New York Dispatch. 1.

Edward R Murrow's name is invoked at more awards ceremonies than I'd like to remember. And it always seems that it's invoked by all the wrong people, either broadcast network executives or anchormen who "earn" huge salaries as they deliver news that looks more and more like Domino's Pizza - the ultimate generic product without much discernible flavor. Murrow's name comes up because people in television want to be associated with a name of quality, even though quality, if it ever existed on network television, is the hardest thing to find there today. Murrow (1908 - 1965) predicted that this would happen. What's nauseating is that the men who made it happen (and made money doing it) are the men who sing his praises at charity event after charity event. I bet even Rupert Murdoch has had nice things to say about Murrow.

Good Night and Good Luck, which opens the New York Film Festival with its US premiere tonight, begins to set the record straight about Murrow by toning down the sanctimony. The record on Murrow and on Senator Joseph McCarthy is important enough, since we have to assume that most under the age of 70 won't know much about that time. They probably haven't seen the footage of the thuggish McCarthy hurling out accusations that anyone opposing him was a communist and bullying anyone who challenged those accusations. McCarthy acted with near-impunity and the whole country watched. His charges were enough to ruin lives, and, while they intimidated the press that we see in Clooney's film, they also helped fortify a conservative Republican political agenda. McCarthy's usefulness may help explain why Eisenhower was not quick to take him on.

In Good Night and Good Luck, which takes its title from Murrow's sign-off line, CBS News is already fighting the battle against news-lite, as executives pressure journalists to interview celebrities like Liberace and Judy Garland. A story has come up in the smoke-filled offices of CBS, where the laconic Murrow (David Strathairn) hosts the program See It Now, which is produced by Fred Friendly (George Clooney). On a slow news day, Murrow learns from a newspaper in Detroit that the US Air Force has  ousted a lieutenant without a trial because one of his immigrant parents was accused of reading a Serbian communist newspaper. Murrow takes on the story over the objections of management - and over the objections of the Air Force, which refused to comment on the charges. Management frets over the potential loss of advertising, the Air Force warns of serious implications, the story runs, and the lieutenant is reinstated.

The battle then moves to Murrow versus McCarthy, whose minions have already circulated documents purporting to prove that Murrow has communist ties in his past. Murrow isn't dissuaded by another bully, the CBS CEO, William S Paley (Frank Langella), who reminds Murrow where his paycheck comes from, and Murrow airs a program pointing out the threat to constitutional freedoms posed by McCarthy's investigations. In the name of fair reporting, CBS gives McCarthy a chance to reply, and he accuses Murrow of doing the work of a communist conspiracy. On television, the journalist is more persuasive than the senator.

As the press and the public see that McCarthy's credibility can be questioned, the bullying senator is seen to be vulnerable. Murrow's reporting and his courage are praised, but the real damage comes when he's told that See It Now will be moved from its weekly evening slot to make way for an entertainment show. Was it about the now-weakened McCarthy, or was it about money? Was the real threat to journalism political, or was it commercial? The implications for today are too obvious to list here.

I've always wanted to believe that the press is as free as it wants to be, but when you're operating at this level, the press is as free as its stockholders want it to be. That sure hasn't changed.

If you read anything from Vogue to Time Out, you've seen the black-and-white palette of George Clooney's movie, with its swirls of cigarette smoke and its clusters of earnest newsmen costumed to recreate a distant 1953. Even with an extra twenty pounds or so, Clooney is appealing on the screen, and even more appealing in the photo-spreads which were shot when he took some of that weight off. There's not a single exterior shot in the movie, which helped keep the palette consistent (and I'm sure helped keep the budget down.) Fortunately, there's never too much atmosphere. Songs that seem to come from nowhere by Dianne Reeves relieve the urgent tension of the newsroom without turning the drama into a pageant. The real star here is Strathairn, the ramrod-straight, tight-lipped Murrow, whose super-dry comments sting with contempt for management of the news business and contempt for what television is becoming under management's control. Strathairn's Murrow is as fine as Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman Capote, tightly wound compared to the unraveling character of Capote.

Balanced reporting is already replacing accurate reporting, Murrow warns, and that's in 1953. It's something we should be hearing from the people practicing his craft today.

It's striking that two of the big "serious" films this season (Good Night and Capote) are portraits of journalists, each of whom, for better or worse, was a celebrity in his day. Neither is the conventional biopic that promises to give us the man in full - in 90 minutes. Yet in each film, the challenge turns out to be bigger than the man. Murrow exposes a bully of vast proportions and then predicts the decline of the new medium that enabled him to do it. (Ten years after the feud between Murrow and McCarthy, CBS News correspondents were narrating military propaganda films. Fifty years later, CBS producers were fired for minor problems in a report on W's ROTC days.) Capote reveals the human side of a man who committed vicious murders. The young man is hanged, nonetheless. After In Cold Blood, Capote abandoned serious journalism for booze and the life of a party scribe.

As much as these films should be welcomed, it's sad that an audience has to be getting its history from movies that compress an era that needs a lot more explaining into a feature-length story arc. We're lucky to be getting this much. In a press conference Wednesday at the Walter Reade Theater, where his film had just screened, a glib Clooney told an audience of reporters that the press needs to question authority.

As a member of the press recently "terminated" after a powerful institution complained about an accurate report that ran on NPR's All Things Considered, I can say from personal experience that "authority" is as strong as ever. (Google the key words - D'Arcy MoMA NPR Schiele - for details of my own case.) And it's a lot easier to be bullied when the audience and advertising for print journalism (and for most things serious) seem to be shrinking by the day.

The audience never appears in Good Night and Good Luck, yet characters make all sorts of assumptions in its name. After Murrow's broadcast on McCarthy in March 1954, calls from the audience to CBS were favorable to Murrow by a ten-to-one margin. There's some humor here. In the film, Murrow signs off, and the production team waits through what feels like a long silence to hear the feedback on the telephone. It turns out that a young assistant turned the phones off so they wouldn't interrupt the broadcast. Eventually, the reaction rings with approval. Where would the public be on an issue like that today? A lot of them would have already given up on network television.

Posted by dwhudson at September 23, 2005 11:52 AM