From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Has Donald Trump Had His Joe Mccarthy Moment?
Date November 9, 2020 8:30 AM
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[When CBS, NBC and ABC cut away from President Donald Trump’s
news conference at the White House on the evening of Nov. 5, they took
pains to explain why they were shutting off the nation’s
commander-in-chief.] [[link removed]]

HAS DONALD TRUMP HAD HIS JOE MCCARTHY MOMENT?  
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Chris Lamb
November 8, 2020
The Conversation
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_ When CBS, NBC and ABC cut away from President Donald Trump’s news
conference at the White House on the evening of Nov. 5, they took
pains to explain why they were shutting off the nation’s
commander-in-chief. _

,

 

Has Donald Trump had his Joe McCarthy moment?

The moment Lester Holt of NBC News cut into a statement from President
Donald Trump. NBC News via YouTube
[[link removed]]

Chris Lamb [[link removed]],
_IUPUI [[link removed]]_

When CBS, NBC and ABC cut away
[[link removed]] from
President Donald Trump’s news conference at the White House on the
evening of Nov. 5, they took pains to explain why they were shutting
off the nation’s commander-in-chief.

It was a moment that for me, as a journalism historian, carried echoes
of the 1954 takedown of another flamboyant populist demagogue, Sen.
Joe McCarthy.

Making false accusations

The key reason, the networks explained, was that Trump had made false
claims about the integrity of Tuesday’s presidential election. As
ballot counting signaled the increasing likelihood that he would lose
to former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump accused the Democrats of
trying to steal the election from him.

“They’re trying to rig an election, and we can’t let that happen
[[link removed]],”
Trump said.

The networks’ anchors criticized the president for peddling false
claims to support his vanishing hopes for retaining the presidency. So
did some of Trump’s staunchest allies.

President Donald Trump addresses the press on Nov. 5, 2020.

An echo from history

Others have earlier drawn parallels between Trump and McCarthy,
including journalist Peter Beinart, who wrote in The Atlantic that
“McCarthy built his political career on demagoguery, intimidation,
and a cult of personality
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– not tangible achievements or coherent ideas.”

McCarthy rose to fame and popularity by exploiting Americans’ fear
of communism. He smeared his political opponents with accusations that
they were communists.

As the news media later did with Trump
[[link removed]], they helped
create the spectacle
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of “McCarthyism” by providing McCarthy the means to make baseless
charges against political opponents.

McCarthy exploited a key weakness in the model of so-called
“objective
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journalism: the practice of journalists to report what politicians
say, without questioning whether what they’re saying is factual.

McCarthy “lied with such boldness
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that he distracted a nation and shot it full of distrust,” one
writer said.

In 1954, the senator’s excesses were exposed. The U.S. Army accused
McCarthy of seeking preferential treatment for one of his aides.
During the televised Senate hearings, he charged that one of Army
attorney Joseph Welch’s
[[link removed]]
associates had ties to a communist organization.

The famous exchange between communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and
Army lawyer Joseph Welch.

An emotional Welch then responded by saying, “Until this moment
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Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your
recklessness.”

Welch went on to famously scold McCarthy: “You have done enough
[[link removed]].
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no
sense of decency
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The media turns

It was that moment from 1954 that I thought of as the news broadcasts
cut away from President Trump.

“We have to interrupt here, because the president made a number of
false statements, including the notion that there has been fraudulent
voting,” said Lester Holt, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” as
his broadcast cut away from the president’s speech. He added,
“There has been no evidence of that.”

David Muir, anchor of “ABC World News Tonight,” was even more
direct: “We’re not witnessing anyone stealing anything tonight
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CNN and Fox News continued to broadcast the news conference but later
reported that Trump provided no evidence
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his claims of vote fraud.

Longtime allies shift

Some of Trump’s loyal defenders, including former New Jersey Gov.
Chris Christie and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, criticized the
president
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for his baseless charges.

[_Deep knowledge, daily._ Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter
[[link removed]].]

After Welch’s rebuke of McCarthy’s baseless claims, millions of
viewers watching the hearings finally had enough of the senator. His
immense national popularity disappeared. He was censured by Senate
colleagues, ostracized by the GOP and – finally – ignored by the
press. He died three years
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later, an alcoholic and a broken man, at age 48.

It is too soon, of course, to know whether Trump meets the same fate
as McCarthy.[The Conversation]

Chris Lamb [[link removed]],
Professor of Journalism, _IUPUI
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This article is republished from The Conversation
[[link removed]] under a Creative Commons license. Read
the original article
[[link removed]].

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