A Shameful Harvest of False Balance

Edward R. Murrow reports on America's "Harvest of Shame"

The now-virulent problem of journalistic false balance is not a new one. Objectivity is a fine thing — right up to the point where it is employed as a means of hiding the truth.

In the fall of 1960, when Edward R. Murrow gave voice to America’s voiceless migrant farm workers in an award-winning documentary, CBS reacted to the loudly voiced pressure from the economic interests that exploited the migrants. In Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, Fred Friendly recalled, “The management was concerned about such programs as 'Harvest of Shame,’ even though they knew it was done fairly; what they wanted was a ‘balanced’ hour. But though objectivity is part of responsible reporting, all arguments, as Murrow had said, are not equal … As Murrow once asked, ‘Would you give equal time to Judas Iscariot or Simon Legree?’”
After all, a purely objective watchdog never barks.

A Sentimental Journey on a Roundabout Train

I had only the vaguest and most powerful memories of this 1958 book, Roundabout Train, which my grandmother read to me over and over as I went to sleep for my afternoon naps when I was 4 years old. I finally found it again today. We lived near a railroad track in Effingham, IL, and I loved trains. How I especially loved those trains with eyes.

Paley and Murrow: See It No More

CBS journalists Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly in happier days

More than McCarthy finally did in the award-winning, groundbreaking CBS News series See It Now.

Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly had helped end Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s reign of anticommunist terror with their much-applauded 1954 exposé, but their reporting made them a political target.

Nevertheless, they didn’t back down from controversy, but even subsequent seemingly noncontroversial topics for the show — on the fate of small farmers, on Hawaiian statehood — attracted bizarre denunciations and demands for equal time.

The corporate taste for the predictable profits provided by mindless, soothing programming and Murrow’s ethical imperatives about the journalistic responsibilities of the television medium continually clashed.

CBS Chairman of the Board William Paley

The showdown came in the office of CBS Chairman of the Board William Paley in 1958. Paley had long been a principled and hands-off supporter of Murrow’s high-minded journalism, but he had grown weary of the headaches they caused him. And big profits beckoned from the cheap quiz shows (whose corrupt practices, ironically, would eventually give him bigger headaches than See It Now ever had).

Friendly described the scene in his memoir Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control, noting that: “…Paley quietly said, ‘But I thought that you and Fred didn’t want to do ‘See It Now’ anymore.’

“ ‘Bill, what I am proposing is a procedure by which we share in the decision about equal time and under which we could continue to do ‘See It Now,’ Murrow said. ‘Of course we want it to continue.’

“The chairman replied with the firmness that goes with final authority. ‘I thought we’d already decided about ‘See It Now,” he said flatly.

“Whereupon enforced calm vanished, and 45-minute scene ensued in which these two commanding figures, the industry’s foremost reporter and its top executive, who had been intimate friends for 20 years, faced each other in a blazing showdown with all guns firing.

“One brief burst of dialogue told it all.

“ ‘Bill,’ Murrow pleaded at one point, ‘are you going to destroy all this? Don’t you want an instrument like the ‘See It Now’ organization, which you have poured so much into for so long, to continue?’

“ ‘Yes,’ said Paley, ‘but I don’t want this constant stomach ache every time you do a controversial subject.’

“ ‘I’m afraid that’s a price you have to be willing to pay. It goes with the job.’

“Nothing else that was said mattered. After seven years and almost 200 broadcasts, “See It Now’ was dead.”

Astute filmgoers will have recognized that conversation, which appears almost verbatim in Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney’s 2005 outsstanding film about Murrow’s battle with McCarthy. The movie is remarkably faithful to the actual history recorded by Friendly, with David Strathairn, Frank Langella and Clooney’s dialogue frequently an exact reproduction of the words of Murrow, Paley and Friendly.

As the ‘50s faded and the ‘60s soared, Friendly sized up why the prestigious program had died.

“The fatal complication — all the other symptoms could have been treated — was the very strength that made Murrow unique. The man who could decide to do a program about McCarthy or Radulovich, or fly off to see Chou En-lai, or to report on smoking and lung cancer, could only do these broadcasts because of his fortitude and independence, and those same virtues which gave CBS distinction also brought it controversy, enemies and ‘stomach aches.’”

“What Paley and (CBS President Frank) Stanton did not realize at the time, and what we failed to articulate — if in fact we truly understood it — was that Murrow’s independent spirit was the biggest asset the corporate body had. CBS couldn’t afford a platoon of Murrows, but logistically and spiritually, it could certainly support one responsible, universally respected, if not unanimously applauded, reporter who was able and willing to do and say precisely what a corporation could not.”

Why the Nazis and the KKK Hated Superman

To learn why, click here.

Superman wraps up WWII, from Look Magazine in February 1940.

Nothing Can Protect a Nation Against Itself

In the 1940s, the conquered French were tortured by their German occupiers. By the 1950s, the freed French were torturing the Arab natives in colonized Algeria. That irony was not lost on philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

“Sartre wrote a sensational review, published in L’Express, of Henri Alleg’s book The Question, an account of being tortured by paratroopers in Algiers,” wrote Ronald Aronson in his book Camus & Sartre.

“Beginning with the memory of the Germans torturing the French at Gestapo headquarters in 1943, Sartre recalled that the French had declared it to be impossible that ‘one day men should be made to scream by those acting in our name. There is no such word as impossible: in 1958, in Algiers, people are tortured regularly and systematically… Appalled, the French are discovering this terrible truth: that if nothing can protect a nation against itself, neither its traditions nor its loyalties nor its laws, and if 15 years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then its behavior is no more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.’”

The French government inadvertently underlined the truth of Sartre’s words by immediately trying to censor them.

“His powerful denunciation caused L’Express to be confiscated by the authorities on March 6, 1959, and during the next several weeks the article became famous by being published in a pamphlet, confiscated, then appearing in a scroll that could only be read with a magnifying glass, and finally being published in Switzerland,” Aronson noted.

Writing in 1961, Sartre eloquently examined the full extent of what the tortured felt prepared to do once they turned torturer.

“Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them,” Sartre wrote. “Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are leveled at the peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces.”

Before Bush and Cheney’s regime, I too thought it impossible that men should be made to scream by those who were acting in the name of my nation. During and since Bush and Cheney’s regime, I too discovered that nothing can protect a nation against itself, least of all rebranding it a “homeland” to justify the use of torture.

Sartre wrote, “We are living at the moment when the match is put to the fuse.” And I know just how he felt.

Dan Hagen, Time Master

DC Comics' Showcase 26 from May-June 1960, at right, has cover art by Joe Kubert.

Within a half-century span, comic books can effectively operate as limited-range time machines for me.

Because I loved them so much when I was young, just reading a Silver Age story can take me back to that precise moment in that spring of 1960 when I was 5 and the world’s colors all seemed as vivid as those four in the comics, or that autumn of 1962 when I was 7 and the civilization of the planet Earth actually faced destruction, or that January of 1966 when I was 11 and one of my superheroes was, wonder of wonders, suddenly the biggest hit on television.

So reading a feature like Rip Hunter, Time Master is an ironic experience in seeing time, both real and fictional, collapse upon itself, something like one of those paintings of an infinite regression…

The Ethics of Captain America

Cap is clearly postconventional on Kohlberg's scale of moral development.