Lecture 5:THE CREEPING RED MENACE AND THE

ELECTRONIC HEARTH

In This Lecture

•PART ONE: Joseph McCarthy

•PART TWO: Marshall McLuhan

•The Link: the power of the medium

PART ONE: McCarthy

•Moral Panic

•The Red Menace

•Tailer Gunner Joe

•See It Now

Formal Logic vs.Cultural Logic

• Formal Logic: based on empirical evidence, measurable and predictable results.

• Cultural Logic: based on cultural fixations relating to shifting social contexts, dictated by emotions and beliefs.

Moral Panic

• A large portion of the populace becomes frightened when an issue appears to threaten the social order.

• The central issue is some sort of taboo.

• They often reveal fault lines in the social structure and suggest hidden conflicts and hypocrisy.

Moral Panics•Salem Witch trials

•“Savage Indians”

•The devil’s music

•Satanic cults

•The red scare.

•Drug use

Characteristic of Moral Panics

•scapegoating - Jews and black plague.

•“shadow” projection - lynching ex-slaves.

•self-interest - invading oil-rich Iraq.

•perceived threat to morality - teen sex

•Fear of Other - hate crimes

•NOTE: Red Scare involved all.

Scapegoating

•Communists were blamed for all social ills, which took the blame off capitalistic greed of corporations.

“Shadow” Projection

•The one country to ever drop a nuclear bomb on civilians (the U.S.) fears a Russian nuclear attack.

Self-Interest• The trials made McCarthy famous.

• Those who named names were allowed to continue working.

• The “red scare” justified a crack down on organized labor--union busting.

Perceived Threat to Morality

•Communism outlawed religion.

•Sharing wealth equally at odds with protestant work ethic.

Fear of Other•Red Scare played into American

xenophobia (fear of foreigners)

The Red Scare

•After WW11, the cold war begins.

•The arms race: nuclear testing

•The space race: Sputnik

•The Committee on UnAmerican Activity

•McCarthyism

Joseph McCarthy

(1908-1957)

•Marine in WW11: “Tail-Gunner Joe.”

•Republican Senator from Wisconsin (1947-57)

•1950 - begins investigating supposed communist sympathizers in the government

•Investigation spreads to the media: film & TV

Questions:

•Why this moral panic at this moment in time?

•Why in the U.S. and not elsewhere?

•What role did television play in triggering the panic and eventually, subverting it?

The 1950’s & Cold War Paranoia

• Why not congressional hearings about the KKK? They were a real physical threat to many Americans (as opposed to a merely ideological one).

• What were the specific social factors in 1950s America that helped to trigger the cultural logic of moral panic known as the “Red Scare?”

•As post-war labor unions gained power, they were a growing threat to corporate elites (unlike Klan).

Domestic Economic Threat

•U.S. industry could not expand into foreign countries with communist governments.

International Economic Threat

•The Russians were building nuclear arsenal equal to ours.

Nuclear Threat

Why U.S. ?

•Why not a similar red scare in other countries?

•Capitalism vs. communism

The Protestant Work Ethic

•U.S. founded by Puritans

•Max Weber on Protestant work ethic

•linking religious ideology with American capitalism.

•Industrious individualism - path to heaven. “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.”

•Creates culture obsessed with production and consumption.

Red Channels•Published by right wing

journal “Counterattack” in 1951.

•Named 151 figures in the media allegedly associated with communism.

•Distributed throughout the entertainment industry, led to blacklisting of everyone listed.

See it Now•CBS news magazine

(1952-57)

•Human interest to serious social issues.

•Took on McCarthy in a series of historic reports.

Edward R. Murrow

(1908-1965)

•American broadcast journalist, host of See it Now.

•Rose to prominence during WWII with reports on London Blitz.

•Became one of the first major TV newsmen.

•Defined a new style of reporting.

Fred W. Friendly

•Teamed with Murrow on CBS radio series Hear it Now.

•Co-creator of See it Now (with Murrow).

•Became president of CBS news.

•Resigned in 1966, when the network refused to air U.S. Senate hearing questioning U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Good Night and Good

Luck•This George Clooney film focuses on

See it Now challenging McCarthy.

