If you haven't seen Good Night and Good Luck, you must. It's an impeccable film about about the life and work of legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. More broadly, though, it explores the responsibilities of journalists — and the nature of courage, a quality not defined so much by the absence of fear as the willingness to act in spite of it.
As the definition of journalism now expands to include "citizen reporters" and tech companies not traditionally thought of as news providers, those issues seem all the more immediate.
A few related links:
* The movie begins and ends with a famous speech delivered by Murrow at the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in 1958. It's worth reading in entirety, and you can do that here. Snip:
Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER.
For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally.
Murrow worked in the early days of a centralized medium. He argues in this speech that television — the new technology of that time — could inform and empower in ways previous media couldn't, but that much of its potential was wasted.
Fifty years later, TV news institutions formed in his day are merging with a decentralized medium — the internet — and we have seemingly unlimited bandwidth. It's easier, more efficient, and cheaper than ever to distribute information. We have the same responsibility to use that bandwidth well.
* Here's Kenneth Turan's review in the LA Times, and here's an LAT profile of the actor who portrays Murrow so brilliantly, David Strathairn. I've been chewing on this line from the Strathairn interview since I read it:
He was a real spokesman for the common man. He was a person who lived by an adage I heard the other day: It is your duty to always take care of those who are less powerful than you and always question those who are more powerful.
* One of the more interesting interviews with the film's director, George Clooney, ran this past week on the Charlie Rose Show. Clooney is himself the son of a television news reporter, by the way. Unfortunately, the interview isn't offered on the program website for free, nor are transcripts. Google Video coughs up something here, but I'm not able to playback. If you can find it on BitTorrent or catch a rebroadcast on that other machine made of "wires and lights in a box", by all means watch it.
* I've been sniffing around for links to related online video and audio files — there's some here here, at archive.org. Old Time Radio has some archived audio clips here. And here are audio clips from his narration of War of The Worlds for television in 1957.
Reader Comment: Daniel Hengeveld says,
participate.net is a social action website created by Participant Productions (note: my employer), the producers of both Good Night and Good Luck and the upcoming North Country. The idea behind the site is to take the films' momentum and use it to propel social action campaigns.
For GN&GL, we have a campaign called "Report it Now" promoting citizen journalism and featuring a thriving discussion with bloggers from organizations like the ACLU and Ourmedia, as well as actors and real-life personalities from the film.
Our campaign for North Country, which deals with sexual harassment in the workplace, features calls to action such as a women-friendly workplace pledge and discussion guides for the film, and has a similar blog.
Reader Comment: Aman says,
Last Sunday the BBC program A Point Of View, hosted by Harold Evans (quite a well regarded newspaper editor in the UK for the pre-Murdoch owned Sunday Times, he's living and writing in NYC now) commented on Edward R Murrow and his importance, the archive should still be on the BBC's site for playback. Well worth a listen, though a transcript can be found here.
Reader Comment: Mark Pike says,
The Center for American Progress, a think tank in DC, hosted a film screening of Good Night and Good Luck a few weeks ago. Clooney and friends showed up and had a nice panel discussion, fielding questions from the audience. Link
