Floyd Abrams and the McCarthy documentary case
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- See also: Floyd Abrams
Helen Whitney was a prize-winning American Broadcasting Corporation producer and writer who in 1982 devoted half of a one-hour program (American Inquisition) to the impact McCarthyism had on Fairmont, a small West Virginia town. She focused on Luella Mundel, who chaired the art department at Fairmont State College. The narrator said in 1951 Mundel "was not a political activist, but had tastes, convictions about art, about religion, unfamiliar to these streets. And at a local American Legion seminar about subversives, she angrily stood to challenge what was being preached there. Her contract was dropped by the college. A state education official accused her of being a poor security risk. She then sued for slander, but in the trial that followed in Fairmont's courtooom, it was Luella Mundel and her right to speak freely, to be different, that wound up being tried."[1]
[edit] Conservative view
"In presenting the case of Luella Mundel, an art teacher at Fairmont College in Fairmont, West Virginia. ABC gave the impression that Victor Lasky had been one of the accusers who had caused her to lose her job. Laskv [sic] was lured into giving ABC News an interview on the pretext that it wanted to talk to him about fighting communism in the 1950s and about the Americanism lectures that he gave for the American Legion. It also wanted to talk about the little people who were caught up in the controversy, such as Luella Mundel, who had been the subject of an article published in Harper's magazine." Accuracy in the Media, June 1983.[2]
According to Accuracy in the Media, Lasky only had a "brief encounter" when he was one of several speakers at the seminar. Mundel criticized the speakers, of which Lasky was one.
Lasky said he recalled when meeting Helen Whitney that she was "an hysterical woman." He said, "I had to...try to calm her down." [3]
