March 17th is also the Feast Day of St. Gertrude of Nivelles, Patron Saint of Cats

March 17, 1967, the Dead Release Their First Album

Who can deny it wasn’t just a change of style? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJeTl6KoJUE

March 9th, 1954: Murrow Takes on McCarthy

I’ve covered this before https://wordpress.com/post/scaypgrayce.wordpress.com/5776?s=Murrow+McCarthy, and I have, at another juncture, bemoaned how our media helped McCarthy rise to power and repeated the exercise in 2016 https://wordpress.com/post/scaypgrayce.wordpress.com/6763. But it’s worth coming back to the well, because the Fourth Estate shows few signs of having learned anything over the decades.

McCarthy, unprincipled and cruel, ruined lives and careers, and the stain of his extremism has never been fully expunged. His right-hand man, Roy Cohn, shaped the man who came even closer to destroying our democracy, and whose influence remains strong in the Republican Party.

Murrow was criticized in some quarters for waiting too long to take on McCarthy, but when he did, as the country’s most visible and respected journalist, the result was devastating. Nine months later, the Senate censured McCarthy. His career crashed, and, a few years later, he was dead.

We are in a more dangerous situation, now, and while McCarthy’s spiritual son still runs loose, we have yet to see the equivalent of Ed Murrow. If anything, our media follows the demagogues with fascination, even a certain enthusiasm.

Later,

March 7th, 1965

Don’t ever believe there aren’t people working to drag us back there.