[Mb-civic] Good night, Murrow - Thomas Doherty - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Good night, Murrow

By Thomas Doherty  |  October 11, 2005

ON A WASHED-OUT, nicotine-stained kinescope, the hallowed talking head 
of Edward R. Murrow delivers a terse commentary that, over a half 
century later, still packs a wallop.

The show is CBS's ''See It Now," telecast on March 9, 1954, and the 
episode is ''A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy," the first 
unflinching critique of the man and his ism on television. ''The actions 
of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay 
amongst our allies abroad and considerable comfort to our enemies," 
Murrow intones, before turning his lens on a target closer to home. 
''The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

After that incantation -- so goes the legend -- the demonic Joe McCarthy 
vanished in a puff of smoke. Indeed, the epic joust between Murrow and 
McCarthy has congealed into a kind of journalistic creation myth. The 
artist Ben Shahn printed a still life version of the legend entitled 
''Edward R. Murrow slaying the dragon of Joseph McCarthy," an 
illustration showing the newsman, astride a horse, skewering the senator 
with a lance.

George Clooney's ''Good Night, and Good Luck" is the latest tribute to 
the white knight of broadcast journalism, an earnest docu-drama from a 
Hollywood liberal that predictably credits Murrow with the kill.

Yet director Clooney and his co-writer Grant Herslov defy expectations 
by making the true villain of the tale not the senator but a menace more 
lethal to the ethos Murrow embodied: commercial television. The chilly 
corporate malevolence of CBS President William S. Paley (played by a 
vampirish Frank Langella) upstages the heated bombast of McCarthy 
(played, in archival clips, by himself).

Clooney's film is bookended by Murrow's bitter 1958 speech before the 
Radio and Television News Directors Association in Chicago, a forum 
Murrow used to denounce a prime time line-up designed to ''distract, 
delude, amuse, and insulate." Without a commitment to teach and 
illuminate the audience, lamented Murrow, television was ''merely wires 
and lights in a box."

Murrow was spending capital accrued during a lifetime of eyewitness 
reporting. For the first generation of Americans to experience the 
emotional intimacy of a media bond forged by shared history, Murrow was 
the object of the most intense and enduring of airwave relationships.

The bond would only deepen after 1951 when the voice of ''Hear It Now" 
came into focus as the face of ''See It Now." He moved from the 
microphone to the camera without missing a beat.

Over both airwaves, Murrow was a mainstream, consensus figure, sometimes 
an advocate but never instinctively adversarial.

Fortified by two wars and two media, the bond between the broadcaster 
and his audience was sturdy enough to test in an ongoing domestic 
battle. In 1953, with McCarthy newly empowered by the chairmanship of 
the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Murrow and his 
producer and collaborator Fred W. Friendly launched a campaign against 
the senator.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/11/good_night_murrow/
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