•(pause lecture. View your copy of Good Night and Good Luck. This film was produced during George W. Bush’s presidency. Consider what it may be saying about press coverage of the Patriot Act and the build up to the Iraq war.)

Further Viewing: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

(Clooney’s other “TV film”)

McCarthy’s Reply

•Guilt by association. Accuses Murrow of communist ties.

• Note, Murrow did not only use “facts” either. Called him “Junior Senator.” Aired unflattering footage.

•Were these tactics justified? Or hypocritical?

McCarthy’s Downfall•After See it Now challenged

him, officially censured by the U.S. senate in 1954.

•Another 2 & 1/2 years in Senate, but loss of credibility.

•Eisenhower: “McCarthywasm”

•Died in 1957 at age 48 of inflammation of the liver.

End of the Blacklist•Dalton Trumbo member of

“Hollywood Ten.”

•Continued writing under pseudonyms.

•Oscar for The Brave One (Robert Rich)

•Otto Preminger credits for Exodus (1960)

•Kirk Douglas made public his work on Spartacus. (1960)

Postscript

•What are today’s fear-driven politics?

•Can news reports ever be entirely politically neutral?

•What makes a program more or less objective?

•Is a “balanced” fluctuating between extremes or middle-of-the-road?

Postscript (cont’d)•What happens when politicians appear

on news channels? Sarah Palin on Fox News.

•Does the media have a liberal bias?

•Could we have another red scare?

•Why do we romanticize “outlaws” and stigmatize “socialists?”

•Should we ever censor an idea?

TV Triggering

•homogenizing effect

•propaganda tool

•guilt by association: associative patterns (Red = evil)

TV subverting•juxtaposition:

counter-narratives, alternate associations (McCarthy = witch hunt)

•increasingly media savvy populous

Marshall McLuhan(1911-1980)

•Canadian media theorist

•Technological determinism

•“The medium is the message”

•Recall Kennedy/Nixon debates - Kennedy won on TV, Nixon on radio. The mediums influences the meaning.

Other Key Concepts:

•The global village: our planet has been contracted into a village by electronic media.

•hot media: require little effort to comprehend (films).

•cool media: require more conscious effort to decode (comics, TV)

Critic: Kenneth Burke

•“If the medium is the message, obviously the important thing is not what somebody says in a given medium, but what medium he uses, regardless of what he says.” (Kenneth Burke)

Critic: Raymond Williams

• “If the medium--whether print or television--is the cause, all other causes, all that men ordinarily see as history, are at once reduced to effects. Similarly, what are elsewhere seen as effects, and as such subject to social, cultural, psychological and moral questioning, are excluded as irrelevant by comparison with the direct physiological and therefore ‘psychic’ effects of the media as such.”

Defender: Neal Postman

•“Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”

Who Leads the Dance, Technology or

Culture?•Technological determinism: television

is such a persuasive, manipulative and omnipresence technology, people begin regarding it with suspicion, reflected in the red scare.

•Social construction: Cold War paranoia is projected from society onto the relatively new medium of television.

Media as a Double-Edged Sword

•Influenced by both technology and culture.

•Though media theory often emphasizes one over the other.

•Media texts are not only influenced my social and technological factors. They themselves also serve to influence culture and technology.

Another Wrinkle

Media as Artifact

•Media texts are artifacts reflecting the concerns of the eras that produced them.

•The See it Now episodes involving McCarthy were influenced by a growing public backlash against the Red Scare.

Media as Influence

•Media texts are also influencing factors that can serve to either maintain the status quo or change it.

•The See it Now episodes involving McCarthy changed how some members of the public viewed the Red Scare.

So...what does all this mean to you?

• As a media scholar writing about See it Now, you could emphasize...

• How the show’s text was influenced by the medium of TV (technological determinism)

• How the show’s text was influenced by the Red Scare (sociological determinism)

• How the show’s text exerted an influence on culture (promoting backlash to Red Scare) and technology (rhetorical use of hearing footage montage)

Next Time:Transforming the Wasteland, Transforming

the Country