W. Joseph Campbell

Posts Tagged ‘Television’

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The ‘Cronkite Moment’ was fictive

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths on July 8, 2011 at 8:01 am

Cronkite in Vietnam

The mythical “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 offers supposedly timeless and irresistible lessons for journalists about the importance of telling truth to power and about the media’s potential to wield decisive influence.

Trouble is, the “Cronkite Moment” is fictive: It had little of the impact so often ascribed to it — impact of the kind described yesterday by Paul Fanlund, editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin.

He wrote at a Capital Times blog:

“One has to be of a certain age, or a student of history, to know Walter Cronkite’s impact on Vietnam. In 1968, the famed broadcaster, who had been privately pro-war, pronounced on air that the war was no longer winnable, prompting President Lyndon Johnson to remark, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.'”

Unpacking that paragraph reveals that it’s exaggerated in three ways.

One is that Cronkite (as he himself claimed for many years) had little if any “impact” on the war in Vietnam.

Two, Cronkite did not say on air that “the war was no longer winnable.” He said, in a special report broadcast on February 27, 1968, that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam and that negotiations might offer America a way out.

Three, Cronkite’s on-air assessment about Vietnam did not prompt President Lyndon Johnson to declare, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.” Or anything akin to such a remark.

As I discuss in my media myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired. And there is no evidence the president watched the show later, on videotape.

Moreover, Johnson was not in front of a television set when the Cronkite report about Vietnam was broadcast.

He was on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, offering light-hearted remarks at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, a long-time political ally.

About the time Cronkite was intoning his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson wasn’t bemoaning his failed Vietnam policy; he wasn’t bemoaning the loss of Cronkite’s support.

He was jesting about Connally’s age.

“Today,” Johnson said, “you are 51, John. That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority.”

Even if he had watched the Cronkite report, it’s unlikely Johnson would have been much moved by the “mired in stalemate” assessment. It was hardly an original observation.

Leading U.S. news outlets such as the New York Times had invoked “stalemate” periodically in the months before the Cronkite program.

For example, in a news analysis published July 4, 1967, the Times said of the war effort:

“Many officers believe that despite the commitment of 466,000 United States troops now in South Vietnam … the military situation there has developed into a virtual stalemate.”

In a report from Saigon that was published August 7, 1967, the Times noted:

“‘Stalemate’ is a fighting word in Washington. President Johnson rejects it as a description of the situation in Vietnam. But it is the word used by almost all Americans here, except the top officials, to characterize what is happening. They use the word for many reasons ….”

By the end of February 1968, “stalemate” had been often used, and had become a rather tame assessment.

Far more assertive was the Wall Street Journal, which, in an editorial published four days before Cronkite’s report, said the U.S. war effort in Vietnam “may be doomed” and that “everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of defeat beyond America’s power to prevent.”

Interestingly, Cronkite disputed the notion his report about Vietnam had much impact.

He said in his 1997 memoir that his “mired in stalemate” assessment represented for Johnson “just one more straw in the increasing burden of Vietnam.” It was an analogy Cronkite repeatedly made.

“I think our broadcast simply was another straw on the back of a crippled camel,” he said in an interview on CNN in 1999.

But late in his life, Cronkite began to embrace the purported power of the “Cronkite Moment.” He said in 2006, in an interview with Esquire:

“To be honest, I was rather amazed that my reporting from Vietnam had such an effect on history.”

A case of believing one’s own clippings.

As I note in Getting It Wrong:

“Under scrutiny, the ‘Cronkite moment’ dissolves as illusory — a chimera, a media-driven myth.

“That it does is not so surprising. Seldom, if ever, do the news media exert truly decisive influences in decisions to go to war or to seek negotiated peace. Such decisions typically are driven by forces and factors well beyond the news media’s ability to shape, alter, or significantly influence.

“So it was in Vietnam, where the war ground on for years after the ‘Cronkite moment.'”

