Jenkins: Getting the facts is hard, crucial work
Saturday, September 13, 2008 11:33 PM PDT
By Don Jenkins
The Daily News
Printable version
E-mail this articleWhile holding a smoldering cigarette that matched his demeanor, Ed Murrow faulted Americans in 1954 for tolerating Joe McCarthy. Murrow laid out the case against McCarthy by showing the senator bullying, belching and giggling as he wrecked lives.
McCarthy responded by telling a conservative broadcaster that he didn’t pay much attention to the “extreme left-wing” of the media.
Others paid attention, though. Murrow’s newscast galvanized opposition to McCarthy and helped end McCarthyism.
Three years ago, the George Clooney-directed movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” came out, and Murrow’s cool legend grew. For some, the move was a parable about contemporary threats to civil liberties.
Something like Murrow’s broadcast happened in Washington state. And it would make a good movie, too.
The central figure was Ed Guthman, a World War II veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart.
Guthman died this month at the age of 89 in Los Angeles. He had been an editor at the Los Angeles Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, taught journalism at the University of Southern California, was Robert Kennedy’s press secretary and made Richard Nixon’s enemies list.
All that came after his role in a drama that changed Washington politics.
Five years before Murrow’s broadcast and while McCarthy was still an obscure freshman Republican senator, lawmakers in Olympia were prowling for communists.
If there was ever a state full of citizens vulnerable to charges of being a commie, it was Washington. Mainstream political groups here leaned so far left during the Depression that a high-ranking Roosevelt administration official purportedly cracked, “There are 47 states in the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”
The Washington State Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities boasted it had files on “40,000 subjects.” Its report to the Legislature claimed that an “alarming number of communists are on federal, state and municipal payrolls.”
The University of Washington was the committee’s main focus. A state senator claimed that at least 150 communists were on the university payroll. Committee chairman Albert Canwell maintained that “this little group of commies ... had an excellent thing going.”
One of the committee’s prime targets was philosophy professor Melvin Rader.
Rader was a union activist and self-described “militant liberal.” But when he was accused of having attended a communist training school, Rader denied it and denied any connection or sympathy with the Communist Party.
The communist training allegedly took place in New York in the summer of 1938, 11 years before Rader was accused of being there. Rader said he spent that summer in Seattle and a nearby lodge.
The Seattle Times assigned Guthman to find the truth.
It took months of painstaking work to establish Rader’s whereabouts during a six-week period more than a decade ago. Guthman went to the lodge and talked to people. He checked bank, medical and library records. For just looking into the facts, Canwell accused The Seattle Times of aiding and comforting communists.
Eventually, Guthman’s scraps of evidence amounted to an air-tight alibi for Rader.
Guthman’s story cleared the professor, won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and helped put an end to the Un-American Activities committee.
The movie could end here. And it could be seen as a warning to be viligant against government abuses.
There might be another lesson, too, about the power of a carefully crafted broadcast or story. Murrow and Guthman were both cautious. They took the time to get the story right.
In this era of newsroom cutbacks and persistent attacks against the “mainstream” media’s credibility, the type of journalism practiced by Murrow and Guthman may become as much of a relic as that smoldering cigarette.
Originally published Sept. 14, 2008.
Other recent Jenkins columns:
Jenkins: Party lines aren't drawn in the sand (Aug. 24)
Jenkins: Our leaders can teach us how to get out of jams (Aug. 3)
Jenkins: Gameshow approach would give all voters an equal say on president (July 9)
ziggy wrote on Sep 15, 2008 6:19 PM:
Let's hope people wake up and realize they want more than the latest celebrity gossip.
Let's hope that people make a connection between sound reporting and informed decisions when it comes to choosing our elected officials. "
Past Month's Most Commented Stories