« Citizen media and a couple of Jeffs | Main | Alan AtKisson at Earth Charter » MurrowXeni's posted some background on Edward R. Murrow and the film Good Night and Good Luck,, which I found via Wendy Seltzer. I'm old enough to remember watching Murrow, though I didn't quite know what was a stake at the time... I figured it out over the years, though, and had the deepest respect for his work and his courage. Studying and thinking about Murrow as I flirted with a career in journalism helped make me a civil libertarian and free speech advocate; not sure where we would be today if he hadn't stepped up, along with John Henry Faulk. We've seen fundamental rights threatened in the US over the past few years; studying the McCarthy era can remind us how bad it can get, and studying Murrow's work can remind us how to take a stand when basic rights are challenged. jon posted this at 7:52 AM |
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Joe McCarthy is one of th emost unfairly maligned men in American history. What McCarthy wanted was accountability from the US Government regarding security risks in the employ of the US Government, the kind of thing that was quite important in an ear when Stalin had over 200 Communist spies in the U.S. Government in the 1940s. We didn't know the number back then, but McCarthy did know that the U.S. state dept had a list of security risks and failed to act on them.
McCarthy threatened not a single person's civil liberties; he merely wanted security risks out of sensetive positions in Govt. (Would you want a Jihadist in the CIA post 9/11?)
Alger Hiss was one of those Soviet Communist spies, but his accusers were, like mcCarthy, smeared for decades, and Hiss denied being a spy.
Then the "Venona" transcripts were revealed in the early 1990s and it proved Hiss was a spy and those calling the hunt for Communist spies a 'witchhunt' were in fact wrong.
Just Google on "Venona" and get the real story.
Posted by: Patrick | November 5, 2005 4:03 PM