ping for a comment
Thanks for the ping. I'm on a bit of a time crunch today, but some quick comments:
It's true the government sometimes didn't reveal its evidence in order to protect Venona. I'm not aware McCarthy had any direct access to Venona, though (on this see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona, 396n11: "The authors have several times asked if Senator McCarthy had knowledge of the Venona decryptions, perhaps leaked to him. . .There is no evidence that McCarthy had any such information. . .The targets he picked for his accusations do not suggest Venona as a source. . .")--as far as I know if he had any information from US government files he got it indirectly via ex-FBI agents and reporters who'd received FBI leaks. (Something in the background of this worth noting is that in order to obstruct Nixon's investigation of Alger Hiss, President Truman--who was not a Communist sympathizer but viewed the Hiss investigation in partisan terms--had issued an Executive Order in March 1948 legally prohibiting Congress from access to FBI files, so Nixon had to rely on indirect access to investigate Hiss, and McCarthy subsequently faced the same obstacle.) As for Murrow, what I find interesting there is his background with Elmer Davis in the Office of War Information's WWII propaganda operation, which was run by journalists and newscasters with a left-wing bent and which we now know from Venona had been penetrated by at least half a dozen Soviet agents during the war (some whose identities have yet to be deciphered). I tend to think the liberal bias in today's media stems from the left-wing influence in the wartime OWI being passed on to the postwar media.