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Abstract
One of the most watched political events in the United States at mid‐century, the Army‐McCarthy hearings coincided with the early period of the reception and evaluation of television as a force in society. Although optimistic rhetoric often attends the rise of new technologies, worries and fears about the power of television pervaded coverage of the hearings. The popular press expressed concern that Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy exercised unrivaled control over television viewers. Murrow and McCarthy became condensation symbols in a new struggle over control of the airwaves, and their highly publicized standoff established discursive rules for thinking about the power of audiences, journalists, and politicians.
Notes
Paul J. Achter is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Richmond. Correspondence to: 402D Weinstein Hall, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, U.S. Email: [email protected]. This manuscript is derived from the author's dissertation, directed by Bonnie J. Dow. A version of the manuscript was presented at the 2002 National Communication Association Convention, New Orleans, LA.
John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).
Kasson, 25.
James W. Carey and J. J. Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution,” American Scholar 39 (1970): 219–241; 395–424. Cited material at 223.
Kasson, 40–41.
Carey and Quirk, 221.
Carey and Quirk, 228.
Carol Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5.
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Richard Rhodes, Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1999), 22–23.
Spigel, 187, 181. For a broad treatment of the discursive reception of television and other media technologies in U.S. life, see Catherine Covert, “ ‘We May Hear Too Much’: American Sensibility and the Response to Radio,” in Mass Media Between the Wars: Perceptions of Cultural Tension, 1918–1941, ed. Catherine Covert and J. D. Stevens (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 199–220; Marvin; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of New Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990); and David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994).
“The Scorched Air: Murrow vs. McCarthy,” Newsweek, 22 March, 1954, 86.
William Klingaman, Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era (New York: Facts on File Books, 1996), 15.
Klingaman, 16.
Klingaman, 16.
“Scorched Air,” 88.
Ellen Shrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 160.
Carl Burgchardt, “Two Faces of American Communism: Pamphlet Rhetoric of the Third Period and the Popular Front,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 375.
Granville Hicks, Where We Came Out (New York: Viking), 51.
Robert Ivie, “Images of Savagery in American Justifications for War,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980): 284.
See Celeste Condit, “Nixon's ‘Fund’: Time as Ideological Resource in the Checkers Speech,” in Texts in Context, ed. Michael Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, CA: Hermagoros, 1989), 219–241.
Thomas Rosteck, See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1994), 16.
Rosteck, 18
Spigel. I make no empirical claim that such news rhetoric has a one‐to‐one correspondence with public attitudes about the role of television in adjudicating governance. I do take these texts as serious initial efforts to understand television that, as first efforts, would have significant power in guiding further thinking on the topic. Spigel has argued that such rhetoric constitutes parameters or discursive rules for talking about television.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 23.
Celeste Condit, Decoding Abortion Rhetoric (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
Condit, 4–6, 35.
C. Wright Mills, “Language, Logic and Culture,” American Sociological Review 4 (1939): 677.
M. Huspek and Kathleen E. Kendall, “On Withholding Political Voice: An Analysis of the Political Vocabulary of a ‘Non‐political’ Speech Community,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 1–19.
Mills, 677.
D.T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
“Scorched Air,” 86.
Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 271.
Barnouw, 272.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, The Interplay of Influence, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), 40.
Jamieson and Campbell, 41.
Jamieson and Campbell, 44.
Jamieson and Campbell, 45.
Jamieson and Campbell, 45.
David Zarefsky, Public Speaking: Strategies for Success (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 318.
McCarthy's legacy is well documented, but Murrow's is not as well known. His importance to the development of a journalistic culture, however, is undisputed. Murrow's legacy looms large in TV news culture, especially at CBS, where he became something of a journalistic archetype. In his autobiography, Dan Rather recalls his feeling at being told he would become “the next Ed Murrow.” “The phrase, of course, gets vastly overworked,” Rather noted. “What you learn after a while is that any time anyone is trying to get his hand on your leg in this business, he will tell you that you can be the next Ed Murrow. But it sings” (p. 160). Rather remarked of Murrow, “it was astonishing how often his name and work came up.… Time and again I heard someone say ‘Ed wouldn’t have done it that way.' I found myself asking, and not in a calculated way, ‘I’m having trouble with this. How would Murrow have done it?' And the answer often was surprising” (p. 295). Dan Rather and Mickey Herskowitz, The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1977).
