What Began as one Broadcast Journalist's Fight for Justice Ended in the Destruction of Two Men in Their Heart and Soul

What began as one broadcast journalist's fight for justice ended in the destruction of two men in their heart and soul.

In 1953, Edward R. Murrow, at that time TV journalist for "See It Now", heard that Lieutenant Milo Radulovich was fired from the air force on ground that his father and sister were communist sympathizers. Murrow immediately decided to run a story on Radulovich stating that "a son shall not bear the iniquity of his father," especially if it has never be proven. Murrow's report left much suspicion in the air force decision to discharge Radulovich, and not long after Radulovich was reinstated. The man responsible for the communist hunt down was Senator Joseph McCarthy.

After the Radulovich program, rumors spread that Senator McCarthy was preparing a reply to Murrow's report. Murrow gathered information on McCarthy and prepared a report on the Senator mostly made up of images of McCarthy and his speeches. The program made McCarthy look like a radical and attacked McCarthy for his ideas and actions. While Murrow was trying to report the fact and be as fair and as balanced as possible, he only displayed images of McCarthy as a "psychopath" (in Seldes' terms) and as crossing the line between investigating and persecuting, while ignoring images of McCarthy as an influential leader or pictures of "a political figure of the first rankÐ'...quite possibly an authentic genius," as Richard H. Rovere wrote in The New Yorker. It is a journalists job to report the news as fair and as balanced as possible and Murrow failed. The actions which McCarthy had taken against people who were communist or knew communists or were related to communist disturbed Murrow very deeply and his report showed his agitation.

McCarthy had a chance to reply due to the rule of equal time; however his $6,000 reply, which he could not even pay for, was nothing compared to Murrow's $15,000 professional report. Murrow was fighting someone who did not have the means to fight back. Due to the intensity and influence of the program, McCarthy lost his hold over the nation and on December 1, 1954, the senate censored Joe McCarthy.

Gilbert Seldes, a widely known media critic at the time stated in an article in the "TV and Radio Saturday Review," is astonished that Murrow attacked someone "who couldn't even borrow enough to make a film"