Today's Murrow of Tomorrow

George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is a historical film depicting the early days of television broadcasting in the 1950s. Starring David Strathaim, Robert Downy, Jr., Ray Wise, George Clooney, and Frank Langella among others, these actors were used in the portrayal of real-life people. The film tells of the true-to-life struggles between Edward R. Murrow’s beliefs in reporting the truth and exposing “the bad guys” and Senator Joseph McCarthy trying to suppress the media through relentless blacklisting and accusations of communist activities by all people involved in the entertainment world.
This movie is very visually striking, whereas most other films in the “journalist genre” of films are very realistic looking. This works well in the film, throwing the audience back into the era from which these problems lay for awhile through the use of black and white film, and then in the very ending as they are left with Murrow’s famous speech, they are left to the realization that the entire film and its messages are certainly applicable to the situations in the United States of today.
While many journalist-genre films tend to bash a journalist, it is not surprising that Americans are biased against journalists. Roger Ebert, in his review on Good Night and Good Luck says “the movie is not really about the abuses of McCarthy, but about the process by which Murrow and his team eventually brought about his downfall (some would say his self-destruction). It is like a morality play, from which we learn how journalists should behave. It shows Murrow as fearless, but not flawless.”(“Good Night, and Good Luck”,Wikipedia). This is both an insult to how journalists of today are perceived as well as a great compliment to Murrow and the film itself.
Murrow began his career in radio broadcasting for CBS in Europe during WWII, which led to his famous live radio broadcast to the United States during the London Blitz. On his return to the states, CBS hosted a “welcome home” dinner of sorts for him with hundreds of guests and an even greater number of people tuning into the dinner via their radios. Tuning in they could hear Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish give an speech in which he said:

“You burned the cit of London in our houses and we felt the flames...You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead...were mankind’s dead without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be...you have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not really done at all.” (“Edward R. Murrow”).

Less then a week later the US had entered into WWII, Murrow is often given a lot of credit for the US’s involvement in the war.
This series of events eventually launched Murrow into television broadcasting career at CBS. He is most famous for the actions he took against Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s as depicted in Good Night, and Good Luck. Murrow was constantly working to expose the truth and reveal the injustices in the world.
Joseph M. McCarthy was a Senator from Wisconsin who rose from teenage chicken farmer, to the youngest circuit judge ever elected in Wisconsin, to the Senate (clooney studio). McCarthy addressed the national suspicions of communist infiltration in the United States by feeding off of the public’s fears. He made accusations, without definitive proof, of communist permeation within the government. These accusations eventually spilled from the government into other major areas of social concern in the US, especially the media, i.e. Hollywood and television in particular. From there it ran rampant, blacklisting of any person suspected of any connection whatsoever that may have anything to do the Communist part occurred, ruining the lives and careers of countless of numbers of people involved in entertainment.
Eventually, aided greatly by the exposure of McCarthy and HUAC’s activities aired on CBS’s “See it Now” on March 9, 1954 with Edward Murrow, McCarthy was investigated by the Senate. This resulted in the Senate committee’s report describing the acts of McCarthy as vulgar, insulting, and inexcusable among other things. He remained in the Senate, but his reputation was marred for life. ("Good Night, and Good Luck." George Clooney - Clooney Studio).
The movie’s accuracy in depicting this era in the history of the US is certainly accurate as far as the media history is concerned. The stylization and soundtrack of the film certainly depict a certain “bygone” era which is nostalgic, but too ideal to be an actual accurate depiction of the world back then. At the very least, it must have been a lot noisier then it’s shown as being. The sets and shots are shown as being very sterile and very quiet. The soundtrack consists of Dianne Reeves singing periodically throughout the movie and different intervals, scene changes and time lapses (IMDB). However, the rest of the film is mainly silent, without any kind of background music whatsoever. This provides for great effects in the film as far as looking at the era in which it is set. It gives the audience a strong sense of the “hush-hush” situations these media people found themselves in the light of the times. People were afraid to speak out against McCarthy for fear of being blacklisted themselves. They were forced to sign papers saying they had never had anything to do with the Communist party, regardless of where they actually stood on political matters. They were powerless at the time, it was a choice between their own personal morals and ethics or the demise of their careers and future lives. The quietness of the film also helped in letting the audience focus on the issues and dialogue which were rapidly being thrown around the screen, a lot of mood music would take away from the seriousness of the situation.
The historical characters and situations in which they are involved are very true-to-life. Fred Friendly, the Wershbas, Sig Mickelson, William Paley, and of course Murrow just to name a few of the characters really fought for their careers and against McCarthyism as shown in the film. All of these people, involved in television broadcasting at the time took huge risks in acting out against the Senator’s actions at this time. The heroic steps they took proved themselves as true journalists during that time period. They stood up for the people, the truth, and exposed the wrongdoings and lies of the government in the light all journalists would love to be seen in.
A look at the ending of this film shows lines from the famous speech Murrow made at the RTNDA Convention in Chicago, October 15, 1958. (Murrow):
“To those who say people wouldn't look; they wouldn't be interested; they're too complacent, indifferent and
insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter's opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost. This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Good night, and good luck.”

