Doherty: Cool Author, Cold Evidence

I agree with Quetzal – it is hard to advocate for this reading since the author has laid down his thesis but hasn’t provided much support for it yet. Luckily I’m the dissenting post! In the first 59 pages of Cold War, Cool Medium, Doherty does a better job convincing me of the “conventional wisdom” he’s trying to disprove than of his belief that television allowed America to become a more tolerant place.

Quetzal mentions the NBC live news program in which McCarthy answered difficult questions from a studio audience as one of the few examples that supported Doherty’s argument. However, even the NBC broadcast doesn’t work as evidence for television as a force of unprecedented tolerance and open-mindedness. In Doherty’s words, “the members of the audience… behave[d] pretty much the way Americans have always behaved in the presence of their elected representatives: respectful but skeptical, the questions polite but probing, sometimes downright hostile” (17). If their actions were merely representative of typical American behavior towards politicians, then even this piece of evidence fails to support Doherty’s radical claims about the “cool medium.”

In the second chapter, “The Gestalt of the Blacklist,” Doherty’s description continues to support his counterargument rather than the point he’s trying to prove. Although he mentions one comedian who makes light of Communist party allegations by making jokes about attending parties thrown by communists, Doherty follows this shred of evidence with the admission that “rare was the entertainer who could muster black humor about the blacklist. For every television actor who stood firm, dozens more quaked and complied” (32).

In the third chapter, I was looking forward to Doherty using his case studies to better support his thesis. After all, writers have to lay down a foundation before their arguments make sense; maybe Doherty was waiting for more specific cases to make his argument clear. However, the blacklist and eventual suicide of Philip Loeb and the allegations against Lucille Ball do not demonstrate television aiding America in becoming more tolerant. In fact, almost none of the manifestations of anti-McCarthy sentiment – the Sponsor article of 1951, Merle Miller’s The Judges and the Judged, and Actor’s Equity meetings – were transmitted through television. The only example I could glean from the reading was the first episode of the new season of I Love Lucy, when Desi Arnez assures the live studio audience and millions of viewers that his wife was not and had never been a communist. But even that action was a tangent, an aside: “Before we go on,” Desi prefaced, “I want to talk to you about something serious” (55). As we can see from this almost apologetic preamble to the episode, Desi must have known that a beloved television show was not the place to vouch for his wife’s political affiliation. Clearly television was at best an awkward and ineffective way of trying to clear one’s name.

Although Doherty does do a good job detailing the opposition to the blacklist, it is not through the medium of television but rather “before congressional committees, at union meetings, and in pages of entertainment trade press” that his evidence abounds (33).