On and off the Air:An Informal History of CBS News

Describes the early days of television, including Eisenhower's 1952 campaign--the first to be televised--and the showdown between Ed Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy, and offers insightful anecdotes about well-known figures in television news

The thesis of this volume is the relatively tired one that television news has suffered a decline since the era of Edward R. Murrow, principally at the hands of corporate managers who have no news experience. Equally shopworn is the story the author narrates of who pushed whom off which rungs on the corporate ladder, an account limited, despite the subtitle, to the small world of CBS News, not TV news in general. Schoenbrun, who died a year ago, joined CBS in 1941, served as CBS Paris bureau chief for 17 years, then was recalled to become Washington bureau chief, scoring his greatest scoop in reporting the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. He broke with the network after his Sunday news show was cancelled. Despite inside stories of Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace, this autobiography covers well-trodden ground. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Just when you thought you knew everything about CBS News Bill Leonard's In the Storm of the Eye ( LJ 5/15/87), Ed Joyce's Prime Times, Bad Times ( LJ 7/88), Robert Slater's This is CBS ( LJ 6/15/88), Peter J. Boyer's Who Killed CBS? ( LJ 7/88), and Peter McCabe's Bad News at Black Rock ( LJ 4/15/87), here is another account of its evolution. Schoenbrun, whose manuscript was nearly complete when he died in 1988, was a broadcast jounalist who "bucked management" and left CBS in the early 1960s. He frequently criticizes CBS news management, its anchors, and reporters, but this is not so much an angry chronicle as an exploration of the history of the network and the "seeds of destruction and who planted them and under what condition."-- Jo Cates, Poynter Inst. for Media Studies Lib . , St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.