[Movies]

Good Night, and Good Luck

During the 50s,

journalism was going through growing pains as television was quickly supplanting radio as the medium of choice for American families. As cheaply-produced sitcoms and game shows raked in the money, broadcasters were looking at their news divisions and demanding that they they either got cheaper to produce or attracte more eyeballs. Fast forward to the new millennium, when journalism finds itself wracked by further growing pains as television news migrates from broadcast to cable. The questions of money, objectivity, and relevance are now rocking journalism again.

George Clooney’s new film Good Night, and Good Luck, which opened yesterday, may depict Edward R. Murrow’s battle to expose Joe McCarthy, but it’s about American journalism in the age of Karl Rove. The movie, though, is less about the political similarities--cold war vs. war on terror, evil-doers vs. Soviets, McCarthy vs. Bush--than about the role the media played in addressing the twin political contexts.

McCarthy is not meant to be a stand-in for Bush, but rather the force of tyranny that will always creep into powerful institutions, and which is now creeping into the US government. It was satisfying to hear the resonance between the two ages of GOP corruption--and to hear the recognition flare throughout the crowd in the form of cynical guffaws--but the movie has a deeper and more disturbing point.

During the early cold war, as with our current early terror era, no one was willing to criticize the government as it danced on civil liberties and crushed lives. McCarthy's witch hunt rolled forward, and the timid dissentors in the government were in no position to stop it. The question in the CBS newsroom, and the question Clooney is concerned with, wasn't whether McCarthy was doing anything wrong, but rather how to report it. Clooney shows Murrow, his producer, Fred Friendly, and CBS news grapple with the question. Is it appropriate to take a position on McCarthy? Does merely pointing out the damage he has caused constitute an ethical breech? While Murrow and Friendly knew where they stood, it was the minority position.

Of course, the outcome is never in doubt, of course. We know that Murrow will take down McCarthy. We know that CBS will become so influential that the decisions Murrow and Friendly make will actually come to define journalistic ethics. Clooney depends on our meta-textual understanding of the story he's telling so that when we see Murrow, we think of the run-up to the Iraq war. We watch Murrow and we imagine what might have happened if he hadn't begun running stories critical of "the junior Senator from Wisconsin" (he couldn't seem to bring himself to name McCarthy). And then we think of Iraq and the answer is provided for us.

Where is journalism headed? As a warning coda to the story, Clooney shows Murrow's own end--getting run out because his program couldn't compete with game shows. There was never actually a time when news was independent from revenues, or when journalists didn't bump up against ad client--and these pressures are on display in the film But, confronted with governments reaching for power in times of war, journalists also had to ask questions about what the nature of fact was, and how to present it. In Good Night, and Good Luck we watch one of the great moments in journalism, as one news team navigated these difficult questions. But it's hard to take full pleasure in what they accomplished because we keep thinking of later journalists, making different decisions.

[Originally published at BlueOregon]