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Local News & Opinion
Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim 03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare! 03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm 02.24 Obama’s New Plan 02.21 Time to Pass the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009 Media Watching
03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel 03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia 03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion 03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax 03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq 03.03 It's Snow News 03.03 The Woeful Washington Post 02.28 The NYT Veers Neocon 02.18 US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco on Iran Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution US Politics, Policy & Culture
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives" 03.09 Thinking About Countings 03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism 02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium 02.24 The Last Flight of Joe Stack 02.22 Thinking About Sadie 02.18 All Systems Go: No Dysfunction in Profitable Afghan Enterprise High Crimes?
03.16 America's Secret Prisons 03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem 03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue 03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children 03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session 03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid 03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda 02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery 02.23 Israeli Unaccountability and Denial: Suppressing the Practice of Torture 02.22 American Genocides: is Haiti Next? 02.18 Israeli Abusive Administrative Detentions 02.16 MK-ULTRA: The CIA's Mind Control Program Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network 03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource 03.05 Is the Recovery Real? 03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You 03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction" 03.01 Thinking About Fees 02.22 Campaigning for State-Owned Banks 02.22 Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do 02.19 Obama’s Stealth Entitlement Commission 02.19 Selling Out America to Wall Street International
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception 03.03 Muslim Disunity 03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation 02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist 02.24 The Dubai Hit 02.22 Holland Has Had Enough: Killing of Innocent Civilians Goes On Apace in Afghanistan 02.19 The Placeman Cometh: New IAEA Chief Stokes Iran War Fever for the Bush-Obama Regime We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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MOVIE COMMENTARY:"Good Night, and Good Luck""GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK"Directed and co-written by George Clooney Produced by Grant Heslov Warner Independent, 2005
Edward R. Murrow and his partner Fred Friendly came to the issue of Joe McCarthy later then others. From the start of McCarthy’s “discovery” of the issue of communists in the Government in 1950, the left-wing press, notably the New York Post and magazines like The Nation and The New Republic, opposed him. At some point in time his tactics were denounced by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, and of course many officials in the Truman Administration.
“Tailgunner” Joe’s first major deception was his alleged service as a tailgunner in World War II. “Desk jockey” Joe only cadged a few safe flights in the Pacific seated in the tailgunner position. This was the basis of his successful 1946 challenge to Robert LaFollette, Jr.’s reelection as Senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy was very much a backbencher until he had a meal with two Georgetown professors to come up with issues to run on in 1952. They suggested anti-communism, and McCarthy signed up for a series of speeches sponsored by the GOP around the US. In Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy took a piece of paper out of his pocket and said there were X number of Communists in the State Department. The US was attacked in Korea, Mao was in charge of China and someone was to blame, according to Republicans like Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The press latched on to McCarthy’s paranoia and wanted to know what was on that paper. McCarthy kept changing the numbers and had the Senate Committee he was on begin investigations of these charges. Robert Taft, Nixon and other Republicans cheered McCarthy on, and he cleverly had a new allegation a day for the press right before deadline, so people read up on the latest exposure in their morning paper. Other than a shot of McCarthy making another accusation, TV coverage was scarce, and until Murrow-Friendly put on their “See It Now” depiction of the senator’s tactics in prime time, few had seen the Senator in action at previous hearings that were shown live in daytime. William Paley, the son of a wealthy cigar maker and distributor, had an adventurous nature when he bought into the Columbia Broadcast System in a market dominated by Robert Sarnoff’s NBC. In time Paley was competing with Sarnoff for talent. CBS had a modest news operation when Edward R. Murrow was appointed Director of Talks. Murrow had been a national student leader at Washington State. Although his post-collegiate career in the national student movement sent him to Russia, he was very much an FDR liberal and rejected Marxism in theory and as practiced. Murrow was sent to Europe to recruit a staff for CBS and found himself on the other side of the microphone broadcasting the Battle of Britain and the rise of Hitler’s war machine. Murrow found a new staff from his London base; not just pretty voices but journalists. He had roundtable remote discussions with CBS correspondents and basically set up the framework for today’s news reportage. His London broadcasts during the “Blitz” made him famous and a friend to both America’s and England’s political establishment. By the time of the “See It Now” broadcast, he was a pretty smug “Son of a Gun." Murrow was in the White House for dinner with FDR on December 7, 1941, and when he finally talked to Roosevelt in the evening, he was told of the tremendous losses of the US Navy at Pearl Harbor and the Pacific. Without being asked, Murrow, the patriot, never reported on what he saw and heard that day. Upon his return to Europe, Bill Paley, who wrangled a job under Supreme Commander Eisenhower, joined Murrow in London. As a very popular and social American, Murrow introduced his boss to Great Britain, especially the social and extracurricular side of London nightlife. They bonded and worked hand in hand until "See It Now" affected CBS’ bottom line. Upon his return to post-war America, Murrow became a CBS executive and board member. Being an executive and off the air was not Murrow’s métier. He had to fire old friends like William Shirer, whose political commentaries crossed the line towards advocacy. Like the present, CBS was concerned about being viewed as“too liberal” in the anti-communist atmosphere of the time. Murrow was back on the radio with a news and commentary show and formed a partnership with Fred Friendly to produce “Hear it Now” and a series of Long-Playing records. "Hear It Now" became "See It Now" as TV became the dominant media. Although not quite fluff, many of the early shows stayed in the mainstream as Murrow visited Korea and other hot spots. To soften his image, "Person To Person" was introduced and Edward R., with cigarette in an easy chair, “interviewed” celebrities like Liberace, Roy Campanella, Arthur Miller and Jack Kennedy. Almost constantly, the non-communist left, headquartered in New York, urged Murrow to take on the Junior Senator from Wisconsin. By then, corporate CBS, led by Dr. Frank Stanton, had its eye on "See It Now"’s time slot. The programs on Radulovich and McCarthy only hastened Murrow-Friendly’s exile to Sunday afternoons, where they competed with roller derbies and wrestling. The speech Murrow gives at the beginning of the "Good Night, and Good Luck" movie was his reaction to being marginalized. Stanton retaliated for Paley by including "Person to Person" in his denunciation of rigged quiz shows. That cut it with Morrow and CBS. He was one of the regional reporters for the 1960 election night coverage and was very uncomfortable. The anchor rarely asked him anything. Soon after, he became the head of the US Information Agency under Kennedy and began his long battle with the cancer that killed him. Paley and Stanton moved on at CBS. Fred Friendly quit because the network wouldn’t interrupt the soaps for a hearing on Vietnam. The Murrow “boys” soldiered on at CBS and other venues, but news as news was gone, as was Paley, who didn’t have the mega-bucks to compete. After the Army-McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn left McCarthy to become an uber-shyster in New York. The Senate conducted a quiet hearing on McCarthy, where, thanks to a kind-hearted Nixon, he was censured rather than condemned. By all accounts, he drank himself to death, rarely surfacing in the light of day. Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were found to be Communist spies when the USSR files became available, but that had nothing to do with the Tailgunner’s investigations. I don’t think McCarthy found any real Communists in the Government, although there were a few discovered by Hoover, HUAC and McCarthy. A lot of people in government service lost their jobs due to McCarthy's false allegations, and had trouble being employed in their profession. Those are the people Murrow and Friendly protected, to their everlasting credit. Joe Rosenberg, of Baltimore, is retired from federal government work. He may be reached at rosenbergjoseph@hotmail.com.
Copyright © 2005 The Baltimore Chronicle.
All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on November 28, 2005. |
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