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One historian told Judis: "I wouldn't hire a red-baiter like Ron." Another said Radosh was "not a historian at all."

Journalists peck at any conservative in exactly the same "not a journalist" way.
Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can set up a printing press (you have a low-speed one hooked to your computer, probably--and you have the ability to post to a web site which is accessible world wide) and become a journalist to his heart's content. But if Harry is a conservative, Tom and Dick will wage a flame war on him for "pretending" to a title which they themselves have no official sanction for holding, never mind excluding others from.
I used to be annoyed at Rush Limbaugh for ceding the point unnecessarily. But I have concluded taht the logical viewpoint to take is to let them have the word, and ridicule "journalists" as a group. It at least gives us a convenient target . . .
This article covers material also seen in Treason, in which Ann makes the point that historians treat journalism as "the first draft of history." And that that is exactly how "McCarthyism" entered history--historians reading the newspapers rather than going to the primary sources for the real story.
"Historian" is therefore a term of contempt like "journalist"--anyone who figures out and publishes a liberty-affirming truth is "not a historian (or journalist) at all."

I've mislaid today's Wall Street Journal but it has a letter to the editor from the BBC. The burden of the letter was that the BBC is no more anti-Republican than the British population at large, and slightly more likely than the rest of journalism to take the government at its word.

Well, what does that buy the listener if a lot of British citizens are WRONG? To that question we would expect to hear the Pontius Pilate challenge, "What is truth?"

That is all very well, in the fog of current events--but we can look back and critique journalism with hindsight. In retrospect, the dreadful sandstorm "bogged down" the coalition not at all. It simply gave the Iraqi army the illusion of safety, under "cover" of which they moved their forces. They thus revealed their locations to our radar and subjected themselves to uttter devastation by aerial assault.

Peter Arnet had the same defense; he claimed that his description of the "difficulties" our forces were faced with was simply the consensus of what journalists in Baghdad were saying. And that was a slightly less negative perspective of coalition progress than "Comical Ali" was promulgating on Iraqi TV. BUT IT DID NOT CORRESPOND TO REALITY ON THE GROUND. Anyone who didn't know that then has been in denial for a long time if they don't know it now.

Journalism systematically averts its gaze from the trail of fatuous errors it has made by systematically discounting what conservative people (e.g., military commanders) have told them. Journalism is the establishment in America, to the extent that it is able to systematically divert our attention from its errors.

Many closed-minded people take for granted that journalism is the pursuit of truth; it is not. Journalism is the pursuit of ratings via nonfiction entertainment. And that makes journalism essentially as superficial and self-important as the rest of the entertainment industry.

Urban legends are circulated on the Internet by people who find the stories too good to be passed up--but the same mechanism exists among journalists. The fact that those same stories are too good to be true is, in their thinking, beside the point. Apparently the "McCarthy era" myth fits that bill precisely; the story of the fearless journalists facing down the ruthless right-wing crackpot is so flattering to journalism that no journalist can resist it.

It seems to strike most historians the same way. But, according to Ann Coulter, all historical accounts of "McCarthyism" rely on the same "secondary sources" as the original journalism did. In other words, the whole thing is an urban legend.