Though CBS legend Edward R. Murrow is given credit, he wasn’t the first muckraking journalist to question Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts

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W. Joseph Campbell, American University School of Communication

(THE CONVERSATION) It has been 70 years since Edward R. Murrow’s withering broadcast report about Cold War demagogue Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, a program that has been called television’s “finest half-hour.”

Legendary though it may be, it took more than a television show to take down McCarthy and short-circuit his relentless drive to rid the federal government of communist sympathizers.

The 70th anniversary of the program that aired March 9, 1954, is likely to be recalled by some historians in nostalgic terms – how Murrow, supposedly alone in American journalism, had the courage and national stature to confront McCarthy and expose him for the Red-baiting menace that he was.

McCarthy, an otherwise obscure Republican U.S. senator from Wisconsin, had unsettled 1950s America with thinly documented charges of...