Dissenting Newman Chapter Burlesque with an Antenna Lowbrow Comedy on Television

This chapter was mostly factual, describing various television shows from the 1950s and classifying them as either lowbrow or middlebrow. The fact based nature of the work coupled with my lack of experience with the vast majority of the shows discussed makes dissenting quite difficult. However there were two points that I felt needed to be discussed with while reading.
First, I wish that the audience’s perspective would have been more prominent throughout the chapter. Aside from small references such as the discussion of the Honeymooners where Newman writes, “Ralph was not alone. His audience laughed at his failures, but they also felt his pain,” (Newman 53). I feel that although the facts are important to present, the reader also needs personal perspective. It is tough for someone of my generation to read so much information on unfamiliar television shows without getting a sense of how the viewers saw it. For example, Newman discusses how the possibility of a celebrity being Communist resulted in sponsors pulling their money out of shows, causing some to be cancelled. How did the average viewer feel about the implication that a celebrity might be Communist? Was this an issue at all; were they extremely concerned? It would be helpful to have the public perspective so that the reader can develop a stronger sense of the climate in which these shows were being produced. In other words, Newman presents an almost insiders look on the television industry in the 1950s (as we are privileged to have interviews and retrospective looks on the subject from those who lived it) while a cultural review would be interesting as well.
Another reason that a look at the general population would be helpful, as well as another issue I had with the chapter is the insinuation that the honeymooners had a political agenda. Gleason denied that these plots had any political significance. "Gleason professed to see no political agenda in his depiction of the poverty and thwarted materialism of the working classes." He insisted that Ralph was ‘no symbol, no metaphor…’ (Newman 50). Could this be true? It seems very possible to me that Gleason did not see any political commentary behind his character, Ralph. Instead, he may have seen a typical man of the era. It seems slightly confusing to assume that Gleason was making his show to convey an agenda when it seems like the show was just mirroring the times. Life during this era did seem hard (this would be another good time to get a viewer’s perspective on how they related to the characters they watched) and perhaps Gleason was just attempting to make the viewer feel comfortable watching someone with problems just like theirs.
I understand that the direction of this chapter is meant to be informational, leaving little room for anecdotal accounts. However, the use of interviews or statistics on viewership from the 1950s might give the reader a better understanding of the climate these shows were premiering during.

The Decline of *The McCarthy Show*

In this final chunk of Doherty, he accomplishes what he set out to do with this book. Although, as we’ve pointed out, this book isn’t as argument driven as some of our other course texts, that doesn’t mean that Doherty doesn’t have a clear task in the project. Doherty’s task is to rewrite what he calls the “conventional wisdom” regarding television in the McCarthy era: the view of TV as “Purveyor of sedative pabulum, facilitator of the blacklist, handmaiden to McCarthyism” (2). In Doherty’s introduction he quotes Eric Barnouw as saying that TV “would learn caution, and cowardice” during the McCarthy period; Doherty undermines this assertion, however, by appending that TV “would also utter defiance and encourage resistance” (3). Illustrating this resistance and, in doing so, illuminating the ways in which McCarthyism and McCarthy were addressed, exposed, articulated and critiqued by television of the 1950s is just what Doherty does in this last section.

The televisual defiance of McCarthyism that comes across in this section is especially vivid because Doherty has set it up so that this section figures the decline of McCarthy, his downfall. For instance, Joseph Welch, articulating the vox populi, famously asks Senator McCarthy if he retains any sense of decency. In this moment Welch speaks for the entire contingent of the television audience that had grown tired of the McCarthy Show, which was a sort of rerun before such a thing existed in that, despite the fact that the McCarthy Show ran on different networks and under different names, the plot was conventional, the characters often the same, and even the script and punchlines predictable. As Doherty illustrates, 50s Americans got a kick out of reciting “Are you now, or have you ever been, a communist?” and shouting “Point of order!” Audiences had enjoyed it for a time, but as Welch illustrates, many TV viewers were ready for the McCarthy Show to be cancelled.

