Critical Review of From Murrow to Mediocrity?

Some historians and media critics described the Murrow era as a “golden age” of broadcast foreign news, and it is now lost. This critical review will analyses the research by Raluca Cozma, who believes that foreign news broadcasting today has not regressed “From Murrow to mediocrity”. Cozma argued the pessimistic conclusion of “Today’s broadcast news falls short of Murrow’s” has not been tested empirically in a comparative, longitudinal analysis” (Cozma, 2010, p.668). The study used content analysis a methodology to compare the coverage of foreign news at CBS during the golden age with NPR during the Iraq War II. CBS was considered the blue ribbon radio network of World War II, NPR is its equivalent today. Both stations gained the majority of audience with their strong foreign news broadcast. Cozma provided logical explanations of why today’s foreign news reporting matched or outshined the “golden age” by answering five research questions. The results from the analysis were precisely related to the questions. For the analysis, sufficient size of samples has been used from the two periods. The disadvantages of the study however is that no theories were provided to support Cozma’s argument, which makes the research less cogent. Also, since World War II was a global scale warfare compared to the Iraq War II, hence the general public will be less interested in “hard news” of the latter. It is an opinion that as all the samples were taken from war times, the results might not accurately reflect the current interests of mass audience. Lastly, Cozma suggested that further research is needed in the topic area, but no specific directions or methodology was provided.

First of all, as every journal article should have a specific purpose for its study, Cozma stated her disagreement with the general conclusion that broadcast foreign news nowadays regressed from the golden age. To support her argument, the author listed the objectives of the study as seeking out changes in