WJC

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Appearance decisive in politics? Revisiting the Kennedy-Nixon debate

In Debunking, Media myths on June 23, 2011 at 4:04 am

First presidential debate, 1960

The power of the image in presidential politics was never better demonstrated than in September 1960.

That was when John F. Kennedy supposedly won the first-ever televised debate between U.S. presidential candidates because he appeared so poised, rested, and telegenic compared to his sweaty, haggard-looking rival, Richard M. Nixon.

Most television viewers thought so, supposedly.

But people who listened to the debate on radio had a distinctly different impression: They thought Nixon won the encounter.

So goes one of the most delicious, enduring, and often-repeated myths about the American media and politics, which was served up yesterday in a commentary posted online yesterday by Canadian-based Troy Media.

The commentary declared:

“The major story of the first televised presidential debate in 1960 became the photogenic appeal of John F. Kennedy versus the sickly look of his opponent, Richard Nixon. … Radio listeners, who heard the debate but hadn’t seen it, gave the victory to Nixon. But a large majority of television viewers recognized Kennedy as the winner.”

The myth of viewer-listener disagreement — that television viewers and radio listeners had starkly different impressions of the inaugural presidential debate — was destroyed (or ought to have been) in research published in 1987 by David L. Vancil and Sue D. Pendell.

They noted that reports of viewer-listener disagreement were thin, flawed, and anecdotal, and the few surveys that hinted at a viewer-listener disconnect were too small and unrepresentative to allow for confident assessments.

Vancil and Pendell concluded:

“The relationship of substance and appearance is complex, and the effects of electronic media on political communication surely deserve attention. However, there is little merit in speculation based upon unsupported anecdotes of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate.”

Vancil and Pendell’s research also challenged the notion that Nixon’s haggard look much contributed to views about the debate.

“Appearance problems, such as Nixon’s perspiring brow, could have had a negative impact on viewer perceptions,” they wrote, “but it is also possible for viewers to be sympathetic to such problems, or to interpret them as evidence of attractive or desirable qualities.”

They added: “Even if viewers disliked Nixon’s physical appearance, the relative importance of this factor is a matter of conjecture.”

It’s revealing to note that a good deal of post-debate commentary deemed the encounter a draw.

For example, James Reston, then the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote shortly after the debate: “Who took the first round is a matter of individual opinion. My own view is that Kennedy gained more than Nixon, but it was a fielder’s choice, settling nothing.”

But the Washington Post saw it another way, stating in a post-debate editorial:

“Of the two performances, Mr. Nixon’s was probably the smoother. He is an accomplished debater with a professional polish, and he managed to convey a slightly patronizing air of a master instructing a pupil.”

Right after the Kennedy-Nixon encounter, the Associated Press conducted an unscientific survey of 100 Americans in 10 major U.S. cities and reported that most respondents said they weren’t influenced by the exchanges.

“Only a few persons,” the AP reported, “said they had actually switched from one candidate to the other because of the debate.”

And it was hardly the case that “a large majority of television viewers recognized Kennedy as the winner” of the debate, as the Troy Media commentary claimed.

A Gallup poll conducted during the week after the debate and released October 11, 1960, reported that 43 percent of voters thought Kennedy “did the better job” in the debate; 23 percent thought Nixon was better, and 29 percent said both candidates were about the same. Five percent offered no opinion.

The survey, moreover, detected no marked shift of support to Kennedy, post-debate. The survey reported Kennedy to be narrowly ahead, by 49 percent to 46 percent, with 5 percent undecided.

“The prudent reader can see,” George Gallup, head of the polling organization, stated in reporting those results, “that polling accuracy has not reached the degree of accuracy required to say with certainty which candidate is ahead in a close race such as the present one.”

WJC

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Invoking Murrow-McCarthy myth to assert the worthiness of TV

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on June 11, 2011 at 6:58 am

Murrow

Media-driven myths have a variety of perverse applications — including value in scoring points in arguments.

