Press Coverage of the Exoneration Campaign

National press coverage for the effort started in October of 2016. 60 Minutes aired a rare, double-length story interviewing Ethel’s sons Robert and Michael Meeropol and exploring the miscarriage of justice in the Rosenberg case. In the wake of that broadcast, media built to a crescendo by the end of 2016.

NPR’s Morning Edition and Here and Now, CBS News, The Washington Post, CNN, Democracy Now! and The Nation were among the many national outlets that did original reporting about the exoneration campaign. Newspapers and radio shows from Canada, England, Israel, Germany and Austria interviewed the Meeropol brothers. An Associated Press article appeared in more than 30,000 newspapers.

The Boston Globe wrote about the campaign repeatedly and its editorial board endorsed the effort with a full-page call for Obama to act. Their stories noted the fact that four members of the Massachusetts delegation in Congress got involved in the effort: U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and U.S. Representatives Jim McGovern and Richard Neal.

And even Fox News covered the campaign favorably, with a story on a stunning report from the Seton Hall School of Law about the government’s egregious actions towards Ethel, published in mid-December. Fox’s headline read, “Legal scholars claim new evidence shows Ethel Rosenberg was innocent in infamous spy case.”