Perhaps feeling that his readers were also growing tired of McCarthy coverage, Doherty offers us a bit of a relief in Chapter 10 by taking the spotlight off of McCarthy and onto some glittery 50s celebrities, Christine Jorgensen and Liberace, and then suggesting that these two queer icons have more in common with “McCarthy and his men” than we might have ever suspected. Although it’s very easy today to look back and shake our heads, imagining that McCarthyism’s connection of homosexuality with communism is a logical conclusion of a xenophobic era, there’s more to learn from this point than simply a confirmation of our assumption that people in the 50s were closed minded. Doherty wants to assert here and elsewhere that the 1950s was a period of acute worry and anxiety on multiple fronts: communism, homosexuality, the decline of religion, momism, new expectations for men, and so on. That these things were seen related is far from outrageous: communism, for instance, was connected to irreligiosity because Marx extolled atheism; homosexuality was related to those “gender troubles” because it was seen as a dysfunction that was produced by dominating mothers or too-soft fathers.

As we’ve learned during this semester, these anxieties are linked to real things: a postwar climate in which men had returned from war and women had returned to home from the workplace, a rise in domestication whereby a new model of the nuclear family had become—very quickly— taken for granted, and so on. What these worries all had in common was that they were commonly believed to be readily preventable if only people would recognize the problems and cling to the “Judeo-Christian heritage” that was so often invoked in this era.

The remainder of Doherty’s book largely concerns fictional treatments of McCarthyism that were undertaken after the fact. With the relative immunity afforded by time, these films and television shows are unafraid to take on McCarthyism and blacklisting; in the case of The Front, for instance, Doherty mentions the notations of blacklisting that accompanied its closing credits and vividly shows us that “a scar of shame in the 1950s has become a badge of honor in the 1970s” (253). That’s no surprise, of course; today we’re allowed to say with all impunity that McCarthy was a scoundrel. But what Doherty’s text has shown us is that the dissent seen in media after McCarthy was really not all that different than the dissent seen in television during the height of McCarthyism.

Ultimately we can say that the McCarthy Show was never truly cancelled but instead, due to popular demand, reinvented after the decline of its protagonist. It wasn’t a one-way process, though: while the McCarthy Show was reinvented after the decline of its protagonist, it was simultaneously reinvented in order to facilitate that decline. In this way the McCarthy Show is much like the Howard Beale Show in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1975 film Network, in which Howard Beale is killed on the air in order to save the poor ratings of his show. He was pretty popular for a while. We all got a kick out of his ranting and raving. But then we just plain got tired of him.

Life Is Worth Living Now That I Have a New Comedy Routine

So, though it's not my turn, I've got to show you all this if you haven't looked it up. I grew up Catholic and my mother and grandparents also went to Catholic schools, so Life Is Worth Living is a large fascination to me. I'm pretty sure that my grandparents both watched this one.

Anywho, Doherty was not kidding when he said Fulton Sheen cracked some sweet jokes. These are pun-riffic, and I do love me a pun. And then he cranks out mad propaganda. Wow. This guy is good.

Also, if you go look at these clips at the YouTube website, you can have the added bonus of all the lovely and ever-thoughtful comments by intelligent YouTube users, which are often my favorite component of any clip.







Enjoy heartily.

"White Knight of the Airwaves"

Doherty maintains a fresh prose that serves to make some of the most dramatic moments in history seem even more theatrical. His eighth chapter's ode to broadcasting hero Ed Murrow does this with a twinge of irony: Murrow, the fabled hero, slays the dragon McCarthy on live television. Sensationalist for sure, tongue-in-cheek a bit, but Doherty is serious. Murrow is the "patron saint of broadcast journalism" (161), the bearer of truth in a sea of spin. Andrea supplied this quote below from Doherty's argument (which she rightly says is overarching) that, "through television, America became a more open and tolerant place" (2). While I can't agree that Doherty consistently supports this hard-to-prove point throughout the text, I do think that the particular case study of Murrow vs. McCarthy amicably backs up Doherty's assessment (minus one pretty crucial thing; but I'm advocating, so I'll save it for the afterthought).