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald does just that in turning to a particularly hardy media myth — that of Edward R. Murrow’s supposedly decisive televised report in 1954 about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

In a commentary titled “In defense of the idiot box,” the Morning Herald argues for the worthiness of television, asserting that the medium “has the power to shock, appeal, nauseate and, if everything comes together, inspire.”

The commentary further states:

“TV has made a difference before. In the early days, Edward R. Murrow took on Joe McCarthy, starting a tradition of fearless TV journalism exposing the corruption of government, the horrors of war and the dark side of society. The medium may have numbed the odd brain but it’s also done a lot of good ….”

Mind-numbing television generally is.

More doubtful is the commentary’s extravagant claim about the fearlessness of Murrow. His report about McCarthy, which aired on the See It Now show of March 9, 1954, scarcely can be termed “fearless” and shouldn’t be seen as inaugurating any sort of “tradition” of searching, intrepid broadcast journalism.

That’s because Murrow was very late in taking on McCarthy and the senator’s heavy-handed campaign against communists in government.

Pearson, muckraking columnist

As I discuss in Getting It Wrong, my media mythbusting book that came out last year, the evidence “is overwhelming that Murrow’s famous program on McCarthy had no … decisive effect, that Murrow in fact was very late in confronting McCarthy, that he did so only after other journalists had challenged the senator and his tactics for months, even years.”

Notable among those journalists was Drew Pearson, who wrote the syndicated and widely read muckraking column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Pearson was quick to call attention to the recklessness of McCarthy’s claims.

He took on McCarthy in February 1950, soon after the senator first raised his claims about communists in high places in the U.S. government.

Pearson wrote that month that “the alleged communists which [McCarthy] claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t.”

Far from being fearless, Murrow, it can be argued, waited till the risks had subsided before taking on McCarthy. By March 1954, McCarthy’s capacity to stir dread was in decided retreat.

I note in Getting It Wrong that Eric Sevareid, Murrow’s friend and colleague at CBS News, was among those who chafed at the interpretation of fearlessness attached to the Murrow program which, he noted, “came very late in the day.”

Sevareid said in the 1970s:

“The youngsters read back and they think only one person in broadcasting and the press stood up to McCarthy and this has made a lot of people feel very upset, including me, because that program came awfully late.”

I further note in Getting It Wrong how the media myth about Murrow took hold despite the protestations of its central figures.

“In the days and weeks after the See It Now program,” I write, “Murrow said he recognized his accomplishments were modest, that at best he had reinforced what others had long said about McCarthy.

“Jay Nelson Tuck, the television critic for the New York Post, wrote that Murrow felt ‘almost a little shame faced at being saluted for his courage in the McCarthy matter. He said he had said nothing that … anyone might not have said without a raised eyebrow only a few years ago.'”

Murrow, moreover, told Newsweek magazine: “It’s a sad state of affairs when people think I was courageous” in confronting McCarthy.

Fred W. Friendly, Murrow’s collaborator and co-producer, likewise rejected claims that the See It Now program on McCarthy was pivotal or decisive. As Friendly wrote in his memoir:

“To say that the Murrow broadcast of March 9, 1954, was the decisive blow against Senator McCarthy’s power is as inaccurate as it is to say that Joseph R. McCarthy … single-handedly gave birth to McCarthyism.”

WJC

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Fast and loose: ‘Kennedys’ miniseries and Bay of Pigs history

In Bay of Pigs, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times on April 10, 2011 at 7:35 am

I suspected it would be dreadful, but I was still curious about how the Bay of Pigs invasion of 50 years ago would be treated. So I tuned in yesterday afternoon to part of a marathon showing of the Reelz television miniseries, The Kennedys.

I watched the Bay of Pigs installment, a turgidly acted episode that played fast and loose with the historical record.

Blessedly, the episode did not take up the New York Times-Bay of Pigs suppression myth, as I thought it might.

