BBC: Good Night and Good Luck--A Point of View-- A Must Read

[longship]

This is an absolutely smashing article.

In his weekly opinion column, Harold Evans looks at the state of television in the US, and doesn't like what he sees.


Morrow (fourth from left) in 1940 with collegues in London.

BBC: Good Night and Good Luck: A Point of View by Harold Evans

"This... is London".

Ed Murrow of America's CBS Network Radio always opened his World War II broadcasts with that purposeful hesitation. There was nothing hesitant though about his journalism though as movie audiences will see this season in the forthcoming George Clooney movie, Good Night and Good Luck.

At one level, the film is a melodrama about Murrow's use of the new medium of television against Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts in the 50s.

At another, it's an indictment of what network television in America has become, since it uses Murrow's own words to accuse the country's TV networks of deserting the civic values of its greatest broadcaster. The spectacle of Hollywood pummelling the commercial networks for becoming merely a money machine is richly ironic, even hypocritical if you like, but Good Night, and Good Luck is a movie made for only $8m, nothing by Hollywood standards.

<snip>

Today four multi-billion dollar entertainment conglomerates control network television in America. It is open to doubt whether Ed Murrow could long survive in the blandness that has enveloped so much of the country's programming.

In my view, the safe "he-said, she-said, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other " style of journalism is an abdication of the journalist's responsibility to pin down the truth.

<much more at link>

Sorry if this is a dupe. If it is, maybe it needs another run.

[Bozita]

1. "Of course, real news is expensive...

... but the consequences of letting this country, any country, fly blind are even more expensive - for the public."

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?

[burrowowl]

2. Can't wait for the movie to come out

I was small, but I remember seeing McCarthy and the hearings on TV and people shuddering.
Hopefully the movie will wake people up and get them to be proactive!