This week, we will again watch a video, “Good Night and Good Luck,” about one of journalism’s biggest heroes, Edward R. Murrow. He takes on Senator Joseph McCarthy and his destructive hunt for Communists in the U.S. in this film. Murrow sets the agenda of news people in America (and hence, Americans) in his fight against McCarthy. McCarthy’s Blacklist of Hollywood people and people on Broadway and in literature (after all, how best to spread propaganda if not through movies, plays and books?) was very destructive. In this film, think of these questions as you watch and then as you respond to this dialog: what tipped Murrow over the edge and made his TV show a single-issue show? What finally occurs that destroys McCarthy? News people are supposed to be impartial and tell both sides of a story – does Murrow violate this principle? Is he overly fixated on McCarthy’s lies and lose his objectivity?
Roger Ebert said this “is a movie about a group of professional newsmen who with surgical precision remove a cancer from the body politic.”