How CBS Saved the Nation

In the 1950s in America, Joseph McCarthy, the Senator from Wisconsin was running riot over the nation.

Searching for a cause to help his career, he hit on the idea of a massive communist conspiracy infecting every branch of both government and society. He had no hesitation about making wild and unfounded claims to a media looking for headlines. It was a toxic combination.

Soon his Red Scare captured the country. The HUAC, the House Un-American Affairs Committee began holding hearing and subpoenaing everyone they could lay their hands on. “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ They demanded that people ‘name names’. Careers and lives were destroyed. The nation was gripped in a kind of hysteria. No one was safe, and almost no one, not even President Eisenhower, had the courage to take this man on.

Someone who did was my mentor in the television news business, Fred Friendly. Friendly was the producer for Edward R. Murrow, a great journalist, whose massive portrait now graces the entrance to the CBS Broadcast Center in NY.

Together, they followed McCarthy at his innumerable rallies and speeches. They filmed everything he said. Then, they cut it all together. It was called McCarthy in His Own Words. And that was all it was. McCarthy in his own words.

CBS ran it in prime time. It was a courageous act in those days. Anyone taking part was risking their careers. Fred told me that when he the team sat in the editing rooms, screening the material and putting the show together, he told his staff their mission was about combatting fear.

“The fear is palpable,” he told the staff. “The fear is here in this room.” And it was. Standing up to a demagogue took vast courage then. But they did it.

The program aired, much to the credit of CBS and Bill Paley who owned CBS, which also took enormous courage, and it went along way to helping to bring McCarthy down. They attacked him with his own words. They let him simply hang himself in a way. His lies, his prevarications became obvious to anyone who watched the hour. Accusation after accusation, lie after lie.

That was the power of televisions. That was the power of journalism.

Not much later, the live broadcast Army-McCarthy hearings, also on CBS, finished McCarthy off. Famously, Boston attorney Joseph Welch turned to McCarthy on live TV and said, “at long last, sir, have you no decency?’

And that was how it ended. The look on McCarthy’s face, broadcast to the watching nation, finished him off.

There’s a lesson in this story.

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