PERSPECTIVE ON BROADCASTING : The Golden Age of TV News That Never Was : Even the revered Edward R. Murrow hosted a ‘lighter than air’ celebrity interview show.

Whenever CBS News gets itself into trouble--as it recently has over front-office interference at “60 Minutes”--someone usually shakes his head and mutters something about how this wouldn’t be happening if Edward R. Murrow were still alive.

According to this comforting myth, there was a golden age of television news when Murrow was king and CBS was the Tiffany’s of broadcasting. As with many myths, there is some truth in this one. Certainly, Murrow was a great journalist who for many years fought the good fight against corporate executives who believed (correctly) that the entertainment division would do more for CBS’ bottom line than would a serious news division.

If there ever was a golden age of broadcast news, it was the age of radio, not television. In the years roughly between 1936 and 1952, Murrow and the small group of brilliant correspondents he supervised virtually invented electronic journalism and carried it to its greatest heights.

Murrow and his “boys” saw radio as another means of delivering the written word. After 1944, they sometimes did live, on-the-spot, ad-libbed reporting, but they typically wrote first (and at length)and broadcast later. When commercial television began to make its presence felt in 1948, they sensed its dangers immediately: Pictures would replace words, they thought; costs would rise; show-biz values would replace journalistic values; time would be at a premium; and brevity, not comprehensiveness, would be the norm.

The years between 1952 and the present proved them right. To be sure, Murrow and others did some memorable television work during those years. Murrow’s “See It Now” and its successor, “CBS Reports,” were often excellent. And many fine correspondents have distinguished themselves on the commercial television networks, along with anchors like CBS’ Walter Cronkite, NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and ABC’s Peter Jennings. But the broadcasting trend since the end of World War II has been toward entertainment and away from news.

It could probably not have been otherwise. There was too much money at stake, too much economic, political and corporate power to be gained--or lost. Commercial television has tended to corrupt or trivialize almost everything it touches, from college athletics to drama, and news was hardly immune. During the 1950s, even the sainted Murrow was host of a lighter-than-air celebrity interview show, “Person to Person.”

In 1961, Murrow was forced out of CBS, the trend toward entertainment and greater profits accelerated and the line between entertainment and news became increasingly difficult to find. So-called newsmagazine shows, even “60 Minutes,” which has always been the best of them, further blurred that line, in the process reaping huge profits. By the 1980s, news divisions that had once existed to demonstrate a commitment to public service were for the first time required to become profit centers.

With that, the battle to establish serious news as a major part of the networks’ mandate was lost. Ed Murrow could not have prevented the defeat, much as he surely would have liked to. Nor in all probability could anyone else have prevented it. Corporate takeover artists and venal executives weren’t the villains, pervasive as their influence was and is. The villain was commercial television itself. Marshall McLuhan was right after all: The medium is the message.

At this late date, there is little reason to think that broadcast news can ever be restored to the position it once enjoyed at CBS in the radio era. Modern alternatives do exist, of course. National Public Radio and public television, as well as CNN and other cable news operations, may fill part of the void. So may the Internet, and there is still print.

Critics, however, should disabuse themselves of the notion that there was ever a “golden age” of television news. There wasn’t, and no one understood that better than Murrow and his boys. In 1992, when one of the Murrow boys, Eric Sevareid, was dying of stomach cancer, he dozed off one afternoon, then awoke with a start.

His son Michael, keeping vigil at Sevareid’s bedside, asked what the matter was.

“I just had a terrible nightmare,” Sevareid said.

“What about?” his son asked,

“Television,” said Sevareid.

And he wasn’t smiling.