I'm inclined to agree with Andrea's post below in that See It Now is praised as a unifier, somewhat out of context with Doherty's point about tolerant America; in fact, it is intolerance that spurned Murrow to unravel his opponents. But what I can agree with is that See It Now does in fact offer a level playing field that did not previously exist to such a degree in American media. Albeit through an unmistakable bias likely encouraged by crystal-clear hindsight, Doherty is presenting Murrow and the show as a moral compass that quite literally allowed its viewers to navigate their own opinion. The difference with See It Now, and what appears to have made it so special, is that it offered two sides to the same story and was unafraid to tell them, leading to social change in some cases. There's a good visual anecdote of this when Doherty is describing the dual coastal monitors: San Francisco on the left, Brooklyn on the right, Murrow in the middle. I think, and I can't say that he is 100% successful, Doherty is accurately locating Murrow's crusade as one of the first instances of media, particularly moving media images, as being aware of itself as a very powerful political tool. It's unmistakable how much this is true today (just one thought back to this past election and I'm sure we'd all have mouthfuls to say about media representation and its relationship to political agenda).

I am, however, left feeling somewhat confused by this last chapter, as I can't say I know where Doherty's laid his cards as far as the book's argument goes. On the one hand, he praises Murrow at times so gratuitously, one can't help but see how Doherty's own personal bias has structured his use or non-use of evidence. Don't get me wrong: I think Ed Murrow was a brilliant figure (incidentally, I just finished watching 2005's Good Night, and Good Luck, which was a little underwhelming compared to the real-life stuff) and I agree that he, along with the CBS writers and crew etc., pioneered the kind of talk-back, take-back liberal pundit journalism that circulates so widely today. On the other hand, though, there are moments where Doherty can't properly filter this admiration in an objective way, which signals alarms for myself as an analytical reader regardless of the subject matter. My issue is with Doherty's odd deconstruction of what reads as Murrow's "free verse" (174) poetry (his transcripts from the broadcasts); his interjections seem a little peculiar. But, as I'm advocating, I digress.

Advocating or dissenting, though, I think there's an important question that rises from the Murrow/McCarthy exchange, and that is regarding the issue of representation. I'm not entirely convinced that Doherty offers a fair balance between Murrow and McCarthy, but is that even possible considering the nostalgic historical perspective from which we look? Even during its time, did something so subversive as See It Now, even with its political inclusivity, really ever allow for a fair and unbiased perspective - that tolerant, even playing field that Doherty's been touching on - to exist between Murrow and McCarthy? On the most superficial level, and Doherty chimes in on this multiple times, Murrow was a fantastic orator; "showstopping" (176), even - but of course he was; he's a TV man, that's his job. Compared with McCarthy's response, which was "poor in quality with spotty cutting and monotonous one-camera shots of McCarthy sitting at a desk directly facing the lens" (186). The editing could be brutal and the audience would be none the wiser. In that regard, I don't agree that America was becoming more tolerant through television media; it seems to me like America was becoming more bifurcated. I do, however, agree that See It Now provided a forum that, for the first time, mediated between the right and left with a subtle subversive swing that makes its success that much sweeter.

Evidence?

While the television may have been the vehicle for encouraging the downfall of Senator McCarthy, I don’t agree that the downfall was the result of a more accepting, open-minded American audience. What I mean is that I don’t think Americans ousted McCarthy for his overt criticism of communism, but instead for the obvious injustices to the American constitution and ideologies in McCarthy's televised hearings. In that regard, Murrow’s unmasking of McCarthy’s political antics was not rooted in accepting difference, but illuminating the injustices of McCarthy’s tyrannical attacks. Therefore, if television did promote a more accepting society, it was a by-product of other intentions, rather than one of television's intentional functions. However, in light of my assenting assignment, I will attempt to illuminate some of Doherty’s observations that I think serve as evidence for his main argument. Although I don’t think he states this directly or even particularly clearly, (thus suggesting that my comments largely depend on my own analysis of his discussion), I do think that chapters seven and eight provide evidence, although questionable, for Doherty’s overarching argument that 1950s television sparked “the expansion of freedom of expression and the embrace of human difference,” and thus, “through television, America became a more open and tolerant place” (2).

