Staying Tuned

A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF influence belongs to journalist Daniel Schorr, whose commentaries, delivered these days on NPR, provide reasoned, thoughtful analysis on events abroad and at home.

With a career of over six decades as a broadcast journalist, many of those as a foreign correspondent, it's tempting to say that Schorr has seen - and covered -- it all. In the post-World-War-II years, it is almost true.

Staying Tuned is an engaging account of a long career, which spanned the world, witnessing monumental changes that the decades brought. The journalism profession has also drastically changed in 60 years, and Schorr has thoughtful insights and musings on that topic as well.

Stationed in the Netherlands, he covered post-war Europe, including the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the beginnings of the Cold War and the erection of the Berlin Wall, Indonesian independence, the creation of NATO.

From Moscow, he found it a challenge to get around Soviet censorship and KGB surveillance.

In 1953, Edward R. Murrow offered Schorr a position with CBS News. After some 20 years with CBS, in what itself became a news story, he was fired -- a journalist both making and breaking news.

Daniel Schorr was born in America, the son of poor immigrant parents who had come to this country from a shtetl near Pinsk. It was hardly an auspicious beginning for this man who would come to investigate, report on, interpret and analyze events and trends for his countrymen.

But it may have helped give him some of his tenacity in pursuing a story, his fairness and his commitment to investigating and reporting in full on what he discovered.

One country Schorr did not report from was Israel. "I have always tried to separate my Jewish heritage from my reporting," he writes in connection with a report he did at Auschwitz.

One wonders if that approach kept him away from Israel, or if his assignments just took him elsewhere.

Photograph (Cover of the book "Staying Tuned")