Joe McCarthy

The media must really believe Rick Perry can defeat their beloved President Obama for they are coming at the Texas governor with guns blazing.

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen likened Perry to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy because of his disbelief in manmade global warming:

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) isn't alone in having trouble understanding how the government is organized.  In a Sunday article posted on the Chicago Sun-Times's Web site, staff reporter Mary Houlihan credits the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) with running the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  That would have been quite an accomplishment, given the fact McCarthy never served in the House of Representatives.

Houlihan writes of photographer Milton Rogovin, who died last month.  After military service during World War II, Rogovin "organized a chapter of the optometrists’ union and served as librarian for the Communist Party of Buffalo."

Then the inevitable happened. In October 1957, Rogovin was caught in the net cast by the House Un-American Activities Committee helmed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It was the waning days of the Communist witch hunt, and the experience would change Rogovin’s life.

In the 1950s, as then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R., Wis.) and his House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated liberal and progressive artists in search of Communist-oriented dissidents, Hellman and Bernstein collaborated on what would become one of several major works fomented by government activities: the play and film Cradle Will Rock, and Arthur Miller’s play and opera The Crucible are others.

Sometimes, readers must wonder if newspaper correspondents ever passed a class in basic civics.  If journalists had, they’d know that Congress consists of two bodies, the House and the Senate.  A member of one body doesn’t chair a committee from the other.  No Senator – not even Joe McCarthy – could run a House committee.  A clue might have been that his title was senator rather than congressman or representative, but perhaps that's expecting too much.    

Not that Dick Feagler meant to.

(Note: This is about a local Northeastern Ohio column, but deals with a media bias issue of broad significance.)

What Feagler revealed gets to the very heart of journalism's failure, why blogs exist, why many news consumers pay attention to them (in fact, feel that they must), and why they matter.

I really want to admire guys like Dick Feagler (and the relatively few gals, back in the day). Their telephones, steel trap memories, and Rolodexes were the "databases" of that era. They worked, and their modern counterparts still work, in an underpaid, underappreciated job that, when done correctly, is something you don't clock out of, and can go crazy in the blink of an eye. The Dick Feaglers used the old-fashion tools and applied the old-fashioned work ethic to do their jobs as best they could. Their successors are typically doing the same, with better tools.

But that avoids the real question: What was, and still is, their job?