That topic no doubt was too intricate for set-piece drama that depicts President John F. Kennedy as mirthless and insecure; his wife as clueless, and his father as domineering and routinely intrusive.

Only the president’s brother, Robert (played by Barry Pepper), put in a strong performance in the Bay of Pigs episode, dressing down an insolent Air Force general and lording it over J. Edgar Hoover.

But surely no one turned to The Kennedys miniseries for historical insight; it’s no documentary and its inaccuracies came as little surprise. Still, they were striking — and deserve to be called out.

The president was depicted as upset that Fidel Castro’s military was not caught unawares when U.S.-trained Cuban exiles came ashore at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961.

In reality, preparations for the invasion were much an open secret, especially in Miami, where the Cuban exile community had buzzed for weeks about a pending assault on Castro’s regime. And Kennedy knew that very well.

As I note in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, pre-invasion news coverage reached a point where Kennedy, a week before the assault, told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger:

“I can’t believe what I’m reading! Castro doesn’t need agents over here. All he has to do is read our papers. It’s all laid out for him.”

Salinger, himself, noted: “To declare in mid-April of 1961 that  I knew nothing of the impending military action against Cuba except what I read in the newspapers or heard on the air was to claim an enormous amount of knowledge.”

Tad Szulc, a veteran New York Times reporter who covered the invasion and its run-up, recalled in June 1961 that it had been “the most open operation which you can imagine.”

A surprise the invasion was not.

The Reelz episode also claimed a full moon helped Castro’s forces thwart the ill-fated landings at the Bay of Pigs.

That’s a nice bit of detail.

But it’s pure invention.

There was no full moon the day of the invasion. The lunar phase on April 17, 1961, was waxing crescent. The next full moon was on April 30, 1961.

The Reelz episode also depicted Kennedy as a stand-up guy, bravely taking blame at a news conference for an assault that had failed.

Kennedy in fact did no such thing.

Took no questions on Cuba

He declined to take questions about Cuba at his news conference that followed invasion. He told newsmen:

“I know that many of you have further questions about Cuba. I made a statement on that subject yesterday afternoon. … I do not think that any useful national purpose would be served by my going further into the Cuban question this morning. I prefer to let my statement of yesterday suffice for the present.”

That news conference was on April 21, 1961, four days after the invasion was launched and two days after the assault had been rolled up by Castro’s forces.

Kennedy did talk at length about Cuba the day before, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

But he was hardly penitent or conciliatory. The transcript of his speech makes clear that Kennedy that day was in full Cold Warrior mode.

He didn’t apologize for the failed the invasion. He said the United States did “not intend to be lectured on ‘intervention’ by those whose character was stamped for all time on the bloody streets of Budapest” — a reference to the Soviet-backed crackdown in Hungary in 1956.

Kennedy said the Bay of Pigs invasion was “not the first time that Communist tanks have rolled over gallant men and women fighting to redeem the independence of their homeland. Nor is it by any means the final episode in the eternal struggle against tyranny anywhere on the face of the globe, including Cuba itself.”

The president was emphatic about the communist threat in the Western Hemisphere, asserting: “We and our Latin friends will have to face the fact that we cannot postpone any longer the real issue of survival of freedom in this hemisphere itself.”

So Kennedy was scarcely apologetic in the invasion’s aftermath. He wasn’t the wounded, wimpish, repentant character depicted in the mind-numbing miniseries.

WJC

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What a Rash remark: ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve….’

In Cronkite Moment, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers on April 2, 2011 at 7:17 am

The mythical “Cronkite Moment” can be an irresistible point of reference in broadcast journalism, especially in assessing the shortcomings and inadequacies of contemporary network news anchors.

A commentary posted yesterday at the online site of the Minneapolis Star Tribune offered such a comparison, unfavorably comparing CBS News anchor Katie Couric to the venerable Walter Cronkite.

Couric is believed on her way out as CBS anchor and the commentary’s author, John Rash, noted that Cronkite said he regretted leaving the anchor’s chair in 1981.

