By J. MAX ROBINS

"Friendlyvision" By Ralph Engelman Columbia University, 424 pages, $34.50 Moviegoers could be forgiven if they came away from "Good Night, and Good Luck" in 2005 under the impression that Edward R. Murrow was a one-man force of nature at CBS News in the 1950s. The film's director and co-writer, George Clooney, was clearly intent on lionizing the already thoroughly lionized Murrow as the scourge of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but Mr. Clooney overlooked the importance of another central player at CBS in those days: producer Fred Friendly. Whether out of modesty or overwork or simple Hollywood license, Mr. Clooney, who portrayed Friendly in the movie, played him as Murrow's bland, good-looking, monochromatic aide. Wrong on all counts. For one thing, Friendly back then looked more like a young and hulking Alan Greenspan. For another, he was the closest thing to a force of nature at CBS News. As Mr. Engelman shows in "Friendlyvision," Friendly and Murrow formed an unlikely partnership: the brash, mostly self-educated producer and the taciturn, urbane superstar broadcaster. Together they pioneered a visually arresting, muckraking brand of journalism -- but it was Friendly who was forever on the alert for new technology that would facilitate more compelling reporting. In the 1960s, for example, he was an early champion of using satellite technology for live television transmission from remote locations. It is refreshing to read about a TV news producer who eagerly tries to marry technology and substantive journalism; these days, too often it's the role of embattled news executives to resist innovation (too costly) and shy away from no-holds-barred reportage (too costly, and viewers are more interested in weather stories).

“He is the quintessential representative of an era of broadcast journalism and also its greatest critic, one who was virtually cast from its midst.”Read an excerpt from "Friendlyvision"

Friendly's role in the development of modern broadcast news has been patchily described elsewhere. He is a player in David Halberstam's portrait of the Eastern media establishment, "The Powers That Be" (1979), and Friendly's complex relationship with Murrow is recounted in A.M. Sperber's "Murrow: His Life and Times" (1986). And Friendly told part of the tale himself in his memoir, "Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control" (1967). But "Friendlyvision" is the first biography of the man, and Mr. Engelman ably brings him to life. Throughout his career, Friendly effectively navigated the corridors of power, attempting to balance journalistic concerns with financial ones and asking hard questions about the responsibilities of the Fourth Estate. Yet in his days at CBS he was hardly a journalistic saint. Every bit the ambitious screaming showman, Friendly bullied subordinates and sometimes played too cozy with politicians. And his journalistic standards were pliable. Early is his career, he produced, with Murrow, a series called "I Can Hear It Now," based on historical recordings from World War II. (The series was a precursor of the better-known newsmagazine he produced for Murrow, "See It Now.") When the quality of the archival material intended for "I Can Hear It Now" wasn't up to snuff, Mr. Engelman says, Friendly had no qualms about asking the original participants to rerecord the material and passing it off as the real thing. Some of the figures balked, including Charles de Gaulle, who refused to rerecord his historic 1940 broadcast to the French people calling on them to resist the Nazi invaders. As a rule, though, Friendly had an ambassador's gift for cultivating politicians and powerbrokers -- when they weren't trying to cultivate him. His savvy understanding of television's ability to sway public opinion made him popular in Washington. Mr. Engelman reports that presidents, including Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, sought Friendly's counsel on honing their message and image. In 1964 -- by then Friendly was president of CBS News -- Johnson tried to recruit him as the White House media adviser on domestic issues, a position that LBJ promised would put Friendly on the same level with National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Bill Moyers, who was then Johnson's press secretary, says that observing Friendly and LBJ negotiate "was like watching King Kong and Godzilla." Ultimately no deal was struck, despite Johnson's ardent courtship. According to Mr. Moyers, the two men were too much alike, with "egos that filled the same room, leaving no space for anybody else." Later Friendly told Mr. Moyers that leaving the presidency of CBS to go to the White House would be "a step down." Others think he declined the job because, as Murrow warned him, White House infighting made network-television machinations look like kindergarten. Despite turning down LBJ, Friendly didn't remain in his TV job much longer. In 1966 he resigned from the presidency of CBS News on a matter of principle, a move for which he is perhaps best known in the canon of American broadcast-news history. The trouble began when higher-ups at the network refused to let Friendly break into regularly scheduled programming -- reruns of such shows as "I Love Lucy" and "The Real McCoys" -- to cover congressional hearings on Vietnam. His primary competition, NBC News, had interrupted its broadcasts to report from Washington. Thwarted by bosses who were grubbing after ratings instead of honoring a commitment to journalism, Friendly quit, his integrity intact. Or that was how the story played at the time. Mr. Engelman shows us that the truth was, as they say, more nuanced. Friendly was certainly irate about being overruled on covering the Vietnam War hearings, but he was already livid with the network over something rather more prosaic: The corporate reporting structure had been changed recently, and Friendly would no longer answer directly to CBS Chairman William Paley. According to Mr. Engelman, Friendly tendered his resignation as a negotiating ploy. He wanted to keep his relative autonomy at CBS News, and he didn't believe that the resignation would be accepted. When it was clear that he had overplayed his hand and CBS was letting him go, Friendly spun the story that his resignation was all about fighting the good fight for the Fourth Estate. The final third of "Friendlyvision" focuses on the years that followed his resignation. These are lesser known chapters of his career -- his work as McGeorge Bundy's "de facto vice president" at the Ford Foundation, his professorship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and the development of his "Media and Society" seminars, which were to become a staple of public television. In myriad ways, Friendly's influence on the news business continued well after he left CBS. His work at the Ford Foundation on proposals for public broadcasting provided a blueprint for the 1970 launch of PBS. At Columbia, he developed the journalism school's broadcast-news curriculum. As for Mr. Engelman's own reporting, it is admirably thorough, but one wishes he had expended as much energy on the writing as on the assembling of "Friendlyvision." There is too much stringing together of interviews and not enough evocative description and careful analysis of the book's colorful main character. Still, I can attest to the accuracy of the interviewees who talked to Mr. Engelman about Fred Friendly as a teacher. I was a student of his at Columbia in the early 1980s, and he was indeed a dynamic, challenging instructor, a kind of media-ethics P.T. Barnum. Most classes featured a guest, usually someone well known from TV news or print journalism but also a longtime friend of the professor's. One day the visitor might be Walter Cronkite, the next day William F. Buckley. As for Friendly's teaching methods, pity the student who would answer "I don't know" to one of his Socratic questions. Friendly would go ballistic, pounding his fist on the table so hard that the future of democracy seemed to depend on knowing the answer. "You need to know, you have to know," Friendly would shout. "When you leave here there will be no time on deadline to ask what's right. You need to know it here." As the audience for the news shifts away from network television and newspapers, toward cable and the Internet, here's hoping that Friendly's sense of get-it-right urgency endures. Mr. Robins is the executive director of industry programs at the Paley Center for Media in New York.