A recent New Yorker magazine (Jan. 23 & 30, 2006) offers Nicholas Lemann's "The Murrow Doctrine," an article that adds nuance to the story told by the recent movie Good Night, and Good Luck (see Roger Ebert film review here).
When oldstyleliberal was small, Edward R. Murrow was just about God ... if God were a TV news reporter whose familiar closing tagline was "Good night, and good luck." But Murrow's apogee had already passed by the time oldstyleliberal got old enough to savvy. So (I switch now to the first person) I don't really recall the night of Tuesday, March 9, 1954, at 8:00 PM EST, when Murrow's half-hour "See It Now" aired as the first of four installments whose combined effect would be to disembowel Senator Joseph McCarthy's reputation forever.
McCarthy had for some four years, ever since the early part of 1950, says Lemann, made "sensational accusations" about the alleged Communist leanings of countless Americans in high places and low. The practice of outing supposed Communists ran rampant during this era of the second "Red Scare." (The first "Red Scare" occurred in 1917-1920.)
For instance, according to Lemann, there was an Air Force Reserve lieutneant named Milo Radulovich who was unfairly "dismissed from the service because his father and sister had unspecified Communist affiliations." That was not McCarthy's doing per se, but it came out of an atmosphere of paranoia which McCarthy was guilty of generating. Murrow, after dithering for several years, in the end could not stand idly by. He aired an exposé in the fall of 1953 which incensed ordinary Americans (I presume) and got Radulovich reinstated.
By the time Murrow faced off directly against McCarthy the following March, McCarthy had already met what turned out to be, Lemann tells us, "his Waterloo." This is apparently the kind of historical nuance the movie, which I have not seen, skips over.
At any rate, such were, apparently, the Army-McCarthy hearings. Lemann does not let us in on exactly what the hearings entailed, or why they were so damaging to McCarthy. But he does point out that McCarthy already had some pretty potent enemies, even before Murrow's onslaught commenced. For example, Henry Luce, publisher of Time and Life magazines, had been a longstanding McCarthy critic.
Hence, the Murrow programs — the original installment, then a follow-up, and then "McCarthy's reply, and Murrow's reply-to-the-reply" — simply finished off an already wounded duck. Although McCarthy was on his way down already, there has grown up around Murrow's memory (he died too young of lung cancer in 1965) a legendary status, almost a myth, which credits him with ending the McCarthy scourge singlehandedly.
So what really put the handwriting on the wall for McCarthy, Lemann says, was the fact that "just a few weeks earlier [before the first Murrow installment], he had picked a fight with the Army," a faux pas on McCarthy's part that Lemann characterizes as "an overreach." That was what led to the fateful Army-McCarthy hearings and made McCarthy a wounded duck for Murrow to finish off.
That, admittedly, is not Lemann's main point. Instead, he wants to show that the Murrow attack was a necessary end stage, though not sufficient all by itself, in bringing about McCarthy's demise. And it wouldn't and couldn't have happened in the absence of a then-strong, nay, meddlesome Federal Communications Commission, with its paternalistic oversight of broadcast radio and TV.
In those days of television's earliest infancy, broadcast journalism on the radio was, shall we say, just entering its adolescence. Lemann details how Murrow and his hireling William Shirer (who later gained fame as the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) had provided groundbreaking, technically revolutionary live coverage of World War II in Britain and Europe for rapt CBS listeners on the home front. This kind of journalism was brand new. Why did it happen? Not because CBS's founder William Paley wanted, of his own volition, to "offer material that was uplifting and public-spirited." The FCC insisted that, rather, if commercial broadcasters didn't want to share the radio spectrum with a commercial-free American enterprise much like England's BBC, then they had to cover world affairs themselves, and do it properly and well.
Murrow was hired to arrange for just that — without himself necessarily going on the air, mind you. But logistics made it impossible to provide the desired WWII coverage on the cheap without Murrow himself becoming an on-air personality. That was in 1938. Sixteen years later, Murrow had somewhat reluctantly switched from radio to TV, and he found himself in a position, when the apt moment came, to put paid to the entire McCarthy era.
This all fascinates me because I'd like to know more about whatever it is that can throw a magic switch and take America out of an erstwhile conservative juggernaut, jumping it over into a significantly more liberal period.
By the time I grew big enough to attend to current events, this McCarthy-Murrow stuff was bygone history. As was the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a unanimous striking down of precedents permitting "separate but equal" treatment of African Americans in the nation's public schools.
The Brown unanimity was the work of a fledgling Chief Justice named Earl Warren, another slam-dunk inductee into the Post-WWII Liberal Hall of Fame. Lemann does not mention Warren or Brown in his article. But he does give us ample justification for believing that quantum leaps away from conservative hegemony require two things: for the conservatives to get cocky and accordingly overreach, and for the liberals to catch them at it and drive the fact home with the American people.
We now find that the present conservative juggernaut, with President Bush at ship's helm, is in danger of having possibly overreached, à la McCarthy, with similar disastrous effect still to come. The Administration's lying to the public about the warrantless domestic eavesdropping carried out under Bush's authorization by the National Security Agency may turn out to be today's right-wing Waterloo.
For that to happen, we need for it to be determined definitely that Bush did overstep the law. It looks as if that determination could eventuate this year as Congress takes the matter up in hearings. But we also need for authoritative liberal voices — today's Murrows — to drive the fact of the overstepping home with the American people — the idea that Bush was, no doubt about it, acting like King George I.
How could the latter happen? Lemann seems to think it couldn't happen today, as it did in 1954, because the Fairness Doctrine that applied to broadcast TV doesn't exist now. This once-well-known approach to controversial broadcast reportage is what Lemann calls "the Murrow Doctrine," since Edward R. Murrow promoted it as a replacement for the erstwhile Mayflower Doctrine. The Mayflower Doctrine said networks couldn't editorialize on the air, period. The Fairness Doctrine said they could, but had to provide equal time for opponents of their stated view to make their case. When Murrow lambasted McCarthy, McCarthy's inept on-air self-defense sealed his doom.
Today, the FCC has "de-regulated" broadcast media, and the Fairness Doctrine is no more. So how would the idea of a "monarchical presidency," revealed by Bush's repeatedly flouting the law in the domestic eavesdropping and other arenas, be transmitted convincingly to ordinary Americans? How would it change enough hearts and minds to halt the present conservative juggernaut?
oldstyleliberal can't answer that. But he recognizes that it may happen, some way, somehow, and set America back on a basically progressive course once again.
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