Journailsm in America
During the depression, some Americans began to lose faith in the American system. Some turned to communism. Even more turned to fascism. The largest fascist rally in the world happened in New York.
Roosevelt promised solutions that weren’t easy to come by. Then the war broke out, and any sense that America might be wrong was replaced with the feeling that there were people who wanted to destroy us—because there were.
After the war, in 1950, an otherwise unremarkable senator from Wisconsin gave a speech to the women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Lincoln Day. In it, he described “The Enemy Within,” suggesting that there were active communists serving in the US Army and other places. This one speech led to a movement that would carry the Senator’s name. McCarthyism swept across America, creating a panic that there were secret communists among us.
The House of Representatives had a standing committee on Un-American Activities since the thirties. It had recently focused on Hollywood writers and directors who attended communist meetings in the twenties and created lists with their names. With McCarthy’s “enemies within” speech, the fear of liberalism and communism in America would become very tangible. People on this list of “possible communists” became unemployable in the movie business.
In 1953, America’s most prominent television journalist was a heavy-smoking man named Edward R Murrow. Starting in radio, Murrow had a program called “See It Now,” which took maximum advantage of the visual aspect of television as it swept across America. During a broadcast, sponsored by Ford and telecast on both NBC and CBS, Murrow began a series of reports on “The Red Scare” and the activities of McCarthy and his young lawyer, a man named Roy Cohn from New York.
Many people thought Cohn, a young jew, shouldn’t be involved in such things. It was too close to the kind of persecution done to Jews in Germany. Cohn wasn’t particularly religious and never spent much time aligning himself with his own culture. Roy Cohn would go on to have one of the most remarkable careers in American History, none of it good.
Murrow’s use of Journalism for the public good is the basis of the award that bears his name. In 2024, WJTV won a regional Murrow award for its sports telecasting. Murrow’s activities also ramped up the meme of a liberal-left media. He was blamed for destroying McCarthy’s reputation, and Cohn spent the next twenty years trying to rebuild it.
I never really felt like the claim that journalism had a left-leaning bias was fair. In the sixties and seventies, it may have seemed like it because between Vietnam, Watergate, the economy, and integration, it was a bad time to be a conservative. Journalism tended to always side with people looking to expand human rights, but I don’t know if that’s really a “liberal” position. I’d like to think that’s a priority shared by both perspectives, but obviously not always.
There have always been some people who were decidedly against expanding human rights that aligned themselves with the right, but I’ve always resisted letting that define the right. There have always been people who advocated for free drugs that aligned themselves with the left, but I don’t let them define them either.
I always had two problems with what McCarthy did. The first was: why only go after the communists? There were fascists hiding in the government since the twenties, too, and secondly, in America, you have the right to be a communist or a fascist. We have freedom of speech and freedom of association. You can’t punish somebody for having an unpopular idea, even if our actual enemies have the same idea.
In journalism school, they teach that you shouldn’t ever show political bias, because if it turns out that your guy actually is guilty of what they say, then it will damage your reputation. As a reporter, your reputation for telling the truth is all that matters.
Every reporter I know works under this assumption. If they’re ever caught not telling the truth, or obscuring the truth to fit their bias, then they’re finished. That’s what kept this idea of a “liberal media” from ever really being the threat people thought it was. Even if a reporter was biased in their thinking, if they were ever caught not telling the truth, they were sunk—or so we thought.
Rupert Murdoch came to this country with a different idea. He believed that readers didn’t really care about “the truth.” What they wanted was a paper that confirmed their bias, and not much else. Again, Roy Cohn got heavily involved.
A lot of journalists discredited his ideas, even laughed at him, but he was making a lot of money, and his readership was going through the roof. If right or wrong was determined by how many papers you sold, then Murdoch might have been on to something. Seeing the success of Ted Turner’s CNN, Murdoch decided to try that formula in television. His first move was to have his broadcasters begin casting aspersions on CNN for “liberal-bias” while at the same time, breaking new ground for “conservative-bias.” Accusing the competition of what you, yourself are doing, is a classic Roy Cohn move.
The biggest flaw in this confirmation-bias reporting is that, if that’s all the news you get, it becomes impossible to tell what the truth is. I worry that’s happening in America. Fox News is so popular that it has become the only news source a lot of people get, so all they get is confirmation-bias, not actual journalism. Somebody like Edward R Murrow would never have an impact in 2025, because nobody would ever see him.
There’s a ton of really good journalism in America these days, but nobody ever sees it. News entertainment, both right and left, has dominated the field.
The truth will set you free, but finding the truth is a pretty difficult journey now. There are so many people trying to manipulate the information you get in an effort to make you believe it’s the truth. Using the internet, I’ve figured out a sort of janky way to aggregate the news myself. That way I can compare sources and try to discern the difference between them.
Sometimes, I’m amazed at the progress we’ve made since 1950. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re regressing. Journalism is important, not just as a way to make money. I wish there was a way to make the actual truth more profitable than the confirmation-bias truth.
When I was at Millsaps, I hung out with other philosophy majors. Looking back, the person who has my greatest respect as a truth-teller was a journalist. But he believed that fiction was sometimes better at getting at the truth of the matter. The problem with that is that fiction can just as well be used to misguide people. It is hard to misguide people using only the facts, although cherry picking has been raised to an art form by some.