In what could pass for a eulogy, Rash also wrote:

“The avuncular Cronkite, once considered the most trusted man in America, was also one of the most influential. His … clear-eyed assessment of Vietnam as a ‘stalemate’ led [John] Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, to say, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.'”

There’s no small amount of myth to unpack in that paragraph.

Most trusted?

For starters, the claim that Cronkite was the “most trusted man in America” rests on a flimsy foundation. The characterization stems from an unrepresentative survey conducted in 18 states in 1972, and from subsequent newspaper advertisements in which CBS touted Cronkite as most trusted.

As for Cronkite’s assertion that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam — well, there’s no evidence that Johnson reacted by saying, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

Or by saying anything akin to such a comment.

The Cronkite-Johnson anecdote, though, is one of the best known in American journalism. It’s often called as the “Cronkite Moment” — and it’s also a media-driven myth, one of 10 I address and debunk in my latest book, Getting It Wrong.

Cronkite certainly made the “mired in stalemate” assessment, at the close of a special report that CBS aired on February 27, 1968.

At the White House, the story goes, Johnson watched the Cronkite program and upon hearing the anchorman’s “mired in stalemate” critique, reached over, snapped off the television and said to an aide or aides:

“If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

But as I point out in Getting It Wrong, Johnson wasn’t at the White House that night. He wasn’t in front of a television set.

He didn’t see the program.

Johnson was in Austin, Texas, at the 51st birthday party of Governor John Connally, a longtime political ally.

And about the time Cronkite intoned his “mired in stalemate” assessment, Johnson wasn’t wringing his hands about his war policy. He was cracking a light-hearted joke about Connally’s age.

“Today, you are 51, John,” the president said. “That is the magic number that every man of politics prays for—a simple majority.”

As I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, it is difficult to fathom how Johnson could have been much moved by a television program he didn’t see.

Besides, Cronkite was scarcely the first to invoke “stalemate” in describing Vietnam.

The New York Times turned to that term periodically in the months before the presumptive “Cronkite Moment.”

In a front-page analysis published August 7, 1967, the Times declared that “the war is not going well. Victory is not close at hand.”

The Times report was published on its front page beneath the headline:

Vietnam: The Signs of Stalemate.

A month before, on July 4, 1967, the Times had said of the war effort:

“Many officers believe that despite the commitment of 466,000 United States troops now in South Vietnam … the military situation there has developed into a virtual stalemate.”

And the Times said in an editorial published October 29, 1967:

“Instead of denying a stalemate in Vietnam, Washington should be boasting that it has imposed a stalemate, for that is the prerequisite–on both sides–to a negotiated settlement. That settlement, if it is to be achieved, will have to be pursued with the same ingenuity and determination that have been applied to fighting the war.”

So Cronkite in his report about Vietnam on February 27, 1968, essentially reiterated an assessment that the Times had offered on a number of occasions  in the months before.

“Stalemate” may have been a “clear-eyed” assessment. But by the time Cronkite invoked the term, “stalemate” in Vietnam was neither novel nor stunning.

WJC

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57 years on: Was it really TV’s ‘finest half hour’?

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth on March 9, 2011 at 12:07 am

Murrow

Today’s the 57th anniversary of what has been called the “finest half hour” in television history — when Edward R. Murrow took to the small screen to confront Joseph R. McCarthy and the senator’s red-baiting ways.

Murrow’s on-air analysis of McCarthy and his tactics was so powerful, so revealing, that it marked an abrupt end to the senator’s witch-hunt for communists in government.

Or so the media myth has it.

The occasion was Murrow’s 30-minute See It Now program that aired on CBS on March 9, 1954.

As I write in my mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, the program supposedly affirmed the potential power of television and confirmed the courage of Murrow.

I also write:

“The never-ending accolades notwithstanding, the evidence is overwhelming that Murrow’s famous program on McCarthy had no such decisive effect, that Murrow in fact was very late in confronting McCarthy, that he did so only after other journalists had challenged the senator and his tactics for months, even years.”

