Argumentative Essay: The First Amendment

The first amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These laws have been in place since 1791, but what happens when suddenly the United States government doesn’t find these constitutional rights important anymore? To find out, we simply need to look back to the second red scare in the United States, during the heat of the Cold War. In those years, fears of a Communist invasion swept over the American public and its political leaders. This led to significant blows to freedom of the press, freedom

of speech and a number of Supreme Court decisions that limited the rights of American citizens.
To understand the limitation of freedoms in the United States, we first have to understand how this anti-Communist sentiment of the second Red Scare began. The period of Communist fear lasted roughly from 1947 to 1957, and its beginnings go hand in hand with the age of beginnings of McCarthyism. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin U.S. Senator from 1947 to 1957, used the threat of a red menace to boost his popularity and power. One of his first accusations for Communist insiders in the United States occurred in 1947, when he accused Capital-Times reporter Cedric Parker of being a known Communist and asking others to boycott the local paper in a speech that would later be considered “the prototype for those he would deliver in later years,” even though “Joe know the Capital-Times was anti-Communist.” For the next two months, McCarthy stumped Wisconsin, warning the locals about the growing Red Menace and telling the Kenosha Young Republicans that the State Department was “honeycombed and run by the Communists.” By the time he gave his infamous Wheeling address in 1950, the second Red Scare had a firm grasp on the majority of Americans.
With the coming of the second Red Scare and McCarthian beliefs, the freedom of press, one faction of the First Amendment, began to take a toll.

McCarthy himself didn’t help the Americans’ trust in the press as he frequently got into disputes with numerous publications. One example is journalist Drew Pearson. In 1950, the reporter started writing a series of columns condemning McCarthy for the Wheeling address. Later that year, McCarthy attacked Pearson in the coatroom of a club. A few days later, McCarthy “exposed” Pearson as a Communist at a press conference. After that, “any newsroom who persisted in criticizing the senator could expect to be labeled a Communist dupe,” and McCarthy used intimidation to continue to take advantage of the press.
But not all of the limitations put on the freedom of the press can be placed on McCarthy. In 1947, the Hutchins Commission’s final report stated that the freedom of the press was in danger. The report found that changes in the economic structure of the press, new forms of censorship and the growth of a mass democracy were hurting the First Amendment’s promised rights. After World War II ended, newspaper diversity was continuously declining, with more and more smaller newspapers having to shut down after newspapers couldn’t keep up with the booming population and

economy.
Ironically, this was happening right around the time the United States Government was pushing for the globalization for the freedom of the press. In 1946, President Harry Truman began pushing for a free flow of information across the world, and by the next year a newspaper industry trade journal declared “few issues have been pressed more earnestly at the UN than freedom of information.” But then hopes for openness and transparency in global communication were replaced by geopolitical confrontation, with “tension between the United States and Soviets … easily expressed in disputes about press freedom.” U.S. journalists began criticizing the Soviet’s practice of using news blockades around territory captured by the Red Army as early as 1945, but within the next few years the newspaper industry in America would face its own challenges with U.S. government pressuring it to become a channel for government propaganda.
Because propaganda was viewed as a Communist tactic, the United States government had to be secretive and creative when figuring out ways to distribute propaganda of their own. Surprisingly, many government officials, including the assistant secretary of the state after WWII William Benton, believed postwar propaganda institutions and the campaign for free information went hand in hand. Upon his return to the United States from Geneva, Harry Martin of the State Department was also convinced that the country needed a propaganda campaign. He was later appointed to the director of Labor Information for the Marshall Plan and took leadership of a propaganda program that produced news features, radio programs and traveling exhibits. President Truman declared propaganda was defined by its falsehood,12 creating a loophole that allowed the government to publish propaganda themselves guilt-free. Members of the Newspaper Guild, a group that could have possibly voiced concerns against such action, instead followed their president as Cold War propagandists because the organization itself was led by anti-Communists.12 In 1948, the U.S. government began to act as co-producers of the news, and networks soon became a channel for distribution of federal propaganda. In the early 1950s, “news management,” the attempt to influence, withhold and distort national and international news, started to spread in America. During this era, “antitotalitarian commitment to classical press freedom easily led to the acceptance of new forms of state power.”
During much of the second Red Scare, the press itself went along with the government’s wishes as its ethics and rights were stripped away. The Central Intelligence Agency, formed in 1947, soon established the concept of the “necessary lie” and began to take ownership of various radio stations and newspapers. Also during the Cold War, many television industries were restricted from giving out certain information in relation to other countries, including China and Guatemala. The press downplayed or even outright denied China’s Communist revolution and silenced reporters who tried to get the word out. “Given the potential consequences, the television industry was understandably hesitant to adopt independent perspectives that the First Amendment sanctioned.” The press had changed during this era into a more timid version of itself. This was both due to alliance to the country and fear of threats both inside and outside the country’s borders. News of the 50s was oversimplified and militaristic, and unless they were covering special events like Army-McCarthy hearings, the networks rarely had resources to cover events live. This in turn meant they relied on government briefing and official footage, putting their trust in a one-sided report.
During the second Red Scare, an idea soon took hold across the government and press the responsibilities of the press were more important than their freedoms at this time. “It soon became clear that press freedom did not extend to behavior that irresponsibly threatened Cold War obligations,”15 and this line of thinking was used to justify the policing of radicals in the press. That policing ended up resulting in a handful or reporters being brought in to testify their political beliefs, which in turn led to a handful of reassignments and firings.
Between 1952 and 1957, over 100 journalists were called to testify their current and previous political beliefs. This led to 14 journalists being fired from their positions. While this was obviously went against First Amendment rights, they were justified as “necessary measures to weed out irresponsible radicals and thus preserve American press freedom,” and were viewed as the press’ responsibility to assist the country.