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Joe McCarthy and the Press
Some shelf wear. Pages are clean, crisp and binding is tight.
270 pages, Paperback
First published August 15, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 17, 2016
Edwin R. Bayley was a reporter at The Milwaukee Journal during the McCarthy years. In this book, published in 1981, he looks back at how newspapers and television covered McCarthy, and tries to determine whether that coverage was a factor in McCarthy's rise to prominence.
It's hard, actually impossible, to read this book in the late summer of 2016 without thinking of Donald Trump. While there are differences between Trump and McCarthy, there are certainly a great deal of similarities. It colors virtually every page of the book.
It was interesting to read about the state of newspaper journalism in 1950, which is, roughly, when this book starts. There were big-city papers who had national desks and reporters stationed in Washington, and smaller papers around the country who had no budget for out-of-town reporters and got all of their national and international news from the wire services. Some of these papers were liberal, some conservative. The Associated Press, who had clients on both sides, felt pressure to write their stories with complete objectivity so as not to alienate any of their client papers. The definition of objectivity, at the time, meant no fact checking, at all. If Joe McCarthy lists four Communist employees at the State Department, and three of them don't even work at the State Department at all, the AP article has no mention of this fact. They just reported the fact that McCarthy had made an accusation, but not the fact that it was demonstrably untrue.
Bayley contends that because of McCarthy, journalists had to rethink their definition of objectivity and, as the 1950s progressed, they decided that offering some interpretation was a necessary service to their readers. Also, as television news came along, small-town viewers who had previously gotten all of their news from one local paper were exposed to additional perspectives.
From the way Bayley describes things, by the 1980s, when he wrote this book, we had reached a point where the public had access to several sources of objective journalism and were therefore getting a decent, balanced, view of current events. Now, however, we've tilted way in the other direction, where there are so many voices -- websites, cable channels, etc. -- and we're now able to only get news from the people with whom we share a viewpoint. But Bayley had no idea in 1981 that this was coming. This makes it interesting to see Bayley examining how things had changed in the three decades leading up to his present day, while the 2016 reader can consider how things continued to change in the three subsequent decades.
I should say that this book started out really slowly. In the early chapters, Bayley was spending too much time "showing his work." Many paragraphs were listings of newspapers and headlines. He would say, for example, that a pro-McCarthy editorial appeared in... (and then he would list 25 newspapers) and an anti-McCarthy editorial appeared in... (another long list of newspapers). Big, thick paragraphs listing newspapers makes for awfully dull reading. But thankfully I stuck with it and the book became much much more interesting in later chapters.
It's hard, actually impossible, to read this book in the late summer of 2016 without thinking of Donald Trump. While there are differences between Trump and McCarthy, there are certainly a great deal of similarities. It colors virtually every page of the book.
It was interesting to read about the state of newspaper journalism in 1950, which is, roughly, when this book starts. There were big-city papers who had national desks and reporters stationed in Washington, and smaller papers around the country who had no budget for out-of-town reporters and got all of their national and international news from the wire services. Some of these papers were liberal, some conservative. The Associated Press, who had clients on both sides, felt pressure to write their stories with complete objectivity so as not to alienate any of their client papers. The definition of objectivity, at the time, meant no fact checking, at all. If Joe McCarthy lists four Communist employees at the State Department, and three of them don't even work at the State Department at all, the AP article has no mention of this fact. They just reported the fact that McCarthy had made an accusation, but not the fact that it was demonstrably untrue.
Bayley contends that because of McCarthy, journalists had to rethink their definition of objectivity and, as the 1950s progressed, they decided that offering some interpretation was a necessary service to their readers. Also, as television news came along, small-town viewers who had previously gotten all of their news from one local paper were exposed to additional perspectives.
From the way Bayley describes things, by the 1980s, when he wrote this book, we had reached a point where the public had access to several sources of objective journalism and were therefore getting a decent, balanced, view of current events. Now, however, we've tilted way in the other direction, where there are so many voices -- websites, cable channels, etc. -- and we're now able to only get news from the people with whom we share a viewpoint. But Bayley had no idea in 1981 that this was coming. This makes it interesting to see Bayley examining how things had changed in the three decades leading up to his present day, while the 2016 reader can consider how things continued to change in the three subsequent decades.
I should say that this book started out really slowly. In the early chapters, Bayley was spending too much time "showing his work." Many paragraphs were listings of newspapers and headlines. He would say, for example, that a pro-McCarthy editorial appeared in... (and then he would list 25 newspapers) and an anti-McCarthy editorial appeared in... (another long list of newspapers). Big, thick paragraphs listing newspapers makes for awfully dull reading. But thankfully I stuck with it and the book became much much more interesting in later chapters.
January 26, 2020
Very detailed chronological story of McCarthy's hijacking and manipulation/management of his press coverage during the post-WWII commie scare. Eerily prescient foretelling of a minor attorney (Roy Cohn) and his behavior affecting politics over the decades.
May 10, 2012
Bayley, unlike many who write about McCarthy, is not content to merely insult the man himself. He examines why McCarthy succeeded in the beginning in convincing the American people (hint: it's because of the press), and ultimately why he failed (also because of the press/media). Bayley, who grew up with McCarthy in Appleton, Wisconsin, is an evenhanded journalist and a good writer. I enjoyed this book more than the others I read for my paper on McCarthy.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews