Murrow said of Joe McCarthy:
His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully.
History seams to be repeating itself, only the actors have changed.
What they dissent from was the entire idea of liberty and our constitutional limits on the government.
We proclaim individual freedom, but that does not include the freedom to subvert that sense of individual freedom. What these communists that McCarthy noted were promoting was absolute freedom for those in control, and little for anybody else.
McCarthy might have overstated some things, but he was onto a central truth. There is no truth at all in our would be king. Murrow was an ass.