ABSTRACT
“The Press in the Cold War: Murrow, McCarthy, and Shakespeare” provides examples of new styles, new media, and new forms of entertainment popularized by the press during the Cold War, an era of intense competition between national superpowers. It opens with an overview of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a compilation of stories from survivors of the U.S. nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 that many press historians consider a masterpiece of modern reporting. It then describes the way the press responded to the ensuing climate of fear tied to the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the efforts of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow to confront anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy. It includes a cross-section of content featured on television in the 1950s, such as CBS’s entertainment-based The Ed Sullivan Show, to describe how broadcasters attracted audiences with entertainment. Using materials from this chapter, students should identify the growth of “infotainment,” as noted in previous chapters, and see how news as delivered by print media continued to take a role of secondary importance to entertainment-based media. They should explore the ways television executives often found that fun sold more effectively than fear, and they should understand how Murrow’s concerns about advertising’s effect on news content proved prophetic. Key words, names, and phrases associated with Chapter 12 include: Hiroshima, John Hersey, and the New Yorker; Joseph McCarthy, HUAC, and the Hollywood Ten; Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, and Hank Greenspun; and The Ed Sullivan Show and Elvis Presley.
