City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington

An inside look at how midcentury DC journalists silenced their own skepticism and shaped public perceptions of the Cold War.

Americans current trust in journalists is at a dismayingly low ebb, particularly on the subject of national and international politics. For some, it might be tempting to look back to the mid-twentieth century, when the nations press corps was a seemingly venerable and monolithic institution that conveyed the official line from Washington with nary a glint of anti-patriotic cynicism. As Kathryn McGarrs City of Newsmen shows, however, the real story of what Cold Warera journalists did and how they did it wasnt exactly the one youd find in the morning papers.
 
City of Newsmen explores foreign policy journalism in Washington during and after World War IIa time supposedly defined by the presss blind patriotism and groupthink. McGarr reveals, though, that DC reporters then were deeply cynical about government sources and their motives, but kept their doubts to themselves for professional, social, and ideological reasons. The alliance and rivalries among these reporters constituted a world of debts and loyalties: shared memories of harrowing wartime experiences, shared frustrations with government censorship and information programs, shared antagonisms, and shared mentors. McGarr ventures into the back hallways and private clubs of the 1940s and 1950s to show how white male reporters suppressed their skepticism to build one of the most powerful and enduring constructed realities in recent US historythe Washington Cold War consensus. Though by the 1960s, this set of reporters was seen as unduly complicit with the governmentfailing to openly critique the decisions and worldviews that led to disasters like the Vietnam WarMcGarr shows how self-aware these reporters were as they negotiated for access, prominence, and, yes, the trutheven as they denied those things to their readers. See more