First, I must say that I was intrigued by Doherty’s discussion of the multifarious identity of the 1950’s male, and couldn’t help drawing parallels to our current society and political wartime situation. The same task of being American among a variety of other adjectives relates to our current situation wherein I myself face the dilemma of being a female American whose liberal Democratic views were concretized during the Bush Administration (a time in which expected and propagandized patriotism soared), am an Iraq war protestor, an Amnesty International advocator, a corporate bail-out critic, and an individual who absolutely loves this country. How can one person be all of these things; how can one person be all of these things and be “American”? I think Doherty does a fine job of illuminating the individual complexities via psychoanalysis within the larger narratives of patriotism, nationalism, and American-ism, thus, for me, questioning the very nature of such –isms, as I think Doherty attempts to critique. Inherent in determining “Un-American” activities is the need to define “American” ones, and I think its fair to say that this may have caused concern for many postwar citizens, in that not many could fit the rigid expectations of the ideal American, and therefore lead the masses to question the such categorizations. An American can be many things that would obviously differ from neighbor to neighbor. Sympathetic to Philbrick’s situation in I Led 3 Lives, Doherty reminds us that “for the postwar American male, controlled schizophrenia was not a mental state reserved for spies and double agents…[for the American male] the multiplicity of roles played at the same time by the same man had never been so numerous and varied…Philbrick’s plight bespeaks an entire generation juggling shifting identities and mercurial relationships…In watching Philbrick watch himself, perhaps Americans identified less with his political agenda than his psychic agility…at a time when so many were leading three lives or more” (148). I think Doherty’s point here, then, is that audience members viewing various persecutions based on “Un-American-ism” allowed the break down of the condemning gaze with which many Americans viewed difference.

Doherty also highlights how media, for biased political and nationalist reasons, favored the representation of one side of the debate, thus unfairly silencing and condemning the opinion with which the government disagreed. Such practices illuminated the civil rights violation of freedom of speech and, as Doherty asserts, the only way to address such issues would be to “find a court dedicated to the rare principle of equal justice for all” (143, emphasis added). I can see how the recognition of this unjustness would elicit sympathy from American viewers not for the Communists, but for the accused’s situation in the judicial system and society, which possibly, then, may have transcribed into some, even if minimal or unintentional, sympathy for Communist individuals in America (?). Additionally, while I Led 3 Lives “critique[d] anticommunist paranoia” speaking “to the plight of the duped liberal smeared by his past associations” suggests a desire for past associations to be forgiven—to move forward, looking ahead rather than back, with a clean slate. Likewise, Doherty uses the See It Now report on Senator McCarthy as a means to suggest a shift toward greater freedom of expression in the media: “when television, the medium so leery of controversial personalities, so devoted to ‘100% acceptability,’ provided a forum for anti-McCarthyism, the gesture marked a seismic shift in the zeitgeist” (162). This television moment, central to Doherty’s argument regarding the expansive possibility for freedom of expression, opened doors for disagreement, contrasting yet equally credible opinions, and controversy on national television—Controversy is “as American as the Rocky Mountains and the Fourth of July” (171); controversy, rather than conformity, is American.

Finally, I think Doherty’s discussion of the Annie Lee Moss case is vital to his argument; Moss “played her part” according to the stereotypes promulgated through popular shows like Amos and Andy and duped the system which believed in and supported such stereotypes. Playing the uneducated Negress, “she stalled over ‘adjudication,’” and “the gallery chuckled, in sympathy, in condescension, at the limited education of the poor black woman” (182). Doherty asserts, however, that Moss “savored the last laugh” (184). Annie, who, as later revealed by the FBI, was indeed a Communist, essentially forced white American viewers to think critically about the Negro stereotypes infiltrating the airwaves of radio and television, and be more open and willing to the possibility of equality among Blacks and Whites in America.

Through these few instances in 1950s television, Doherty attempts to highlight how television was not only used for political propaganda, fueling anxiety about the war and communism, and instilling fear in the American people; he argues that there were, in fact, also instances where television programs reinforced the freedoms that McCarthyism threatened, thus opening doorways for more accepting, open, and tolerant views.

Schizophrenic confusion

In chapters six and seven of Thomas Doherty's Cold War, Cool Medium, calmness and anxiety seem to be key opponents to Cold War television. In what sounds like a cross between Flavor of Love and Judge Judy, Kefauver's televised hearings showed the chaos of organized crime. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI is portrayed as calm and collected, in opposition to the bumbling cops of local offices. Bishop Sheen serves in direct contrast to earlier hot-headed and caustic Catholic priests in media (159). And McCarthy also will be shown to be an enraged and irrational beast by Howard Murrows. In analyzing I Led 3 Lives, Doherty posits that "book and telefim" both "[express] the psychic turmoil of the multitasking 1950s male" (142). Using another spy's own term for his double-agenting, Doherty later terms this Philbrick's "controlled schizophrenia" (148, 149). This internal struggle is heightened for the double agent, but according to the reference on page 142, this was a common psychological battle for 1950s men. Where does this idea come from and where does it go?

