For instance, I found it interesting that Milo's interview, who was a Lieutenant in the airforce, showed how being labeled as a security guard for the communists could not only affect the person being accused but could affect their families and everyone they knew in their lives. Being accused could destroy a person and their entire family’s reputation in society. Milo talked about how his daughters would have to explain to their friends what happened to their dad and why he was being scrutinized. This is heartbreaking to think about because these are just children that were being affected by the Red Scare.
The movie shows just how dangerous it is to be a communist sympathizer by how little it takes to be scrutinized. One of the reporters in the room when Ed decided that he wanted to go after Senator McCarthy had to excuse himself because his ex-wife was a communist sympathizer and had gone to communist meetings, and even though they weren't married anymore, just simply having that connection would have hurt their mission to go after the Senator in the news. This was eye-opening for me, I didn't realize how quickly people could have their reputations tarnished. While watching the film, I thought of the Salem Witch Trials. Women were so quickly marked as witches and sentenced to death with little to no evidence, all it took was an accusation. As this move makes it abundantly clear from Ed and the Senator's back and forth, all it takes is one person to spread a lie for a person to be stuck under the communist stigma.
Another interesting aspect of the movie is how Joe and Shirley couldn't wear their wedding rings to work because at the time CBS was an anti-nepotism company and they couldn’t let anyone know that they were married. Before watching this film, I didn't know what nepotism was. While watching, I did a quick Google search and I learned that nepotism is, "favoritism (as in appointment to a job) based on kinship." This was interesting to me because I wondered if there were a lot of other couples doing the same thing as Joe and Shirley during this time.
When CBS caught Joe and Shirley being a married couple and they were given the opportunity for one of them to leave the office in order to save another colleague from being fired. I was surprised that the couple didn’t have a very angry reaction to this news, they seemed very civil and relaxed during the whole thing. It was almost as if they knew that this was going to happen eventually, I noticed.
Going back to the media feud between Ed and McCarthy, I noticed that from Senator McCarthy's end, he used lies to try and get the public to turn against Ed. Senator McCarthy fired back at Ed’s attack on him in the media by claiming that Ed was involved in communist propaganda in an attempt to ruin him and his reputation. Claiming, that if Ed was giving comfort to the enemy (the communists) he had no place being broadcast in people’s homes. McCarthy attempted to make people turn on Ed by claiming all of these things in his own broadcast and encouraging people to stand with him against Ed and his show. He claimed that Ed worked for the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), which Ed said in his own broadcast was false. This just shows how desperate people were to protect their own reputation during the Red Scare and that they would throw another person under the bus to do it.
It was intriguing how Ed and Senator McCarthy went at each other back and forth through broadcast news, attempting to discredit what the other had said about them in their previous broadcast. This just proves the power of the news and how it can be used to influence a large number of people.
I liked how Ed was very strategic with how he responded to the Senator’s broadcasts. He would clarify what was true and what was false from the objections of Senator McCarthy. This was a very clear contrast from McCarthy's responses because all he did was fire accusations at Ed instead of defending his own reputation and name, this seemed very silly to me as I was watching because it made the Senator seem guilty of what he was being accused of.
It's clear that these differences in strategic responses from Ed and McCarthy are what set them apart in the eyes of the public, from the perspective of the movie audience at least, Ed was definitely seen in a brighter light. It became evident that this was also the perception Ed's audience was having when Ed got the Senate to investigate McCarthy.
The most shocking part of the film for me was that despite how successful the media attack against Senator McCarthy was, Ed's show was still greatly reduced in air time as a result of the controversial subjects he covered and the untimely suicide of his colleague, Don Hollenbeck.
I wish the movie would have ended with Ed prevailing above the Senator for successfully showing the public his true colors and retaining air time for his show, however, I feel like the actual ending was a better representation of how the Red Scare. That period wasn't a time of success, and even undeserving people were met with devastation and lows, unfortunately, just like Ed was.
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