Wall Street Journal Stonewalls on McCarthy

Human Events, May 12, 2008 by Evans, M Stanton

A final instance to be noted is Kessler's reliance on Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the McCarthy executive hearings for publication. Though Kessler quotes Ritchie as an impartial expert, the facts of the matter are quite different. In numerous comments, Ritchie has routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy-most conspicuously and most often in McCarthy's most famous case, that of Annie Lee Moss.

Mrs. Moss, who appeared before McCarthy in March of '54, has been portrayed for 50 years as a mistaken-identity victim because the committee supposedly collared the wrong suspect. Ritchie's treatment of the case, cited to secondary sources, reinforces the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant. All of this, however, again is false, as shown by the extensive archives of the FBI and other official records.

When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he had by any chance checked out these official sources, rather than simply citing other academics. When I offered to sum up the relevant data proving McCarthy was right about the case, the historian grew irate, said, "I am growing very tired of this conversation" and quickly ended our discussion. Such is the supposedly impartial authority quoted by Kessler-all too typical of the recycled error that passes for historical knowledge of McCarthy. (End of letter.)

Though devoting about a third of a page to venting provable misstatements about McCarthy, the Journal has explicitly refused to run my answer. The reasons given for this include (a) that my rebuttal was too long-though considerably shorter than Kessler's essay (I have been told that a 200-word letter might be considered); (b) that the paper didn't realize I wanted to have the letter run since it was emailed by an office staffer; (c) that the paper doesn't accept opeds in answer to previous op-eds. Bottom line: The Journal has plenty of room to run wildly inaccurate hearsay statements about McCarthy, but no comparable space for accurate data from official records.

As it happens, this is not my first such experience with the Journal. Five years ago, the paper ran a misleading column by Dorothy Rabinowitz attacking Ann Coulter for her comments on McCarthy, the main point of contention being the above-noted case of Annie Lee Moss. Ann's comments were very much on target, while those of Rabinowitz were, to put it mildly, misguided. On that occasion I wrote a letter to the Journal pointing out the facts about the case. That missive never appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

In these instances of stonewalling and refusal to correct the record on McCarthy, the Journal is following in the footsteps of other newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. I recite some of these earlier episodes of misreporting in my book, and my previous attempts to set the record straight about McCarthy and his cases. Concerning these I wrote:

"Responses to these sporadic efforts have always been the same-reluctance to admit or fix the problem, or even to run a letter pointing out the miscue. The prevailing attitude seems to be: We will print any off-the-wall assertion about McCarthy that comes along, without bothering to check any facts whatever, and if we get called on it won't correct the record. Why such a mindset should exist, and what it says about the state of journalistic ethics, are intriguing questions, but less important than the effects of such slovenly reportage on our understanding of the Cold War and Joe McCarthy's involvement in it."