Sam Tannenhaus Quotes
To Eisenhower it seemed like the press was building up McCarthy.
McCarthy was in many ways like Donald Trump. One was taht the press loved to cover his statements and accusations that were so absurd and sensational that they sold a lot of nespapers, magazines and obtained many TV / Radio viewers/listeners. As a result he got much more media coverage that he warranted in teh view of many, President Dwight Eisenhower, who generally would not even mention McCarthy's name was percieved by Adlai Stephenson and many others as weak and fearful of McCarthy, Tannenhous and some other historians believed that fear had nothing to do with it, but that Eisenhower not only chose this as a deliberate strategy, but one that was quite effective.
Sam Tannenhaus, "Who Stopped McCarthy?", The Atlantic, April 2017
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
McCarthy was in many ways like Donald Trump. One was that the press loved to cover his statements and accusations that were so absurd and sensational that they sold a lot of nespapers, magazines and obtained many TV / Radio viewers/listeners. As a result he got much more media coverage that he warranted in the view of many. In retrospect, Kampton, one of the most prestegious journalsits of his era, felt that he had been guilty of wrongful judgment in covering McCarthy and giving him so much press, just as many journalists did after they covered Donald Trump in the 2016 Campaign.
Even the President was not spared during the McCarthy era. The red scare was so pervasive, that a lunatic fringe ultra right wing organization could call the President a “communist dupe” and be taken seriously be much of the media who were themselves intimidated and might be accused of being communists at any moment. It was a very low point in America’s history.
Reacting to the disarray of the federal government as a result of the activities of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy:
See {632333} for the offensive McCarthy attack on Zwicker.
After this, no other member of the Executive branch went before McCarthy again
Note the use of the word “alien” to describe the American owners of newspapers, radio and TV stations. Oliver was a right wing, racist, paranoid, fanatic and extremist. His quotations are interesting because he often said in public what many right wing extremists believed but only said in private. Joseph McCarthy was a senator who suffered from alcoholism and claimed that there were communists throughout the government and the military. However, while he claimed there were all these communists, he was never able to identify them. After a few years of his antics, he was censured by the Senate and he died shortly thereafter. Oliver and a few other extremists believe that McCarthy was silenced by a national communist conspiracy. However, McCarthy was never silent on anything.
Until the 20th century almost all American political media were shamelessly and overtly biased—left or right. Political Parties had their own de facto publications much like Fox News became for the Republicans in the 21st century. In the 20th century journalism developed into a profession that evolved standards of objectivity in reporting. That norm then prevailed for about 70 years. With the extreme polarization of the later years of the 29th Century the right wing began to accuse much of the media of a left wing bias, and the media tended to react as Krugman describes in this quotation. The model of having spokespersons for “each side” of an issue works for highly subjective political preferences with a two party system, but where it broke down is with scientific and technical issues. On these, there often really are not two scientific points of view, but there is a scientific consensus of the vast majority of scientists and almost all the prestigious and accomplished scientists are in accord. However, there may be some who have a cultural, religious and/or political concern for some science and its implications for society. They in turn find a scientist or two, often one who is unaccomplished and not recognized in the scientific field to argue a different point of view. The media have tended to equate the two and have a “debate” as if there were two sides to the science when there are not. These issues tend to cluster around scientific medical issues involving sex and birth control methods, environment and conservation, evolution, the age of the earth and the method of creation of the universe. The problem is particularly exacerbated by the general scientific illiteracy of the American population and the relatively few journalists who themselves are scientifically literate who can explain scientific issues well.
The queen was a lot more sophisticated about the newspapers than politicians in the 21st century.
The Red Scare had already reached most conservatives and Truman and most others had not yet been affected by the fear of Communism that so many people had through the 1970s.
The organization thought that Franklin D. Roosevelt was surrounded by and influenced by communists, and was destroying America for capitalism, when in reality it was Roosevelt who saved capitalism in America by leading the country out of the Great Depression without any revolution or insurgency and maintaining the basic structure of capitalism. They were so fearful of communism that most Americans thought paranoid and unrealistic. When Roosevelt trounced Alf Landon in the 1936 Presidential election, the Liberty League collapsed.
- Born:
- Nationality: American
- Profession: Historian, biographer, and journalist
