Both men were fired from their newspapers. They set themselves up to write a syndicated column, a form that was soon emulated and adapted. When America discovered it could not escape the world conflict, it could not blame the messenger. Newspaper and news agencies, new public affairs punditry, newsmagazines, and radio, newsreels, and documentaries, had all warned of the dangers, but not enough understanding had been built up to shake a country that felt safe behind its oceans, and was preoccupied anyway with bread lines and jobs. The public affairs columns did something to diversify debate.
History shows that it is peculiarly hard to go against a common sentiment in America.
With a vast, scattered heterogenous population of insular disposition, the political and social pressures are for conformity. In covering McCarthy, the press was, by contrast, generally timid and inept. Much of the reporting never caught up with the lies. There were journalists who saw the threat to American principles posed by the witchhunt. The Washington Post , The New York Times , The Milwaukee Journal , The New Yorker , Time , Ed Murrow, and I. F. Stone refused to believe that opposition to McCarthyism was unpatriotic.