This month, sophomore director George Clooney scored a success with his historical docudrama, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Set during the height of the Cold War, the film details the successful effort CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow to undercut the specious charges of Red-baiting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Underlying the movie is the belief that there is a truth in the world, and that at times the journalistic trend towards the false objectivity of giving each side of a debate equal weight must be thrown out the window. As Clooney explained to Jon Stewart, “The reason I did it was because it thought it was an interesting time to talk about the responsibilities of the fourth estate.” Murrow, as played exquisitely by David Strathairn, becomes fed up with simply repeating McCarthy’s unfounded claims of Communist infiltration of the government and devotes an entire program to exposing McCarthy as a sham. As a result of his efforts, and those of others like him, McCarthy was relegated to a position of historical ignominy.

Reporters today would be well-served by taking a lesson from Murrow. In an interview with The Hill newspaper in June, Joe Klein – author of “Primary Colors” (the novel upon which the 1998 Mike Nichols/John Travolta film was based) – offered an argument similar to that of Clooney. “A lot of times, especially on television, there is this kind of false balance where one side says, ‘The sky is blue,’ the other side says, ‘No, the sky is red,’” Klein said. “And you have to give ‘the sky is red’ as much credibility as ‘the sky is blue’ just because one side or the other said it. That’s nonsense. We have a job to seriously analyze the world and to figure out what comes closest to approximating the truth.”

Are there dangers to having reporters divine fact from fiction, truth from spin? Yes. If a journalist believes that he is offering an unabridged truth but is instead propagating falsehoods, the public can be mislead. Case in point, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, whose reporting on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) implied a need to go to war in Iraq.

Miller relied on huckster Ahmad Chalabi for “proof” that Saddam Hussein had WMD without taking Chalabi’s desire to unseat Hussein into account. Later, she was one of the few journalists that the administration contacted to contradict Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s claims that Iraq had not sought uranium for WMD. As a result of receiving this leak, Miller became embroiled in the investigation of the outing of Wilson’s wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, and eventually went to jail for 85 days to protect her sources, including the Vice President’s Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

Despite the danger of reporters peddling false memes, the effects of journalists neglecting their duty of real objectivity – rather than simply repeating what either side says – are far worse. When members of the media allow spurious claims to go unchallenged, they empower politicians to lie without consequence and enable demagogues like McCarthy to arise. America is in desperate need of a new Edward R. Murrow; hopefully “Good Night, And Good Luck” will inspire a generation of them.

Posted by: Jonathan Singer / 8:51 AM | Basie! Home