There is much to say about postwar anxiety, particularly for men in the 1950s, but Doherty doesn't say it, so it's not clear what "multitasking" he means. Also missing from this undercurrent of order/chaos is its connection to communist/capitalist ideologies. Order is necessary to combat the chaos of figures such as corrupt cops, fire-and-brimstone priests, and loony McCarthyites. But as we discussed earlier in the course, order is also the source of suburban anxiety and a counterimaginary. Order is national unity and just progress, but it is also conformity and communal thinking. Individuality is chaos, not calm. Making this paradox of what is seen as "good" on TV further exacerbated, all of these calm figures stem from large institutions: Kefauver is federal and sweeping the nation; Hoover is federal and part of an expanding bureaucracy; Sheen is part of the enormous Catholic Church and endorses religion, a conformed and nonindividualist religion as promoted by Eisenhower (149-150). Murrows is perhaps the only figure who appears as calm reason without a lot of institutional/bureaucratic association. Doherty ignores this paradox between order as good and orderly as communist.

Doherty is very convincing in his explanation of the trumping of spectacle within a spectacular medium, but he seems to ignore the "how" of it. I imagine that the line of thinking runs thus: people are anxious, therefore calm figures are necessary (if not necessarily always popular in ratings, then in ideology). But the counterpoint to these television appearances are the variety shows, surely a form of schizophrenia on stage, which ultimately triumphed for financial reasons if not also for interest. There is (as of yet) no reference in Doherty's argument to how these two forms of entertainment play out on an ideological level and why one wins in service television and the other in entertainment television. Murrows "slays" McCarthy, so the tide does finally fully turn against pro-America fascism, but I'm not sure how to read the differences in popular and service shows, because Doherty combines them into a seamless set of national television programming, even while admitting that they are not.

McCarthy: From Budding Tyrant to Disgruntled Prepubescent Girl

I want to dissent. I want to dissent oh-so-very badly. ...But since I'm not dissenting, I'm going to just agree with everything I liked and ignore the lack of evidence pointing to his major argument and the fact a lot of his evidence is in fact contradictory to his claim that TV in the Cold War also uttered defiance and encouraged resistance against a hyperconformist culture.

Now considering all I did in high school and college was study the Cold War and make fun of McCarthy, I have to say chapter 5 was a delightfully good time and all I'm going to talk about. McCarthy being a moronic psychopath wasn't very flattering on TV. Still, there was a good 4 year period where McCarthy was on TV, making noise, and getting everything he demanded to the point of being treated even better than former president Truman by the media. A whole fifteen minutes better!

Without a doubt McCarthy being so widely publicized on TV when he blindly attacked the wrong people (Army vs. McCarthy hearings in 1954, for example) with improperly quoted excerpts (like no politician has ever done and never will do again) damaged him. However, a large credit to McCarthy's defamation would better be associated with him taking it too far: attacking the republicans just the same was he did the democrats (pp. 102-3). Props to McCarthy for being an nondiscriminatory brainless moron, but still it's not the best move politically.

While the sudden turn of the media denying McCarthy's air time was significant, and the FCC not forcing it on them was an excellent point (p. 95), I still don't see this as being a sudden change from conformity. There was still a strong sense of conformity: communist imperialism: evil, capitalist imperialism: heavenly. Just McCarthy took his momentary power trip too far by calling everyone everywhere who ever slighted him and made his testicles wither a communist. To make matters worse, once he stopped getting his way he just got more reckless and whinier. That's not exactly the most flattering combination. Consequently he landed face first in a pile of the president and the media's collective vomit.

So long rant short: Doherty's evidence is excellent. The only problem is it tells a story not reflective of his main argument, which I'm going to guess is why he often fails to draw any conclusions and instead creates a running cultural and historical dialogue rather than any strong argument. ...That counts as assenting, yes?