Donald Trump CNN town hall failure echoes McCarthy coverage … – The Capital Times
Christiane Amanpour has recently become an even brighter journalistic star, and it has nothing to do with her day job as chief foreign correspondent for CNN.
Its because she publicly condemned her employer for hosting a widely panned televised town hall in which former President Donald Trump did what he always does: repeatedly interrupted the moderator and lied incessantly, egged on by a studio audience of sycophants hooting approval at his cruelty.
Amanpour got most everything right in her critique, except the part in which she contrasted failings in covering Trump with how much better the press supposedly performed in covering Wisconsins Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced late U.S. senator, in the 1950s.
Larry Tye, who wrote a 500-page book on McCarthys demagoguery, begs to differ. Well get to that, as well as Tyes perspectives on the CNN event.
Amanpour, addressing the graduating class of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently, criticized CNN for allowing a Republicans-only studio audience and for presenting the event live, limiting any opportunity for fact-checking.
My management believes they did the right thing as service to the American people, she told the Columbia audience. I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format.
She said it was nave to think the event would succeed, given Trumps track record: He just seizes the stage and dominates, no matter how much flak the moderator tries to aim at the incoming. It doesnt often work. Amanpour had what she called a robust conversation with CNN Chairman and CEO Chris Licht, who has defended the town hall as newsworthy.
Amanpour said journalism leaders could learn from predecessors from the 1950s, whom she said refused to give McCarthy attention unless his foul lies, his witch hunts and his rants reached some basic level of evidence.
Sadly, this 1950s journalists-as-heroes theme did not ring true with me, having learned how much William T. Evjue, founder of The Capital Times, was a lonely outlier for years in this newspapers relentless scrutiny of McCarthy dating to the late 1940s.
I emailed Tye, a former Boston Globe reporter and prolific author whose exhaustively researched 2020 book on the disgraced Republican senator was titled: Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. (The Cap Times excerpted part of the book for a print cover story.)
Interesting comments by the great Amanpour, but sadly totally wrong, Tye emailed back. The press, as you know, published McCarthys false claims from the first big lie he told in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, when he said he had in his hand a list of 205 spies at the State Department.
The fact that he couldnt back up that claim didnt matter, same as it didnt matter when he made page one day after day over the next couple of years, Tye said. Defenses from those he was accusing generally were relegated to page 57 in the next days paper, next to the corset ads.
McCarthy does offer an object lesson, but of what not to do how press inaction or complicity enables demagogues like McCarthy.
Tye said courageous journalists such as columnist Drew Pearson and television commentator Edward R. Murrow belatedly stepped up to make up for their colleagues errors and take on the bully. Tye said the press failed early on to expose McCarthy even though it would have been easier because he was only a senator and not an ex-president.
Tye elaborated further in a telephone conversation: Before the press was McCarthys disabler, it was his enabler in a dramatic and, I think, embarrassing fashion.
The press blew it, he said, when it uncritically covered McCarthys charges that there was a Communist behind every pillar in the State Department. By the time theyd ever sort of catch up with him and say what about this, we want to see the list that you were holding in your hand, he had already succeeded.
The press was perpetually a step behind in checking on his charges before they had made them page one news. And it was a huge challenge to the press, and it took the press like it took most leading government officials in America too long to figure out what it had done wrong and correct course.
Tye was scheduled to speak this week at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, about why it took then-President Dwight Eisenhower, a fellow Republican, so long to stand up to McCarthy. The press was similarly culpable, he said.
The mainstream of American media was out there just repeating what McCarthy said. Many of the exceptions were papers like yours in Wisconsin that knew who this guy was and knew how unjustifiable his charges had been from his earliest days, Tye added.
A key difference between McCarthy and Trump was that McCarthy was no master of the then-new medium of television, Tye said. His poor performances in front of cameras, including at the Army-McCarthy hearings and attempting, awkwardly, to rebut Murrow by appearing alone on Murrows show, hastened his downfall, Tye said.
Donald Trump doesnt play well in the print world that McCarthy dominated, but he has mastered the TV world in a way that the best reporter cant begin to contend with, Tye said.
Even giving CNN the benefit of the doubt that I am not sure it deserves, (the network) was trying to build a big audience, (not) a fair and balanced event. I think that they got a big audience and they learned the hard way that you dont take on the master of a medium in their medium.
Tye added, The idea that you can go on and give him a forum like that and expect that youre not going to get trampled is nave. You dont beat a demagogue in a demagogues forum.
Coming from an expert on political demagoguery, thats a maxim worth remembering.
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Donald Trump CNN town hall failure echoes McCarthy coverage ... - The Capital Times