Not Exactly Lying by Andie Tucher

Author:Andie Tucher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

8

“SO GODDAMN OBJECTIVE”

Much of what Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin said about himself was embellished, exaggerated, or fake, starting with his nickname (although “Tailgunner Joe” had avidly volunteered for a number of aerial combat missions during World War II, his official assignment was as a deskbound marine intelligence officer) and his heroic stories about the “war wound” that he had actually sustained in a shipboard hazing ritual.1 Most of what the Republican said about Communists overrunning the State Department, the army, the Democratic Party, and the press was recklessly fabricated out of whole cloth, solely to exploit Cold War fears and earn himself power, attention, and reelection. Most of what he claimed about immense conspiracies and decades of treason was a purposeful lie. But his nearly five years’ worth of vicious assaults, verbal and occasionally physical—in the cloakroom of an exclusive Washington club, he either slapped the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson in the face or kneed him in the groin—represented not just a low point for the U.S. Senate but also for parts of the U.S. press. And it posed an essential question: What happens when one side plays by the old rules and the other side simply fakes it?

Senator McCarthy was a cunning thug. His deployment of innuendo, ridicule, and contempt, his blithe trampling of legal and constitutional constraints, his gaudy bullying, and his crass exploitation of his public office made it impossible for journalists to ignore him, and the conventional wisdom holds that journalists actively enabled his rise with coverage that was both overlavish and uncritical. In fact, however, the journalistic landscape was more varied than that story suggests.

Plenty of news people and organizations—including Colonel Robert McCormick’s ultraconservative Chicago Tribune, the San Diego Union, the Hearst press, and Hearst’s widely syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler—supported McCarthy openly until the end, or near to it. Plenty of others—Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post, the Milwaukee Journal, Edward R. Murrow of CBS, James Reston, Richard Rovere, Drew Pearson, the syndicated columnists Stewart Alsop and Joseph Alsop, the cartoonist Herblock, and others among the nation’s most powerful journalistic voices—could be equally open with their dismay, in editorials if not in news columns. Established journals of opinion such as the Progressive, the Nation, and the New Republic did not hesitate to weigh in against the senator, and even some smaller newspapers, notably the Capital Times of Madison in the senator’s home state, routinely ran critical pieces. Thus, another bit of conventional wisdom, that no journalist dared stand up to McCarthy until the heroic Murrow showed the world what television could do, pays tribute to the wallop of the new visual medium, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

But many news organizations did cover McCarthy with the carefully balanced, fact-centered, disinterested approach characterized as “objectivity” afforded to all their coverage of Establishment institutions, often relying uncritically on information from official sources and treating anything related to national security with marked deference. It was the adherence to those traditional professional values, as critics argued at the time and afterward, that was exactly the problem.

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