[On June 9th, 1954 laywer
Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have
you no sense of decency?” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
contexts for McCarthyism, leading up to a weekend post on that moment and
historical turning points!]
On the special
report that helped begin McCarthy’s fall, and the response that only hastened
it further.
In this piece
for the Saturday Evening Post, on
the 50th anniversary of Walter
Cronkite’s famous February 27th, 1967 special report on the
Vietnam War, I argued that Cronkite, along with his contemporary investigative
reporter David Halberstam, helped provide models of adversarial journalism that
changed the journalistic landscape and have endured into our own moment. But in
so doing, CBS Evening News anchor Cronkite was also following in the footsteps
of his equally influential predecessor at CBS (both
in radio and television), Edward
R. Murrow. Murrow had been delivering radio reports for CBS since the late
1930s, and by the early 1950s was one of the nation’s most prominent
journalists in multiple media. His longstanding radio program Hear It Now transitioned
to television on November 18th, 1951 as See It Now,
and at the same time Murrow began contributing both reporting and opinion pieces
to the CBS Evening News.
One of Murrow’s
most important and influential See It Now
pieces aired on March 9th, 1954. Entitled “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,”
the half-hour episode used McCarthy’s own statements and speeches to highlight
his contradictions and hypocrisies (foreshadowing what media commentary shows
like The
Daily Show would do half a century later). CBS was extremely wary of
running the show, and did not allow Murrow and his longtime
producer Fred W. Friendly to use the CBS logo or to take advantage of CBS
resources to publicize the episode. So Murrow and Friendly paid themselves to
advertise the show in newspaper across the country, clearly believing that they
were doing meaningful work that should reach as broad an audience as possible. I
would agree, and would emphasize that in the era before either cable news
networks or the internet, it’s quite possible (if not very likely) that most
Americans had not had the chance to hear the majority of the McCarthy
statements and speeches used in the episode. They certainly would not have been
able to hear them in close succession, and thus to understand the kinds of
deceptions, falsehoods, and half-truths that (as I traced in yesterday’s post)
McCarthy had been relying on throughout his life and career.
The episode’s
very first statement emphasized that McCarthy would have the chance to respond
on a subsequent episode of See It Now
if he chose. He did, and joined Murrow for another half-hour episode on April 6th, 1954.
Unsurprisingly, given the history of ad hominem and inaccurate personal attacks
that I also traced yesterday, McCarthy mostly used his TV time to take on
Murrow, calling him a communist sympathizer and then adding, “Ordinarily, I
would not take time out from the important work at hand to answer Murrow.
However, in this case I feel justified in doing so because Murrow is a symbol,
a leader, and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the
throat of anyone who dares to expose individual communists and traitors.” Not
only were these accusations entirely unfounded, but they reflected McCarthy’s
unwillingness (or, more exactly, inability) to respond to the specific factual
charges that the original episode had leveled against him. The audience and nationwide
responses to the rebuttal show were just as fully in favor of Murrow and
critical of McCarthy as had been those to the original episode, and taken
together these two episodes illustrate the possibility for quality adversarial journalism
to truly help shift collective conversations and debates.
Last context
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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