RED SCARE
Bayley, Edwin R.
RED SCARE JOE MCCARTHY AND THE PRESS by Edwin R. Bayley University of Wisconsin Press. 295 pp. $16.50. From 1950, three years after Joseph R. McCarthy took his seat in the U.S. Senate, to 1954,...
...Some small weekly papers—even a few in Wisconsin—risked the wrath of advertisers and readers by opposing McCarthy...
...During the four years that followed the Wheeling speech, press coverage improved here and there, but, with notable exceptions, it was far from distinguished...
...After McCarthy's Wheeling speech ("I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party...
...Mencken was always contemptuous of what he called "pumper-ups of popular fears and rages" like Theodore Bilbo and William Hale Thompson...
...At least one earlier and harder-boiled observer of the Washington scene would have found this notion laughable...
...Alger Hiss had been convicted three weeks before the Wheeling speech, and editors seemed ready to believe any accusation McCarthy dished out...
...As for papers that staunchly supported McCarthy—such as the Chicago Tribune and the Green Bay Press-Gazette—their reporters merely covered McCarthy as he would wish and gave full credence to his continually revised accusations against Federal employes and others for Communist "connections" or "leanings...
...Could good interpretive reporting and editorial judgment have brought McCarthy down long before 1954...
...The Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s tended to make the general reading public ready to believe the wildest accusations and exaggerations McCarthy could fabricate...
...William McCann (William McCann is a free-lance writer and critic...
...In any case, with Joe McCarthy and the Press Bayley has turned out an important study in such a thorough and fair-minded way that it should never be necessary to do the work again...
...Bayley's chapter on television makes it clear that television coverage of McCarthy was not good generally, although Edward R. Murrow's memorable anti-McCarthy documentary was effective...
...He interviewed forty reporters from the wire services and Washington bureau staffs who covered the McCarthy period...
...News accounts were disjointed and confusing, with headlines inaccurate to the point of contradiction...
...On these occasions he seems, in the words of Frank Moore Colby written long ago and in another context, to be "seeking an inductive basis for the obvious...
...Bayley praises The Progressive and its then editor, Morris H. Rubin: "No publication fought McCarthy more tirelessly...
...Just how well or poorly did it perform...
...There were numerous reporters and editors who were convinced that McCarthy's position as a duly elected U.S...
...It is recalled generally that the press did not perform commendably in covering McCarthy...
...What journals and journalists did the best work...
...Trumped-up leads were invented for the sake of providing a McCarthy story on days when other news was dull...
...Some prominent newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Milwaukee Journal, The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, the 5...
...Red-baiters had been around the national scene before McCarthy's time, but their names were forgotten and they lacked McCarthy's cunning and bravado...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, and a few others—did superior work...
...He helped reporters create stories, timed his announcements to suit press requirements, and provided drinks and rowdy, good-humored companionship...
...Senator and chairman of an important committee made it incumbent upon them to report his activities and statements with little or no evaluation or investigation...
...Diluted because Bayley, although he admits that "few questions about McCarthy and the press are subject to measurement," nevertheless sets out more than once to measure them—by counting "pro" and "anti" headlines, papers for and against McCarthy, measuring columns of print, appending lists and tabulations...
...Wire service reporting was flat, uninspired, almost wholly devoid of interpretation or analysis...
...few papers were willing to go against the red-scare tide...
...As part of his preparation he read every story about McCarthy printed in The New York Times and The Milwaukee Journal...
...Some reporters felt trapped in the prevailing climate of public opinion...
...press performance was poor at a time, Bay-ley believes, when skillful journalism might have derailed McCarthy at the start...
...Even those reporters who saw through McCarthy's manipulations and multiple-lie techniques recognized his news value...
...Perhaps he is merely reflecting his exposure in recent years to the influence of academia and behavioral scientists...
...For news coverage during the first month after the notorious Wheeling speech of February 9, 1950, he read 129 papers throughout the country...
...Reporters found McCarthy to be an easy news source with an astute, self-serving understanding of reporters' problems...
...Local editors seemed timid and demonstrated little grasp of the significance of incoming McCarthy stories...
...He faded rapidly after the Senate resolution of censure and died, at forty-eight, three years later (1957...
...These questions and others Edwin R. Bay-ley, who covered McCarthy for The Milwaukee Journal and is now dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, addresses in this informative, abundantly detailed study, Joe McCarthy and the Press...
...Reportorial indolence and ineptitude were among the reasons for press failures and shortcomings, Bayley believes...
...At Harvard's Widener Library he read everything written about McCarthy in books, magazines, and academic journals...
...Senate, to 1954, when the Senate finally passed a resolution of censure against him, the press had to deal with one of the most audacious, hell-raising, bamboozling demagogues in the nation's history...
...After finding that his own recollections of the period were faulty when checked against the records, Bayley undertook a scholarly, wide-ranging examination...
...Shel-, tering themselves behind so-called press "objectivity," reporters gave readers no indications that McCarthy was a dangerous fraud...
...Stone felt that even liberal journals and journalists "suffered a prolonged attack of laryngitis intimidatus" in the early McCarthy period...
...Bayley believes the televised Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, with McCarthy's dramatic confrontation with Judge Joseph L. Welch, foretold the Senator's doom...
...Bayley's book deserves solid praise, diluted only slightly...
...In one sense the press was supplying the stuff that readers wanted to read...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
