MediaWatch: July 1994
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: July 1994
- Christian Coalition Regularly Places on the Right, NAACP Almost Never on the Left
- NewsBites: Dumping on D'Amato
- Revolving Door: Price to Urban League
- Reporters Portray Religious Right as Extreme, Take Moderates' Side
- CBS Mourns Spies, Traitors
- Peggy on Prayer
- Dared to Call ABC News Liberal
- Janet Cooke Award: Liberal Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pays for Pro-Clinton Health Care Special
CBS Mourns Spies, Traitors
Canonizing Murrow
In the most recent media dose of Cold War revisionism, Dan Rather examined the TV confrontation between CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy in a special hour-long June 15 CBS Reports. Rather began by characterizing the 1950s as "a time of blacklists and witch-hunts and red baiting; a time that took Senator [Joseph] McCarthy's name -- `The McCarthy Era' -- a time when America trembled."
In a program filled with McCarthy detractors, admitted communists and fellow travelers, Rather glorified the "integrity and honor" of Murrow while failing to mention the atrocities that made the communist threat more lethal in the long term than even Hitler. Even a convicted spy raised hardly an eyebrow as Rather described Alger Hiss as "a former US State Department official accused of spying for the Soviets."
By contrast, columnist Jack Anderson intoned "Joe McCarthy looked more like he ought to be in prison, where he probably should have gone, than be in the United States Senate." Former Washington Post reporter Murrey Marder declared "McCarthy was the supreme fraud of all times."
Film director Edward Dmytryk and his lawyer Bartley Crum were held up as victims of McCarthy. Rather reported: "Bartley Crum committed suicide in 1959, but not before giving into the FBI and revealing the names of Communist Party members." Rather left out that Dmytryk was an admitted communist and, in the words of William F. Buckley, "Bartley Crum was a prominent fellow traveler who ardently defended the Communists, in print and in court...His suicide, two years after McCarthy's death, was unrelated to McCarthy."
Rather introduced Murrow as the dragon slayer: "The question was: Who would stand up to McCarthy? Many people did, but it was Edward R. Murrow's opposition on television that signaled the end of Joe McCarthy." According to Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, however, "CBS's decision to air the show came well after McCarthy's power and influence had begun to wane." Ironically, Farhi wrote, at that same time, CBS "was engaging in McCarthyite `blacklisting,' preventing writers and actors suspected of communist sympathies from working on network programs."
