Recommended viewing
There are a few movies coming out that I'd like to see. I don't frequent the theaters as much as I used to, but I do recommend checking out Good Night, And Good Luck which I saw recently.
It covers journalist Edward R. Murrow and his reporting for CBS News. It focuses on Sen. Joe McCarthy's witchhunt against supposed communists as head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. As a result of Murrow's reporting, McCarthy was eventually exposed as the lying lowlife that he was.
The movie reminds viewers that television journalism can accomplish good when the journalists are allowed to do their job and are not neutered by the news division's corporate ownership in the process.
posted by Scott @ 3:44 PM
2 Comments:
Hear hear. A friend, after seeing this, was impelled to join the ACLU. As a reporter, I felt a stirring in my heart to see somone from the Big Media of the 1950s taking on someone in the upper reaches of the federal government.
McCarthy sounded as nuts as today's neocons, but at best we've had Jon Stewart taking them on. That marks a big shift, when a sarcastic, satiristic faux newsman is showing the reaily evident holes in the neocon's arguments, but no serious journalists a la Ed Murrow are in such his positions today.
I think the biggest difference between then and now, in terms of journalism, is that editors were willing to stand up for their reporters then. Obviously there still exist examples of this now, but there's such an enormous amount of pressure from the top down that stories with any merit or opinion to them are squeezed out. It's a shame.
I really enjoyed the movie as well. The mood of the film, it's pacing and the unspoken parallels to today made it very worthwhile.
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