Fred W. Friendly, a pioneering CBS News producer and distinguished media scholar, enjoyed a 60-year career as remarkable for its longevity as for its accomplishments. As the technically creative and dramatically inspired producer for CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow, Friendly helped enliven and popularize television news documentaries in the decade after World War II, when television news was still in its infancy. After Resigning from CBS as its news division president in 1966, Friendly found a second career as an author and as creator of a series of moderated seminars on media and society.

Friendly got his start in broadcasting during the Great Depression with a staff position at a small radio station in Providence, Rhode Island. It was as a successful radio producer that Friendly was teamed with Murrow in the late 1940s to create a series of documentary albums entitled I Can Hear It Now. When Murrow made the jump to television reporting, he brought Friendly with him as his principal documentary producer. Armed with a flair for the dramatic and his experience as a technical innovator in radio, Friendly set out to do for television what he had already done for radio documentaries. The result, in 1952, was the debut of the highly acclaimed See It Now, a weekly series hosted by Murrow that broke new ground with its intrepid probing into subjects of serious socio-political significance and its stunning visual style. The successful combination of Friendly's energy and Murrow's stature hit its professional peak in 1954, with their decision to broadcast a documentary attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy that helped change the tide of popular opinion against the anticommunist demagogue. In his later years at CBS, Friendly was given broader responsibility to create a variety of news programs, including the landmark hourly documentary series, CBS Reports, and a political forum that would later be known as Face the Nation. As president of CBS News in the mid-1960s, Friendly struggled to keep his news division independent of profit-conscious and entertainment­-oriented corporate decision making at CBS Inc., which he considered a threat to the autonomy and integrity of his news operations. In March 1966 Friendly argued vociferously to management that CBS had a journalistic obligation to carry extensive live coverage of the first Senate hearings to question U.S. involvement in Vietnam. When the network opted instead to air reruns of I Love Lucy, Friendly resigned from CBS in protest.

In his post-CBS years Friendly turned his interests to writing and teaching about media and law. In a span of 20 years, Friendly traced the history of people involved in landmark Supreme Court cases in books including Minnesota Rag, The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and the First Amendment, and The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. At the Ford Foundation in the mid- l 970s and, later, as the Edward R. Murrow Professor of Broadcast Journalism at Columbia University, Friendly collaborated with some of the nation's leading lawyers, journalists, and politicians to create a series of roundtable debates on media and society. Now known as The Fred Friendly Seminars, these Public Broadcasting Service programs remained under Friendly's stewardship until shortly before his death in 1998.