And now, my final paper as an undergraduate student (hopefully). The press' coverage of the McCarthy hearings has left an indelible mark on history, forever painting Senator McCarthy as an evil example of fear and anger combined with a government position turned awry. While using the government as a bully pulpit for fear mongering and control is an evil I will decry my entire life, the fact of the matter is that in the case of Joseph McCarthy, the press misused their power and maligned an individual in a most insidious manner which ignored the facts and instead focused on making its own case to its own gain. This is the story of one case in the hearings where the media clearly took sides and ignored facts- for their own advantage, and to the detriment of history and the integrity of our news media.
Annie Lee Moss sits at the bench, being cross examined by Chief Council Roy Cohn as the camera focuses on the spot where Joe McCarthy has just left. Sitting there in a black coat and frayed white gloves, she is a stark contrast to many of the previous defendants who sat in the chair being questioned at McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.[1] As a small, timid-looking and soft-spoken woman, only recently promoted from working in a cafeteria, Ms. Moss was a far cry from the regular crowd of intellectuals and policy analysts that had been brought in and investigated. When questioned about Karl Marx, she asked “Who’s that?”- provoking laughter in the audience. She claimed that "Never at any time have I been a member of the Communist Party and I have never seen a Communist Party card," and "I didn't subscribe to the Daily Worker and I wouldn't pay for it."[2]
This powerful moment crystallizes much of the media coverage of the Joseph McCarthy hearings, leaving the crucial question- how did the media cover Annie Lee Moss’ testimony, what effect did that coverage have on the public, and where did the media go wrong in their coverage of this event? To answer this, it will be important to look at who Annie Lee Moss was, how the media covered her and the hearing, the effect of the media coverage on the public, and why and how the coverage went wrong.
Annie Lee Moss was a 49 year-old African-American widow at the time of her arrangement, but her story goes beyond her time in front of the committee.[3] She was born in South Carolina in 1905 with a given name of Annie Lee Crawford. She had six siblings, and her father was a tenant farmer. They would later move to North Carolina, where Annie left high school to work as a domestic servant. She would marry Ernest Moss in 1926, and they moved to Durham, North Carolina, where she worked in the tobacco industry.[4] She would later work in the General Accounting Office as a clerk, eventually attaining an Army Signal Corps communications clerk civil service position at the Pentagon. It was the sworn testimony of a female FBI agent that brought her to the committee to testify after she had lost her Army Signal Corps job.[5]
In defense of the media, the hearings themselves did not appear to be going well for McCarthy. Ms. Moss had already testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in closed session, and had denied that she had ever engaged in espionage or been a member of the Communist party. She also did not code or decode anything, nor did she have access to anything in the code room beyond top-secret scrambled messages. The FBI agent identifying her admitted to never seeing her at any meeting. When Ms. Moss appeared to the committee, McCarthy said "We do have . . . two witnesses who know that she had been . . . a Communist . . . a long time," he said. "[This] witness is of no importance."[6]
The reaction of the court itself gave many cues to informing the coverage by the media as well. After McCarthy left the hearing, leaving Chief Council Cohn in charge, the case against Ms. Moss rapidly degenerated. As Cohn adamantly insisted that there was secret evidence which convicted Ms. Moss that he could not bring forward, Democratic Senator John L. McClellan from Arkansas denounced the proceedings as “convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo.”[7] Other Democratic senators would ask Ms. Moss whether there could be some kind of mix-up whereby she had been implicated, to which she replied that there were three other women with the name Annie Lee Moss living in Washington DC at the time. After her testimony, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri cried out “I may be sticking my neck out . . . I think you're telling the truth. If you're not taken back into the Army [job] . . . I am going to see that you get a job.”[8] At this point, the room erupted in spontaneous and prolonged applause.[9]
The media coverage of the event would reflect the attitude of the room, aiming to discredit McCarthy’s hearings as brutal and lacking in credibility. A cameraman from the Edward R Murrow TV show “See It Now” had filmed the proceedings, and his footage would show in the next episode. Murrow had already broadcast the episode “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy”, and determined that Annie Lee Moss would be the subject of the next episode. He began his show stating that this would be a “little picture about a little woman”, and end it with a speech by former president Dwight Eisenhower where Eisenhower praised the importance of being able to “meet your accuser face to face”.[10]
Prominent newspapers also played a major role in using this hearing to discredit McCarthy. In one of the more famous newspaper quotes regarding the hearings, John Crosby would write in the New York Herald Tribune that “The American People fought a revolution to defend, among other things, the right of Annie Lee Moss to earn a living, and Senator McCarthy now decided she has no such right.”[11] Newspapers far and wide would cover the event with nearly the same vehemence, even newspapers in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin. Drew Pearson wrote in his syndicated column that “Wisconsin folks saw her as a nice old colored lady who wasn't harming anyone and they didn't like their senator picking on her.”[12] The key take-away from the news media’s coverage of the event was that it was a general disgrace and that it was McCarthy, and not Annie Lee Moss, who was in the wrong.
