There’s a hint in the movie that TV journalism---all journalism---was what it is today, superficial, process and narrative obsessed, prone to the worship of power and success and the celebrification of the rich and powerful, including and especially Washington politicians, fetishizing “balance” and “objectivity”. Chuck Todd would have been as at home then as he is now, although he might have thought twice before blithely announcing it’s not his job to sort out fact from fiction or determine who’s lying and who’s telling the truth out of fear of what Ed Murrow would think of him. But part of why McCarthy was able to get away with things he did---“I hold in my hand a list…” was that the national press corps practiced the same He Said-She Said journalism that lets Republicans today claim climate change is a hoax, tax cuts pay for themselves, government spending doesn’t create jobs, Obamacare will establish death panels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... I learned in a history of journalism course back in college that after the Senate finally censured McCarthy and he crawled all the way into the bottle---one thing is clear in the clips interspersed throughout Good Night, and Good Luck: McCarthy was almost continually drunk---there was some collective soul-searching among journalists and editors that concluded with the self-indictment that “balance” was another name for institutional timidity and for some time after, up to and through the Vietnam War and Watergate, news organizations practiced a more aggressive and investigative brand of reporting. That ended with the election of Ronald Reagan and the realization that there was a large conservative audience waiting to be exploited as a market for advertising.At the daily howler, Mr. Somerby in commenting on a speech by Malala Yousafzai mentions the oppositional tendency of current journalists.
George Takei speaks at the National Press Club (YouTube video -- speech begins 8 minutes in).
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