Listening to “McCarthy: The Reds Were Under the Bed” on Radio 4, I found myself somewhat shocked. I do not often find myself jolted by such things, but this was too much; here was a program that was actually telling me that Joe ‘the drunken witch hunter’ McCarthy was right. This program wanted to tell me his wild accusations that every other mother’s son in the American government of the 1950’s was a communist have been proven true by recently released documents. Never mind that the most persuasive argument the program presented arose from evidence disseminated in 1995.
The program sets out to vindicate Joe McCarthy, ignoring how his unfounded accusations ruined people’s lives and has forever muddied the waters in the American psyche so that many do not know the differences between a liberal, a socialist and a communist.
Of the list of names that McCarthy claimed were all communists, or sympathisers or ‘fellow travellers, one contributor claims “It’s like the Rosetta stone”. The justification of this was that the FBI had files on those people and they were suspected of communist sympathies in the Second World War.
Claiming that suspicions raised ten years beforehand by the world’s most paranoid intelligence entity were evidence of a massive communist infiltration seemed to be a bit of a stretch, to me at least. But it was when the presenter, David Aaranovitch, said “Some say” that I became really interested.
The expression “Some say” is used on the Rupert Murdoch run ultra-right-wing dystopian future fascist propaganda channel ’Fox News’ as a way of introducing the presenter‘s ‘spin‘ on a subject, whilst still giving the appearance of fairness. For example: “President Obama took a bath this morning. Some say he bathes in child’s blood, lambs tears and pornography.” There is no claim of any basis for this version of his bathing habits, they just get the unfounded accusation in and move on. On Fox there is a drip-drip of this paranoia-inducing journalistic malpractice throughout the day.
I got a first hand dose of that stuff here in Foggy Albion when Aaranovitch blandly stated: “Some say the (US) government in 1945 wanted to downplay any apparent evidence of communist infiltration so as not to upset their ally, the Soviet Union. Also, the evidence of pro-Soviet influence… was obtained illegally through wire-tapping and burglary, tactics that would have prevented a conviction and would have been politically embarrassing.”
That is a lot of information all coming from under the gnarled wing of ‘some say’. It certainly does not contain any reference to who is ‘some’, nor does it make any sort of case for what constituted the communist ‘influence’.
Shaken by this lazy, sloppy, editorial sleight-of-hand I decided to find out who was responsible for the program and started getting to know Juniper Productions. According to linked-in, they are a three person outfit with one follower (Jesus, I’m down as a waiter and I have more than that). Digging deeper, I found an article by Andrew Pierce and Heidi Blake of the Telegraph, dated 19.7.09, entitled ‘BBC in cronyism row over paying 1.2 million in fees to family members’. It begins:
“The lion's share was taken by Samir Shah, a non executive director of the corporation, whose production company Juniper Communications was paid £715,000 last year. Mr Shah, who owns 70 per cent of Juniper, is paid £35,000 as a member of the BBC executive board which oversees the corporation's management and directs its editorial output.
“The payments to Juniper will also further enrich the family of Jana Bennett, the BBC head of Vision, who is tipped to be the first woman director general of the corporation. Miss Bennett's husband Richard Clemmow owns 10 per cent of Juniper. Last year Miss Bennett was paid £535,000 by the BBC.”
So Mr. Shah is on the BBC’s executive board and he directs editorial output? No wonder this program was in the headline banner of the BBC homepage. Further investigation turned up another dirty nugget, this time from Tom Harper of the Mail on Sunday, dated 6.9.09:
“Dr Shah’s firm was paid £308,000 for the My Story clips featuring TV fashion expert Gok Wan, comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar and paralympian Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson. However, an investigation into the deal, passed to The Mail on Sunday, found the original budget for the films was just £30,000.
“The 34-page report also reveals that another unnamed production company submitted a significantly lower offer to produce the films. A senior EHRC source said that bid was ‘around £55,000’.”
‘Juniper Communications’ has disappeared, but ‘Juniper Productions’ seems to have taken its place, after a quick clean-up operation and a fairly unimaginative re-naming. The ‘linked-in’ page for Juniper Productions describes the company as producing “Historical Audio Media Music Productions for Broadcast” (lol) and the link listed as ‘homepage‘ led to http://rayteret.com/, a page trying to hawk some flea-bitten and filthy ‘how to become an entrepreneur’ DVD.
So, how do you become an entrepreneur? It’s easy if you know people who will give you licence-fee money with no questions asked. Should nothing else come up, £715,000 will keep you well oiled for the next year, then change the company name and repeat. Hilariously, rayteret.com recommends getting to grips with the web as a tool for professional advancement, and yet their own linked-in page and wider web-presence is a pitiful joke; I could find nothing on facebook, myspace or twitter.
Nietzsche said ‘monstrum in facie, monstrum in animo’ meaning that if what you present to the world is rotten, then so too is your soul. This is my central point: that this program does a sub-standard job by presenting a frighteningly two dimensional view of the McCarthy trials. Juniper Productions are commissioned to do so, not because they are a genuinely respected company, but because they know the right people. The air-waves are polluted with this vacuous garbage in the guise of intellectually diverting programming because the people in charge of the BBC believe ‘jobs for the boys‘ is a valid hiring policy.
Production companies that legitimately sought BBC funds to produce programming were ignored in favour of the friends, relatives and even companies of the board. As a result we got at least one program that was misguided in its central premise that McCarthy could ever be proven right; he cannot.
It was never whether there were communists on capital hill that gave McCarthy his bad name; instead it was his manner, his wild and unfounded allegations, his demagoguery that was his crime. The spy game goes on and will always go on and it was ever thus, but accusing people with no evidence, or evidence that you refuse to reveal, of plotting to ‘infiltrate’ the position they possess, that is McCarthyism.
Whether or not one or other person actually is a communist, it was the perversion of the judicial process that defined his campaign not as lawful trials or even as an anti-communist crusade, but as witch hunts. In a witch hunt; the evidence is inaccessible, the accusations are only offensive to the ignorant and the suspicion of guilt is equal to a conviction in the mob’s eye. That was the injustice of Joe McCarthy; he can never be vindicated.
It should be no surprise, however, that a production company receiving BBC commissions through cronyism could not see that it was justice herself who McCarthy offended: they have forgotten that process matters and would rather not think about such abstract things as justice, fair-trading, right and wrong. Juniper Productions are doomed to be capable only of soulless garbage because if for a moment they were possessed by the kind of self-reflection necessary for quality programming then the blackened wastes of their hearts might awake in them and, for a moment, they might feel the ego-crushing shame of realising that they are an edifice of contemptible air, farted from the arses of undeserving, aristocratic parasites.
