The 60th anniversary of Edward R. Murrow's program about the excesses of Senator Joseph M. McCarthy — sometimes called the finest half-hour in television history — falls in two weeks.
The media myth has it that Murrow's See It Now program of March 9, 1954, was so powerful that it abruptly ended McCarthy's communists-in-government witch-hunt, a campaign long on innuendo that the senator had launched four years before.
In fact, Murrow was very late to take on McCarthy, and did so only after several other journalists had called attention to the senator's excesses. Notable among them was Drew Pearson, a Washington-based syndicated columnist who began questioning the substance of McCarthy's red-baiting accusations almost as soon as the senator began raising them.
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