In Sunday’s Washington Post, the bragging newspaper couldn’t just run an article on the new “fact-based” movie about its Seventies heyday. The Post gang of movie critics made a list of the ten best Journalism Movies and recruited journalists to tout them. So Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein praised the movie about their crusade against Nixon, All The President’s Men (1976), and current Post editor Martin Baron touted a movie promoting his role in slamming the Catholic Church at The Boston Globe in Spotlight (2015).
But the purplest prose about heroic journalistic activists came from NBC’s Andrea Mitchell touting the myth-making movie about CBS News called Good Night and Good Luck (2005).
I love this George Clooney film for the way it uses the 1950s McCarthy inquisition to illustrate the critical role television news can perform — if it has the courage to do so….
Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) warns fellow broadcasters at a 1958 awards dinner to hold the powerful accountable, even as network executives and their advertising masters try to straitjacket Murrow and his colleagues, one of whom takes his own life as a result of the Communist-baiting witch hunt.
The movie carried the propagandistic slogan “In A Nation Terrorized By Its Own Government, One Man Dared to Tell The Truth.” But "truth" gets mangled to add drama. The movie shows Don Hollenbeck's suicide closely following Edward Murrow's April rebuttal to McCarthy, but Hollenbeck killed himself in July. Clooney also mangled the history of Murrow's See It Now program, which wasn't taken off the schedule immediately after the McCarthy wars, as the movie portrays it.
Mitchell naturally found this "witch hunt" movie has Trumpian parallels:
The film is exquisitely current at a time when the news media are being attacked as “the enemy of the people.” Murrow helped bring down McCarthy by exposing his lies and bullying tactics. But four years later, as the film ends, Murrow tells his colleagues that if television is used only to “entertain, amuse and insulate,” then “the whole struggle is lost.” He goes on to say: “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.” A prescient warning, in television’s infancy, more than a half-century ago.
Mitchell and her media buddies still righteously talk about McCarthy's "lies" without ever asking if there were actual Communist Party members and Soviet agents inside the federal government. Indeed, there were, including Annie Lee Moss, a figure at the center of the Clooney movie on Murrow.
Journalists sometimes lack the skill of introspection about movies that glorify them as freedom-loving heroes. As Jack Shafer wrote in 2005, Clooney had found a secular savior: "If Jesus Christ no longer satisfies your desire to worship a man as god, I suggest you buy a ticket for Good Night, and Good Luck, the new movie about legendary CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. Good Night, and Good Luck's Murrow burns cigarettes like altar incense."
