Lessons learned in how to cover demagogues, from one era to another

I’ve been professionally involved in the news — reporting, editing, opining — since the June day in 1955 when I went to work for The Intelligencer, the morning paper in Wheeling, West Virginia.

That first newspaper is in the history books today because it assigned a reporter to cover the annual meeting of the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club on a February evening in 1950. The speaker, an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin, informed the women that he had in his hand the names of 205 communists currently employed by the U.S. Department of State.

The story went viral, as they didn’t say back then, and the next day, Joe McCarthy was famous — even though people at the meeting thought he said 57 communists, or was it 27? The text provided by the senator to the Intelligencer’s reporter said 205 but the reporter was relaxing in the hotel bar while McCarthy was speaking and couldn’t note any textual changes the senator might have made. He wrote 205 communists in the story that appeared the next morning in Wheeling and papers across the country via the Associated Press. They were still talking about it when I joined the paper five years later.

McCarthy would become the most successful media manipulator in our public life until the emergence of Donald Trump 65 years later and in both cases, the media initially failed to figure out how the senator and the president should be covered.

In the McCarthy era, too many journalists tended to report the claims McCarthy was making in his largely invented Red scare without even attempting to verify what he was saying. When he accused the Truman and Roosevelt administrations of having participated in “20 years of treason,” reporters didn’t seek proof. When he painted a dark picture of communist infiltration into not only the State Department, but other institutions — films, universities, even the Army, proof was rarely sought.

McCarthy was finally brought down by the excesses of his gray eminence, the committee counsel Roy Cohn. Cohn, often photographed in whispered conferences with the senator, first gained notoriety when he and colleague G. David Schine toured Europe, seeking and destroying “subversive” books by authors like mystery writer Dashiell Hammett and even Mark Twain in State Department libraries. 

Later, when Schine was drafted and the Army declined to give him a commission, Cohn got McCarthy to launch a probe into subversive activities at an Army post in New Jersey. McCarthy’s nasty questioning of a general and a condemnation of his tactics by one of the Army’s lawyers — “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” — caused the country to turn on McCarthy and his tactics.

As did the reporting of the great CBS journalist, Edward R. Murrow, whose two broadcasts devoted to McCarthy — featuring mostly the senator’s own words — contributed to his censure by the Senate in late 1954. He died three years later at the age of 48.

But Roy Cohn lived on to emerge as one of the first legal fixers for a New York developer named Fred Trump and his son Donald. Cohn represented the Trumps when the Justice Department sued them for discriminating against blacks in housing they owned. Young Donald Trump was, according to many sources, impressed by Cohn’s strategy of counterattacking immediately, claiming victory and never admitting defeat. They were close until Cohn’s death in 1986.

Cohn’s tactics — also known as McCarthy’s — made a profound impression on Donald Trump, as we have seen since 2015. First discounted as a non-starter by most journalists, Trump emerged as the star of the show in the debates broadcast on the cable news outlets. The more outrageous Trump became, the more creative names he gave his opponents, the more delighted the ratings-happy cable stations were.

But after his election, some journalists began to worry about the tendency of the press, especially the electronic kind, to regurgitate every tweet that came from the presidential mind without context or verification. The Washington Post even provided a continuing record of Trump lies, now somewhere north of 5,000.

When Trump announced he was pulling out of Syria and his press secretary confided how difficult it was for the president to write all those letters to the families of Americans killed there, many reporters failed to note the number of Americans deaths since 2015 was four. But last week, when an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) bomb killed four Americans, most accounts not only noted the president had declared victory over ISIS just days before, they also reported the four deaths doubled the number of Americans killed in Syria.

But Trump continues to be the master manipulator and we’ll see how effective the media will be in future efforts to clarify his pronouncements. It won’t be easy. We’ll still have cable news putting ratings above journalism — and no Edward R. Murrow in sight.

Simsbury, Conn., resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.