You're sharpening stones, walking on coals To improve your business acumen. Sharpening stones, walking on coals, To improve your business acumen. Enemy sighted, enemy met,

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• You're sharpening stones, walking on coalsTo
  improve your business acumen.Sharpening stones,
  walking on coals,To improve your business
  acumen.Enemy sighted, enemy met,
• I'm addressing the realpolitikLook who bought
  the myth,
• by jingo, buy America"Let us not assassinate
  this man further Senator,you've done enough.
  Have you no sense of decency, sir?At long last,
  have you left no sense of decency?"
• Lyric from Exhuming McCarthy R.E.M.,
  Document

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General outline
I. Time-line II. The Role of the media in
McCarthyism A. Objectivity as an ideological
routine B. Radio and the wire services C.
Newspapers and deadlines D. The medium of
television proves to be an exception III. Trajecto
ry chart
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Time-line
1950 McCarthy begins his campaign against the
specter of Communism in the U.S. 1951 Murrow
Friendly buy NYT ad for See It Now about USAF
meteoroligist Milo Radulovich. 1954, March 9
Murrows See it now airs on McCarthy.
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Time-line

• 1954, April The Army-McCarthy hearings televised
  beginning in April by ABC and NBC.
• 1954, Dec. The U.S. Senate votes 67-22 to strip
  McCarthy of his power.
• 1957 McCarthy dies of alcoholism.

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III. The Role of the media in McCarthyism
A. Objectivity as an ideological routine B. Radio
and the wire services C. Newspapers and
deadlines D. The medium of television proves to
be an exception
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Milo Radulovich reads a letter of support as he
sits with his family, wife Nancy, and daughters
Kathryn in 1953.
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Edward R. Murrow
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The Army-McCarthy hearings
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin
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Roy Cohn http//members.tripod.com/bheller1/who-1
.html
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Trajectory chart

• Outsiders? Alleged Communists in government and
  elsewhere
• Goal for change? Republican pres. victory in
  1952
• Mainstream presss ideological base?
• For print news A scientized form of objectivity
  that left them trapped in an uncritical
  journalistic routine. The immediacy of television
  changed this.
• Outcome? McCarthys extremism was renounced, but
  the national narrative of anti-Communism remained
  central.