Rupert Cornwell: Out of America

Daniel Schorr, a veteran of the Murrow generation, is a national treasure

What do Englishmen abroad miss most about the old country? We know what John Major would miss: "Long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers." Most of us expatriates, however, wax less poetic, with a list of things like Marmite, McVities biscuits and – almost invariably – Radio 4.

These days, courtesy of the internet, you can conjure up the Today programme, Just a Minute or even the shipping forecast, anywhere in the world. But when you're pottering about the house or driving the car in the US, you make do with National Public Radio.

Now NPR is an admirable institution, sober, thorough and scrupulously factual. It covers complicated topics with depth and intelligence. In contrast with the whizz-bang news stations and inane talk radio that otherwise dominate the airwaves here, NPR is aware that the rest of the world exists. But it lacks the bite, the variety, the sheer perversity that make Radio 4 a joy. On the other hand, it has something even Radio 4 does not, and that is Daniel Schorr.

Schorr is a listed national monument of American journalism. He was one of the "Murrow Boys", that legendary group of reporters assembled by Ed Murrow, the CBS reporter who made his name reporting from wartime London and who remains the patron saint of the industry – as anyone who saw the George Clooney film, Good Night and Good Luck, will attest. Rising 92, Schorr is the last of the group still practising his trade for a living.

His career began when, as the 12-year-old son of Russian Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, he discovered the body of a woman who had jumped, fallen or been pushed from the roof of the block of flats where he lived. He was composed enough to phone the Bronx Home News and earn $5 (a princely sum in those days) for the tip, and has not looked back since.

Schorr reported from post-war Europe for various newspapers before Murrow enlisted him in 1953. After two decades at CBS, he fell out with the network and left. In 1979 he joined the infant Cable News Network – only for another falling-out, with CNN's founder and owner Ted Turner, six years later.

Happily, he was soon offered the perch he occupies today, as NPR's senior news analyst, providing regular commentaries on current events. They rarely exceed 400 or 500 words in length, three minutes of radio time. To listen to them, though, is to be carried back to a vanished age, when bombastic self-certainty had not yet become the coin of the broadcasting realm.

Instead, Schorr relies on pithiness and wry understatement, a turn of phrase that grows if anything more graceful as he grows older, and a wonderful sense of timing. Now a selection of more than 15 years' worth of these commentaries has been published, entitled Come to Think of It. Not only does the thrust of his analysis survive the test of time pretty well, his pieces read as elegantly on the printed page as they must have sounded when originally delivered by that slow and mellifluous voice on NPR.

Schorr is an unabashed "liberal", in the American sense, working for a radio network that conservatives regard as hopelessly prejudiced against them. Off air, as at a book launch last week, he does not bother to hide his delight that the Democrats this year will surely recapture the White House. On air, however, and even at a moment of national trauma like 9/11, the hallmark of his commentaries is balance and restraint.

Only rarely did he let his feelings show – as on 13 December 2000, when the Supreme Court, after halting the Florida recount, handed the closest election in US history to George Bush. For once admitting to "something less than cool dispassion", Schorr denounced as a "gang of five" the conservative majority on the court who had ruled in favour of Bush. "The fix was in," he declared, part of what he termed a "judicial equivalent of a Third World military coup", to achieve a transfer of power. In the light of what has happened since, his fury was not misplaced.

To borrow the phrase used by Steven Norris about his own amorous past when campaigning for mayor of London, Schorr has "a bit of form" when it comes to the shenanigans of Republican presidents and their supporters.

These days, he is part of the NPR brand. But older listeners remember him as a target of the Nixon White House, whose name appeared on the celebrated "enemies list" drawn up by Chuck Colson, Nixon's hatchet man and an orchestrator of the Watergate break-in. "A real media enemy", Colson scrawled against Schorr's name – a professional badge of honour if ever there was one.

Now we are in yet another presidential election cycle, the 12th that Schorr has covered. His cool and detached style could not be in greater contrast with the shrillness and fury all around.

Companies no longer directly sponsor news and current affairs programmes in the US as they did in the 1950s. But today's TV networks belong to giant corporations, for whom the bottom line is the top priority. Murrow's scathing description of broadcast news coverage as "an incompatible combination of showbusiness, advertising and news" was delivered in 1958, a cri de coeur to leaders of his own industry. But it rings hardly less true today, in an age when cost-cutters have taken an axe to foreign and investigative reporting.

At least, however, we've got Dan Schorr and NPR. It's almost enough to make you forget Radio 4.