Donald Trump's Joe McCarthy Moment
The moment cable news, at long last, had a sense of decency, cutting off the liar-in-chief.
By The Conversation
Chris Lamb, IUPUI
When CBS, NBC and ABC cut away from President Donald Trump’s news conference at the White House on the evening of Nov. 5, they took pains to explain why they were shutting off the nation’s commander-in-chief.
It was a moment that for me, as a journalism historian, carried echoes of the 1954 takedown of another flamboyant populist demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Making false accusations
The key reason, the networks explained, was that Trump had made false claims about the integrity of Tuesday’s presidential election. As ballot counting signaled the increasing likelihood that he would lose to former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump accused the Democrats of trying to steal the election from him.
“They’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen,” Trump said.
The networks’ anchors criticized the president for peddling false claims to support his vanishing hopes for retaining the presidency. So did some of Trump’s staunchest allies.
President Donald Trump addresses the press on Nov. 5, 2020.
An echo from history
Others have earlier drawn parallels between Trump and McCarthy, including journalist Peter Beinart, who wrote in The Atlantic that “McCarthy built his political career on demagoguery, intimidation, and a cult of personality – not tangible achievements or coherent ideas.”
McCarthy rose to fame and popularity by exploiting Americans’ fear of communism. He smeared his political opponents with accusations that they were communists.
As the news media later did with Trump, they helped create the spectacle of “McCarthyism” by providing McCarthy the means to make baseless charges against political opponents.
McCarthy exploited a key weakness in the model of so-called “objective” journalism: the practice of journalists to report what politicians say, without questioning whether what they’re saying is factual.
McCarthy “lied with such boldness that he distracted a nation and shot it full of distrust,” one writer said.
In 1954, the senator’s excesses were exposed. The U.S. Army accused McCarthy of seeking preferential treatment for one of his aides. During the televised Senate hearings, he charged that one of Army attorney Joseph Welch’s associates had ties to a communist organization.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Sunday, November 15th 2020 at 4:21PM
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