Wires and lights in a box

Chicago Institute of Art currently has an installation which flicks randomly through US television channels and averages them out to the colours that make up the TV signal. It speaks of a televisual culture whose choices merge into an indistinguishable commercialism. Something like this is, presumably, what revered CBS news anchor Edward R. Murrow had in mind when, in 1958, he lectured the Radio and Television News Directors Association on the dangers that television reduced to commercial entertainment is ‘merely wires and lights in a box’.

The force of these words, which are the last ones spoken in Good Night, and Good Luck, came home to me as I left the ramshackle $3 cinema in Chicago where I watched this true story of how Murrow’s See It Now show confronted the politics of fear cultivated by McCarthy and helped lead to his censure by the US Senate. The film, co-written and directed by George Clooney, is shot with a black-and-white ambiance that beautifully captures the smoky ambiance of the 1950s newsroom in which almost all of its scenes are staged.

Murrow's original 1954 broadcast used excerpts of McCarthy’s own speeches to criticise him, laying out the contradictory arguments, anachronisms and logical fallacies of the senator's arguments – as well as his persistent reliance on the repetition of unfounded assertions until they could take on the status of ‘facts’. Good Night, And Good Luck uses the same technique, making effective use of archive footage of McCarthy in full flight.

The contemporary resonance is hard to miss, with Clooney presenting the film as a reminder of 'how dangerous a democracy can be if fear [of terrorism] is used as a weapon.' whilst the story revolves around a personal battle between Murrow – played brilliantly by David Strathairn - and McCarthy, much of its drama is conveyed by the lingering sense that fear can infect people’s everyday interactions. A sub-plot tells of how fellow newscaster Don Hollenbeck is, eventually, hounded to death by hostile newspaper reports that he is a ‘pinko’, whilst the CBS news crew’s decision to go after McCarthy leads Murrow to question them about their communist connections in advance of an anticipated backlash. 'No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices', he concludes, visibly unsettled by the infectiousness tendency of McCarthyism to result in self-policing.

At the film’s climax we are shown McCarthy's rebuff to Murrow – a crude act of red baiting whose broadcast on See It Now did almost as much to damn the senator as the show’s original charge-sheet against him. But the denouement of the story comes when, as Murrow’s news crew receive word that McCarthy is to be censured by the Senate, they also here that See It Now is to be replaced by the $64,000 Question game show. The tension between hard news and the corporate sponsorship received by See It Now here reaches its conclusion, as a furious Murrow confronts CBS boss Bill Paley and reminds him that censorship is not just about saying no. Fear itself is not the only thing to fear, it seems, as the real Murrow later told a Chicago audience of news directors. His speech, with which Good Night, And Good Luck begins and ends, is a reminder that television can teach, illuminate and even inspire “to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.” This excellent film proves that this can be true even of a Hollywood production. But it is a sad reflection on the state of contemporary television that its ‘wires and lights’ commercialism currently leaves it shorn of the aspiration to impart greater truths.

More articles by Oscar Reyes