The Baited Trap

For a change, radio & TV were talking loudly about something besides the sponsor's product. The subject was the same one that engaged many another citizen: Senator Joe McCarthy. A few of radio & TV's pundits--notably Fulton Lewis Jr. and Walter Winchell--were loud in Mc Carthy's defense. Some held a middle view, as did Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who, by implication, praised Joe's works while decrying his ways. The bishop's parable: "It may very well be in any home that a man may set a rat trap with Gorgonzola cheese . . . Many in the home are dissatisfied with the Gorgonzola because it smells up the place. They should prefer to see Swiss cheese . . . put into the trap. But let no one confuse a process with a crime, and if the Gorgonzola is smelling up the house, then change the cheese, but, in God's name, do not forget that the house has to get rid of its dirty rats!" Others--e.g., Quincy Howe, Elmer Davis and John Vandercook--took after McCarthy with verbal scalpels.

But the strongest voice was that of CBS's Edward R. Murrow (Person to Person and See It Now), who is something more than just another commentator on the news. Murrow decided that "this is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent," and began preparing his See It Now (Tues. 10:30 p.m., CBS) program on the subject of McCarthy in action. When it went on the air, its impact was heightened by the course of events. While it was being prepared, McCarthy had successively locked in combat with the U.S. Army, Secretary Stevens, Adlai Stevenson, Senator Flanders and the White House. He had also fought a secondary action with the radio & TV networks themselves over his right to reply to Stevenson. In this supercharged atmosphere, Murrow's hard-hitting attack made a bang such as television had rarely registered.

Keeping his comment to a minimum, Murrow made his show largely from newsreel clips of McCarthy in action on the rostrum and the committee bench--a contrived but effective record of arrogance and assumed martyrdom, of half-stifled belches and heavy-handed humor. Radio & TV men spent the next day congratulating each other that the networks had, for once, shaken off their habitual timidity.

Last week Murrow returned to the fray. After announcing that McCarthy had accepted a bid to appear on See It Now in his own defense on April 6, Murrow devoted most of his show to a film report of the appearance of Annie Lee Moss before the McCarthy committee. It was nearly as devastating an indictment as the previous show, especially since it pictured McCarthy decamping from an unfavorable situation and leaving his harried counsel, Roy Cohn, to deal ineptly with the aroused Democratic members of the committee, who clearly felt that the accused witness was getting a raw deal (TIME, March 22).

At week's end McCarthy was still firing countercharges from the hip. From Midwestern platforms he repeatedly blasted Murrow for being an "extreme left-wing bleeding heart," and reported in shocked tones that in 1935 Murrow had been on the advisory council for a summer school at Moscow University. Murrow professed an inability to define "bleeding heart" but freely conceded that his position was "to the left of both McCarthy and Louis XIV." The advisory council, he pointed out, had consisted of 25 U.S. educators, ranging from the University of Chicago's Robert Hutchins to Smith College's late William Allan Neilson, and the summer school session had been canceled by the Soviet government before it ever got started. In answer to the continuing barrage of McCarthy charges, Murrow contented himself with observing: "The Senator's language appears to be deteriorating."

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