This unflattering coverage resulted in a significant shift in perception about Senator McCarthy and the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The hearings began in January 1954, when McCarthy had a 50% approval rating. When the hearings concluded in June of that year, those numbers would drop to 34%.[13] This was attributed in large part to Murrow’s coverage of the Annie Lee Moss hearing in his TV show, and the highly favorable responses the show received after the episode was aired.[14] Specifically, from March (the month the hearings were held in) to April 1954, the Gallup poll shows McCarthy’s unfavorable ratings jumping up 10% from 36% to 46%- the largest increase of the year.[15] While it is clear that this was only a single event in a series of events where the media would portray McCarthy as a dangerous bully, it is apparent that this was a key point where the media was able to point out Moss as a vulnerable “victim” suffering under what had been termed McCarthy’s “reign of terror”. [16]
Ultimately, the immediate aftermath of the coverage showed that the news coverage had an impact. After her suspension during the hearing, she was rehired in January 1955 to a non-sensitive position in the Army's Finance and Accounts office. In 1975, at age sixty-nine, she finally retired from her position as Army clerk.[17] Meanwhile, it would not take long before the impact of the media’s coverage of the hearings took its toll on McCarthy. In the immediate aftermath of the hearings, McCarthy was censured by a vote of 67-22, stripped of his power and made into a public disgrace. Three years later, McCarthy would die of liver disease associated with alcoholism- he had not yet reached the age of fifty.[18]
The media failed to pay attention to details which could undermine the political statement it was trying to make. While it had been noted that there were three women with the name of Annie Lee Moss living in Washington DC at the time, one detail that was forgotten was that the female FBI agent had testified to having her address. In 1958, the federal Subversive Activities Control Board reported that “the Communist Party's own records, the authenticity of which the Party has at no time disputed … show that one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R Street SW, Washington DC, was a party member in the mid-1940s.”[19] The media here clearly failed to do their due diligence in reporting the facts, instead choosing to focus on the fact that McCarthy was not present during her questioning.[20]
What is now clear is that Annie Lee Moss lied under oath and perjured herself on the matter of her membership in the Communist Party. In point of fact, Joseph McCarthy was right in his allegation of her guilt, and Annie Lee Moss was wrong- her Communist Party membership had identified her address. Moreover, McCarthy was right on a number of other accounts. Documents discovered later proved that many of McCarthy’s statements were accurate, vindicating many of his accusations during the hearings. According to an article in The New American, “all of his other major cases--such as Army Major Irving Peress, Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney, Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, and John Carter Vincent--were also later demonstrated to be Communists.”[21] And yet the overarching tone from the print media and television shows was, in the words of Edward R. Murrow’s character from Good Night and Good Luck, that McCarthy was “wrong 100 percent of the time”.[22]
The media is often referred to as the “Fourth Estate”, or the fourth branch of government. As the public, we often confer this power upon the media because of their ability to keep a check on the three main branches of government- the executive, legislative and judicial. However this trust, as with the three other branches, should be lost or reconsidered when self-interest prevents justice from being carried out to the fullest extent. In this case, the media used its power and lens to portray McCarthy as the bully and Ms. Moss as the victim, where the facts unto themselves painted an entirely different scene. What can be seen very clearly now is that there was a kind of “snowball effect” at play, where the press coverage of McCarthy began to take on such a negative tone that true journalism and fact-checking no longer mattered. All that interested the press was how to maintain the same story it had given night after night- that Joseph McCarthy was “wrong 100 percent of the time”- and no fact or discrepancy would stand between them and that message. In fact, the media had become the bully it had made McCarthy out to be. When certain elements of the press become so self-interested that so-called journalistic integrity cannot get in the way of a good story, it is time to reconsider our trust in them as an effective check on government. As the Roman poet Juvenal once wrote, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Or, in colloquial English, who watches the watchmen? If it is not the viewing audience, then there are none left.
[1] Time Magazine, 1
[2] Doherty, 181
[3] Time Magazine, 1
[4] Friedman, 446-447
[5] Ibid.
[6] Time Magazine, 1
[7] Time Magazine, 1
[8] Time Magazine, 2
[9] Doherty, 183
[10] Reeves, 569
[11] Herman, 335-336
[12] Doherty, 184
[13] Strietmtter, 171-172
[14] Herman, 335-336
[15] Polsby, 252
[16] Eddlem, 1
[17] Friedman, 467
[18] Streitmatter, 172
[19] Shafer, 1
[20] Reeves, 569
[21] Eddlem, 1
[22] Ibid.
Bibliography
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Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2005)
Eddlem, Thomas R. Good Luck finding the truth here: George Clooney's new movie Good Night and Good Luck continues the smear campaign against Senator Joseph McCarthy and lionizes leftist reporter Edward R. Murrow. Oct 31, 2005 (The New American, 2005) Available online:http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Good+Luck+finding+the+truth+here:+George+Clooney's+new+movie+Good...-a0138271732
Friedman, Andrea. The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism (The Journal of American History, 2007)
Herman, Arthur Joseph. McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Free Press, 2000),
Polsby, Nelson W. Towards an Explanation of McCarthyism (Political Studies, October 1962)
Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (Madison Books, 1982)
Shafer, Jack Edward R. Movie- Good Night, and Good Luck and bad history Oct. 5, 2005 (Slate Magazine, 2005) Available online:http://www.slate.com/id/2127596/
Streitmatter, Rodger Mightier than the Sword 2nd Ed. (Westview Press, 2008)
Time Magazine National Affairs: Committee v. Chairman Mar. 22, 1954 (Time Magazine, 1954) Available online:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,819556-1,00.html
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