American Masters: Edward R. Murrow -- PBS - Wednesday, August 2, 2006 - 9:00 p.m. (EDT)

Just one week after PBS' American Masters series used a profile of Walter Cronkite to make us reflect on we went from a network news anchor being the most trusted man in America to how they are perceived today, this week they do it again (with a rerun from 1990). Many people today only know the name Edward R. Murrow from the hit movie Good Night and Good Luck, his signature signoff (his version of "And that's the way it is."). As on-the-money as David Strathairn's cinematic portrayal was, now you can see the real thing. American Masters' 90-minute profile of Edward R. Murrow takes us from his astounding reporting in World War II (still the standard by which others are measured) to the fearless way he dispatched domestic bully Sen. Joseph McCarthy. This kind of tell-it-as-you-see-it reporting is hard to imagine today -- rather than a Bill O'Reilly or Chris Matthews, you'd first have to imagine a national campaign so pervasive (as was the 1950s Communist witchhunt) that almost no one dared speak out even as hundreds of people were being ruined by rumor and innuendo. There is one sad parallel to today, however. Both Murrow and Cronkite spent their later years feeling to some extent betrayed by the network to which they had given so much. The legacy continues.