“Television in Controversy: The Debate and the Defense,” Newsweek, 29 March, 1954, 51.
“Television in Controversy,” 54.
“Most Major TV Stations Say ‘Let’s Take Both Sides,' ” Newsweek, 29 March, 1954, 50.
Philip Hamburger, “Man from Wisconsin,” The New Yorker, 20 March, 1954, 71.
Such protection from charges of libel curiously failed to protect the Senator's targets from damages to their reputation once the accusations were aired on television or reported by the news media.
Ralph Flanders, “Colossal Innocence in the Senate of the United States,” Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 83rd Congress, Second Session 100 (1954): 7389.
Ralph Flanders, “The Junior Senator from Wisconsin,” Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 83rd Congress, Second Session 100 (1954): 12731.
Will Herberg, “McCarthy and Hitler: A Delusive Parallel,” The New Republic, 23 August, 1954, 113–114.
Herberg, 114.
“Murrow Calls It ‘Reporting,’” Newsweek, 29 March, 1954, 31.
“Murrow Calls It ‘Reporting,’ ” 51.
“Scorched Air: Murrow vs. Senator McCarthy,” Newsweek, 22 March, 1954, 86.
“Baited Trap,” Time, 29 March, 1954, 77.
“Baited Trap,” 77.
H. L. Varney, “The Lynching that Failed,” American Mercury 79 (1954): 84.
Varney, 81.
Thomas Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1967). Chapters 9, 11, and 13 are especially salient on this point. See also Richard Rovere, “I've Got a Paper Here,” The New Yorker, 10 April, 1954, 126–130.
Rovere, 126.
“Television in Controversy,” 50.
“Baited Trap,” 77.
Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 192.
Hamburger, 72.
“Television in Controversy,” 50.
“Baited Trap,” 77.
“Murrow Calls It ‘Reporting,’ ” 31.
Herberg, 113.
Gilbert Seldes, “Murrow, McCarthy, and the Empty Formula,” Saturday Review of Literature, 24 April, 1954, 26.
Murrow prefaced the episode on McCarthy by guaranteeing the Senator equal time from CBS the following week, an offer McCarthy accepted.
Seldes, “Murrow, McCarthy, and the Empty Formula,” 26.
Gilbert Seldes, “TV and the Hearings: Unfinished Business,” Saturday Review of Literature, 10 July, 1954, 26
“Television in Controversy: The Debate and the Defense,” Newsweek, 29 March, 1954, 50.
Seldes, “Murrow, McCarthy, and the Empty Formula,” 26.
J. Cogley, “The Murrow Show,” Commonweal, 12 March, 1954, 618.
Cogley, 618.
Spigel.
Edwin Black, “The Second Persona,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 109–119; Phillip Wander, “The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory,” Communication Studies 33 (1984): 197–216.
Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–249.
McGee, 245, emphasis in original.
McGee, 245.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).
Cohen, 119.
The term is borrowed from Walter Lippman. See Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 191.
Schudson, 26–27.
“Free Air,” The New Republic, 17 May 1954, 4.
Walter Goodman, “Television,” The New Republic, 23 August, 1954, 22.
Seldes, “Unfinished Business,” 27.
Goodman, “Television,” 22.
Gilbert Seldes, “TV and the Hearings: An Interim Report,” The New Republic, 10 July 1954, 24.
Seldes, “Unfinished Business, 27.
Seldes, “Unfinished Business,” 27.
Ivie, 284–285.
Fred Friendly, Due to Circumstances beyond Our Control (New York: Random House, 1967).