Indeed, the legendary status accorded the Murrow program has effectively “obscured and diminished the contributions of journalists who took on McCarthy years earlier, at a time when doing so was quite risky,” I point out in Getting It Wrong.

These journalists deserve more credit than Murrow for courage in confronting the McCarthy menace when it was most virulent.

One of them was James A. Wechsler, editor of the New York Post, which in 1951 published a bare-knuckle, 17-part series about McCarthy.

The closing installment characterized McCarthy as “a drunk at a party who was funny half an hour ago but now won’t go home. McCarthy is camped in America’s front room trying to impress everybody by singing all the dirty songs and using all the four-letter words he knows. The jokes are pointless, the songs unfunny, the profanity a bore.”

The series appeared in the Post 2½ years before Murrow’s program on McCarthy.

Wechsler was called before McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee and grilled about having been a member before in the Communist Youth League.

Wechsler said his being summoned to the closed-door hearing was “a reprisal against a newspaper and its editor for their opposition to the methods of this committee’s chairman.”

He sparred effectively with McCarthy, telling the senator at one point that the New York Post “is as bitterly opposed to Joe Stalin as it is to Joe McCarthy, and we believe that a free society can combat both.”

But in the end, Wechsler complied, reluctantly, with the subcommittee’s demand for names of people he had known to be communists during his time in the Youth League.

During McCarthy’s communists-in-government campaign, which lasted from 1950 to 1954, the senator had no more relentless or scathing foe in the news media than muckraking columnist Drew Pearson.

He wrote the widely published “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column — and was quick off the dime, taking on McCarthy soon after the senator first raised his reckless claims about communists in high places in the U.S. government and military.

Pearson wrote in February 1950, in one of his first columns about McCarthy’s charges, that “the alleged communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t.”

Pearson noted that he had covered the State Department for years and had been “the career boys’ severest critic.

“However,” he added, “knowing something about State Department personnel, it is my opinion that Senator McCarthy is way off base.”

And he was.

Pearson’s frequent challenges angered McCarthy who in December 1950, physically assaulted the columnist after a dinner at the hush-hush Sulgrave Club on DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C.

McCarthy confronted Pearson in the Sulgrave’s coat check room and either slapped, kneed, or punched the columnist. Accounts vary.

Richard Nixon, who recently had been sworn in as a U.S. Senator, intervened to break up the encounter. In his memoir RN, Nixon wrote that Pearson “grabbed his coat and ran from the room” and “McCarthy said, ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dick.’”

So by the time Murrow took on McCarthy 57 years ago tonight, Americans really weren’t “waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed,” I write in Getting It Wrong, adding:

“By then, McCarthy and his tactics were well-known and he had become a target of withering ridicule — a sign of diminished capacity to inspire dread. On the day the See It Now program aired, former president Harry Truman reacted to reports of an anonymous threat against McCarthy’s life by saying:

“‘We’d have no entertainment at all if they killed him.'”

The notion that Murrow and his television program brought down McCarthy is a delicious story of presumptive media power:  More accurately, it is a tenacious media-driven myth.

WJC

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Only Murrow had the bona fides? Nonsense

In Debunking, Media myths, Murrow-McCarthy myth, New York Times, Newspapers on December 30, 2010 at 11:31 am

The New York Times certainly was casual and superficial in likening TV comedian Jon Stewart to Edward R. Murrow. Not only that, but the discussion about the absurd comparison has been accompanied by the appearance of media-driven myth.

Notably, a post yesterday at the Atlantic online site invoked the dubious notion that Murrow stood up to Joseph R. McCarthy, the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, when no one else could or would.

The Atlantic post said of Stewart and Murrow:

“Both men stuck their necks out. Both went first into a sort of no-man’s-land. It is probably true that only Murrow in his time had the bona fides to stand up to McCarthy (and don’t forget, Murrow waited years before doing so).” [Emphasis added in bold.]

