major news organizations such as CNN are prohibiting reporters from blogging (see www.kevinsites.net), but that is likely to change over time. An embedded reporter's blog could add the depth currently missing from the snippets and sound bites. Searchable, collective blog-style reporting may become a very natural way to represent events that unfold over weeks and months and have many disparate witnesses, and Internet-ready mobile phones with onboard audio recording and digital imaging will eventually evolve into multimedia transmitters, including lip-reading speech recognition text for automated multimedia blog publishing. In my dreams, anyway. But lately, I've been sleeping with the television on. . . .

It was about TV that Edward R. Murrow made the observation in my framed quotation. "The trouble with television," he said, "is that it is a sword, rusting in the scabbard, during the battle for survival."

It is not a defeatist comment; it is a challenge: to find ways to make the medium work better, to communicate better. The battle for survival is always present, always changing. A few years ago, I opened up the frame and drew a line through the word "television." I replaced it with the word "Internet" and put it back in the frame. It is right here, on my desk.

Send puzzle pieces to joan@cpumag.com.

Read Murrow's full speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association, October 15, 1958: www.rtnda.org/resources/speeches/murrow.shtml.