Lary Bloom
Writer, Editor, Teacher
The Bloom Blog
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Sunday, October 23, 2005
Good Night, Good Luck, Good Timing
In the last few years, we have been treated in film versions to two extremes of television, and specifically CBS. The Insider, for which Russell Crowe won an Academy Award for Best Actor, documented the way 60 Minutes -- up to then a television news show with unquestioned integrity -- caved in to corporate and advertising realities. The powerful tobacco companies put the network in a vulnerable position, and the result was punch-pulling, and the ebbing of CBS's credibility.This was particularly ironic and sad considering the legacy of Edward R. Murrow at CBS. George Clooney's new film, Good Night, and Good Luck, has taken a few hits from historians, but its essence remains true: the way Murrow and others at CBS stood up to governmental and economic pressures during the Joe McCarthy era. Clooney, obviously, made a parallel to the present, where the White House press corps, so pleased with their elite status, emerges from their days of work with little other than direct quotes from press secretaries. Who are the Edward R. Murrows of today?
Television has no one. Newspapers have none. Magazines have Hendrik Hertzberg (in the New Yorker), and a few others. But there is no one with the kind of influence Murrow had earned to say what clearly needs to be said about the frauds perpetrated at the highest levels of government, and about the political and economic pressures that result from them.
There are bloggers, of course. But we desperately need that national voice of honesty and courage to stand up to a political machine that has gone haywire, and in the process flung debris in a thousand directions at once -- while those in control are claiming it works fine.
Economic influences are huge in the newspaper and television businesses; there's nothing new in this. But the assumption that all will be well if the media is "balanced" and "objective" (in short, giving equal weight to everything, including matters in which there is no equal weight to be recognized) will not guarantee them anything, except becoming, as time goes on, irrelevant.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 7:57 AM
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