That claim is just absurd.

While Murrow did take on McCarthy, in a much-celebrated half-hour television program in March 1954, he was scarcely alone in challenging the senator and his communists-in-government witch-hunt. And certainly not the first.

As I point out in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, other journalists in the early 1950s had the bona fides, and had the guts, to take on McCarthy when the risks of doing so were quite pronounced.

Pearson: Had the bona fides

Among these journalists with the bona fides was the Washington-based syndicated columnist Drew Pearson.

As I note in Getting It Wrong: “During the four years of his communists-in-government campaign, McCarthy had no more relentless, implacable, or scathing foe in the news media” than the muckraking Pearson, who wrote the widely published “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column and had a radio show.

Pearson was no saint. Jack Shafer of slate.com not long ago described Pearson as “one of the skuzziest journalists to ever write a story.” Pearson was intrusive and overbearing. He readily made enemies, and almost seemed to relish doing so.

But there’s no denying that he was quick off the dime, that he went after McCarthy hard and relentlessly, and that he immediately recognized the dubious quality of McCarthy’s claims about communists in high places in the U.S. government and military.

Pearson first wrote about McCarthy’s allegations on February 18, 1950, just days after McCarthy had begun raising them, notably in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. Pearson called McCarthy the “harum-scarum” senator and said that when he “finally was pinned down, he could produce … only four names of State Department officials whom he claimed were communists.”

Two of the four people named by McCarthy had resigned years earlier; another had been cleared, and the fourth had never worked for the State Department, Pearson wrote.

Pearson followed up with another column, writing that “the alleged communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t.”

Pearson also noted that he had covered the State Department for years, during which time he had been “the career boys’ severest critic. However, knowing something about State Department personnel, it is my opinion that Senator McCarthy is way off base.”

As he was.

Pearson leveled not just a few, scattered shots at McCarthy. His challenges in print became a near-barrage. Pearson scrutinized the senator’s tax troubles in Wisconsin, his accepting funds from a government contractor, and his taking suspicious campaign contributions back in Wisconsin.

The probing angered McCarthy, and in December 1950, the hulking senator physically assaulted Pearson after a dinner at the hush-hush Sulgrave Club on DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C.

McCarthy confronted Pearson in the Sulgrave’s coat check room and either slapped, kneed, or punched the columnist.

Richard Nixon, who recently had been sworn in as a U.S. Senator, intervened to break up the encounter. Nixon, in his memoir RN, said Pearson “grabbed his coat and ran from the room. McCarthy said, ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dick.’”

So Pearson had the bona fides.

So did James A. Wechsler, editor of the New York Post.

In 1951, the Post published a 17-part, bare-knuckle series about McCarthy. The installments of the series addressed McCarthy’s tax troubles, his hypocrisy, and his recklessness in raising allegations about communists in government.

The closing installment likened McCarthy to “a drunk at a party who was funny half an hour ago but now won’t go home. McCarthy is camped in America’s front room trying to impress everybody by singing all the dirty songs and using all the four-letter words he knows. The jokes are pointless, the songs unfunny, the profanity a bore.”

The series was published 2½ years before Murrow’s television program on McCarthy.

And Wechsler paid a price for it, too. He was hauled before McCarthy’s investigative subcommittee and grilled about his dalliance years before in the Communist Youth League.

Wechsler characterized the closed-door hearing as “a reprisal against a newspaper and its editor for their opposition to the methods of this committee’s chairman.” But he complied, reluctantly, with the subcommittee’s demand to produce names of people he had known to be communists during his time in the Youth League.

By the time Murrow took on McCarthy in March 1954, the senator’s favorable ratings had crested and entered a terminal decline.

And Americans by then weren’t “waiting for a white knight like Murrow to tell them about the toxic threat the senator posed,” I write in Getting It Wrong.

Thanks to the work of Pearson and Wechsler and other journalists, they already knew.

WJC

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