There is another dimension to this story that has become clearer with time. McCarthy was basically a typical twentieth-century government propagandist; like Creel, Mussolini, or Goebbels, he used the looming foreign threat to inflame hatred for marginal groups (communists mainly, but also gays) for the sake of amassing power. By exposing him, Murrow and CBS demonstrated not only courage but also the power of the private sector and, in particular, the attention industries, to defeat official propaganda. That had never happened before.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 446