However, in the way that it brings Murrow to life and pays tribute to something he did that has likely been forgotten, the film makes a case for redefining what constitutes a good political film. Because the events depicted so clearly mirror events in our own political world and life, yet are done so in a way that grippingly recreates a lost era of the 1950s, a viewer gains the sense of being 'transported' in a way that is the essence of cinema.
The film's theme raises a potentially provoking challenge to our own media obsession -- yes, it is easy to condemn McCarthy now, with the wisdom of hindsight, now that McCarthy has become a synonym for baseless slander and the Soviet Union is defunct. However, after 9/11, another threat to the nation, the Department of Homeland Security engaged in a number of questionable tactics, including surveying the library borrowing records of Americans who were accused of no crime, and many Muslims, Arab-Americans, or simply individuals with dark skin were held in suspicion and 'profiled' by private and public organizations. "Good Night and Good Luck" as a film narrative does run the risk of merely congratulating us as viewers that we are not as we were 'back then,' during the bad, old days of 1950s witch-hunting, but because it is close enough to our own era it still provokes us to engage, as Americans, in more difficult national soul-searching about the need to balance liberty and security in a rational fashion that does not destroy the rights we are trying to protect. It is at once wholly of its era, filled with cigarette smoke and 1950s executives in drab, grey flannel suits and of our own era of corporate news media domination.
The most subtle question about the film raises is the question of media ownership. Despite the spread of sources of media through the Internet and blog-o-sphere, sources of the mass media are increasingly consolidated in only a few hands today. Disney owns ABC, Rupert Murdoch owns countless newspapers and television channels. This makes the pressure upon Murrow to conform by studio executives in the 1950s...
The reason Murrow's bosses are pressuring him to capitulate is not simply because he is against McCarthy, and may draw fire from the powerful and influential senator but because they fear losing advertising revenue. Even if viewers tune in to hear Murrow, if sponsors flee, than supposedly objective
journalistic channels like CBS cannot stay afloat.
Over and over again, the film demonstrates Murrow's
integrity in the face of such pressures. Murrow does offer to give McCarthy equal airtime in response, to show his own objectivity as a journalist, which of course the senator rejected. The shadowy 'money men' at CBS, like owner Bill Paley and Murrow's producer Fred Friendly clearly have different priorities than Murrow, who they force to do celebrity interviews when he would really be rather doing serious journalism. These historical figures, of course, can no longer speak for themselves, and the viewer must accept what the film makes them into -- symbolic, rather than real representative of corporate journalism. But they are symbols that have resonance with our own concerns today.
Once upon a time it was said that if a
lie was big enough, and told often enough, people would believe it. Murrow to expose such lies in the film strives to be an unapologetic advocate of the truth and essentially sacrifices his career, while the film strives to rebuild it and restore his name to his rightful
place in history. The film likewise, in tribute to its subject, unapologetically offers a version of
history with parallels to
contemporary society that is an
argument as well as a story. But it is not any less gripping or
artistic in striving to do so.