This was the actual speech in which Murrow got into quite a bit of trouble late on, but he was still ever the journalist, telling it how it was, always being honest in his reporting and his opinions both.
Going by this quote, if Murrow were alive today I cannot conceive that he would be happy or proud with the way television of today has evolved, and what it has evolved into. Without first looking at the news itself of today, take a look at the pure entertainment that society puts on television of today. Reality T.V. is a prime representation of just how lowly our prime time entertainment has become. We not only struggle to live out our own lives, but at the day’s end we feel the need to derive pleasure from other people’s struggles and misfortunes with no redeeming value whatsoever. These shows have no morals, no values, no educational or even relaxing value to them, so why is the public so fascinated with them? Murrow said the television could teach, illuminate, and inspire. These shows do none of that. We have failed to follow his warnings that television can be used as tool only to the extent which people use it. Such big-time entertainment niches in the television world of today (for example, MTV) are exactly the opposite of what Murrow would have had liked to see television used for.
The news industry of today is an absolute mess as well. Take the Dan Rather scandal, the political divisions excruciatingly apparent in such big-name news networks as Fox, all the “fluffy” news stories the local news channels find so necessary to inform the public of. These are precisely the kinds of shoes Murrow hated, even as he was forced to host them on CBS as made blatant in Good Night and Good Luck.
However historically accurate this film is of the 1950s and the media war with McCarthy at the time, this film is not merely a documentation of the past. It is a statement about our way of life as it presently stands in the US today.
“In the 1950s the right wing attacked liberals as being communists. In 2005 Karl Rove has attacked liberals as being therapists. Thus is born a kinder and gentler form of McCarthyism.....Rove’s instantly famous speech...should be read in light of this history and not be written off as a cheap, one-time partisan attack. On the contrary, the address by Rove, President Bush’s most important adviser, provides the outlines of a sophisticated strategy aimed at making liberals and Democrats all look soft on terrorism.” (Dionne, Jr).

Terrorism has simply taken the place of Communism in the United States of today. If one is against the war in Iraq, you’re unpatriotic, one must be a terrorist sympathizer. In the fifties if one didn’t conform to McCarthy’s ideals than HUAC declared one a communist, blacklisted instantly. Murrow would be terribly disappointed that his work to expose the government in it’s over-obsessive attempts to “cleanse” the US’s society were in vain, only to have them repeated fifty years later. Yet, it’s alright to expose the people of our country to the mindless babel of rotten television, poor morals and ideals strewn across our media as if it were candy for the public to gobble up and digest. Russia was a threat in the fifties, not the entertainment industry. Nowadays, the entertainment industry has found an all-time conglomerate-controlled low, we are attacking all of those overseas who are not a threat whatsoever, and pacifists or liberals (anyone who disagrees with the war or the President) are being attacked and labeled as “unpatriotic” and “terrorists”.
Good Night, and Good Luck strives not only to depict journalists as they should be, as Ebert voiced, but to draw attention to the obviously paralleling issues between our current society and that of our country’s yesterdays. History, although proven to continuously repeat itself, should be learned from in order to act upon mistakes previously made before they even occur. As a legendary broadcast journalist Murrow pushed the truth as he saw it on the American people, before Watergate, before the journalist-school boom. Yet every aspiring journalist should take a look at this film, at Murrow’s work, and compare it to the situations presented in our lives of today. As said best by Murrow:
“We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”(Clooney Good Night, and Good Luck).