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President of CBS News

Fred W. Friendly (born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer, October 30, 1915 – March 3, 1998) was a president of CBS News and the creator, along with Edward R. Murrow, of the documentary television program See It Now. He originated the concept of public access television cable TV channels.

Friendly was born to a Jewish family in New York City to Therese Friendly Wachenheimer and Samuel Wachenheimer, a jewelry manufacturer. The family moved from Manhattan's Morningside Heights district (where later, Friendly would teach for a quarter century) to Providence, Rhode Island, where he graduated from Hope Street High School in 1933. He received an associate's degree from Nichols Junior College in 1936. Friendly later wrote, directed, and produced the NBC Radio series The Quick and the Dead during the Summer of 1950. It was about the development of the atomic bomb. It featured Trout, Bob Hope, and New York Times writer Bill Laurence, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Manhattan Project.

After the success of The Quick and the Dead, Friendly was recruited to work full time for CBS by news executive Sig Mickelson. That fall, Murrow and Friendly collaborated to produce a CBS Radio documentary series inspired by their record albums—a weekly show called Hear It Now that was hosted by Murrow. The show moved to television as See It Now on Sunday, November 18, 1951. Murrow and Friendly broadcast a revealing See It Now documentary analysis on Senator Joseph McCarthy (airing March 9, 1954) that has been credited with changing the public view of McCarthy and, being a key event leading to McCarthy's fall from power. It was an extension of the duo's continuing probe of the conflict between McCarthy's anti Communist crusade and individual rights. The previous fall, Murrow and Friendly had produced a notable See It Now episode on the topic, when the show probed the case of Air Force Reserve Lieutenant Milo Radulovich, who had lost his security clearance because of the supposed leftist leanings of his sister and father—evidence the Air Force kept sealed. Five weeks later, Radulovich was reinstated by the secretary of the Air Force. Radulovich was granted leave of his duties that same year, however, when he was forced to move temporarily to Phoenix, Arizona to care for his nephew who had recently been involved in a dog mauling incident. After See It Now ended, in the Summer of 1958, Friendly and Murrow worked together on its successor, CBS Reports, although Friendly alone was executive producer and Murrow no more than an occasional reporter and narrator. Their most famous CBS Reports installment—the probe of migrant farm workers Harvest of Shame—aired in November 1960 and still is considered one of television's finest single programs. After Murrow's departure from the television network in 1961, Friendly continued to oversee several notable CBS Reports documentaries, including Who Speaks for Birmingham?, Birth Control and the Law, and The Business of Heroin. Under CBS president James T. Aubrey Jr. the pressures on CBS News operations arose and escalated. Aubrey constantly fought with Friendly. Friendly felt Aubrey was insufficiently concerned with public affairs and in his memoir, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, recounts one budget meeting at CBS when Aubrey spoke at length of how much money the news was costing the company, being a sea of red ink that could be stopped by replacing news with more entertainment programs. CBS founder and board chairman William S. Paley supported the news, however, and protected Friendly's division from Aubrey's proposed budget cuts. In 1962, Aubrey ordered that there would be fewer specials, both entertainment and news, because he felt interruptions to the schedule alienated viewers by disrupting their routine viewing, sending them to the competition. Friendly resented this move. To Friendly's relief, in 1965 Aubrey was fired. Friendly served as president of CBS News from 1964 to 1966.

In 1966, Friendly resigned from CBS when the television network ran a scheduled episode of I Love Lucy instead of broadcasting live coverage of the first United States Senate hearings questioning American involvement in Vietnam. Onetime CBS News president Dick Salant, the executive who preceded and later succeeded Friendly in the role, wrote in his memoirs that Friendly's problem was compounded by his inability to make such a request directly to the top CBS management (William S. Paley and Frank Stanton), as previous CBS News presidents had. In this case, Friendly had to go through a new supervisor at the executive level, CBS Broadcast Group president Jack Schneider.

After he left CBS, Friendly initially worked as a broadcast consultant at the Ford Foundation, a position he maintained until 1980. In this capacity, he initially developed an infeasible plan to allocate revenue generated by communications satellites toward the nascent medium of public television before he emerged as an integral figure in "negotiations about interconnection that would lead to the creation of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1969." By ensuring National Educational Television's subordination to the Washington based PBS through the merger of NET with New York City's WNDT (and including a $2 million Ford Foundation grant to bolster the station's local programming), Friendly reluctantly placated members of the Nixon administration who perceived NET as a propagandistic front for the Eastern Establishment. Despite his relative dearth of formal education—not atypical among contemporaneous practitioners—he was appointed to the tenured faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Broadcast Journalism in 1966. Over the next thirteen years, Friendly assumed stewardship of the school's hitherto threadbare broadcast journalism concentration. To the chagrin of some of his colleagues, he often eclipsed other top administrators (including 1970s era dean Elie Abel, who was personally recommended by Friendly for the post) in the popular consciousness. The non degree Summer Program in Journalism for Members of Minority Groups (renamed the Michele Clark Fellowship Program for Minority Journalists following the death of a distinguished alumna in a December 1972 airplane crash) was directed by Friendly from 1968 to 1975, enabling many individuals (most notably media savvy attorney Geraldo Rivera) to switch careers during the tempestuous epoch. A proposed "University Broadcast Laboratory" (an experimental Sunday news magazine initially proposed by Friendly in partnership with the Ford Foundation, Columbia, and NET) only manifested in attenuated form, however, as Public Broadcast Laboratory from 1967 to 1969; administrative and content circumscriptions imposed by the University trustees precipitated his divestiture from the program and hastened the retirement of Journalism School dean Edward W. Barrett in 1968. As chair of Mayor John Lindsay's Task Force on CATV and Telecommunications that year, Friendly revived his revenue sharing proposal by advising cable companies to set aside two channels that the public could lease for a minor fee, ultimately enabling the development of public access television. Spurred by classroom discussions, he inaugurated the Media and Society Friendly Seminars under the auspices of the Journalism School in 1974 as private conference fora on media, law (particularly the Constitution and the First Amendment) and public policy for the edification of professionals from disparate fields. Drawing upon the case method employed by many professional schools and the Socratic method for interlocution, these eventually evolved into PBS's long running Fred Friendly Seminars in 1981. Following his statutory retirement in 1979, Friendly relinquished control of the Journalism School's broadcast program; however, he continued to teach and produce the seminars at Columbia as an administrative officer of the University before retiring in earnest in 1992. By the time of his death in 1998, Friendly "was criticized by some working in network news as being isolated in academia and out of touch with the new realities—and limitations—of the business of broadcast journalism." He also served as a visiting professor at Yale University (1984) and Bryn Mawr College (1981). In addition to his work with the seminars, Friendly produced and hosted a ten part series on PBS, Ethics in America, on which a panel of leading intellectuals debated and discussed modern ethical issues.

Friendly died on March 3, 1998, of a stroke, at his home in Riverdale, Bronx. He is interred in the Sharon Gardens Division of Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

In 1986, Edward Herrmann portrayed Friendly in the original HBO drama Murrow. In 2005, George Clooney played him in the film Good Night, and Good Luck.