Good Luck Saying Good Night!

I saw the movie Good Night and Good Luck months ago, right after it debuted in theaters. Actually, I saw the movie with a contributor to this blog, longdistancedancer. But anyway, my reaction to the movie at the time was that it was good...but too short. I didn't feel the movie showed the effects of censorship or McCarthyism in their full effects well enough, before Edward R. Murrow came in and "saved the day." Still a worthy movie, and definitely worth seeing for a peek at American journalism before it became...loud. Steve Young, on Huffington Post, has a good point when he writes that the Academy Awards would do well to honor this film in some way. The biggest problem facing America today is not prejudice against gays (which I would argue Brokeback Mountain does nothing to stop), but rather, the loudness and bias of the media. The media in fact is what contributes to biases and prejudices. Young hits the nail on the head with how the famed lines of Army Counsell Joseph Welch proclaimed to McCarthy ("Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?") would be received by the media: "An anti-American, communist kiss-up lawyer telling an elected official of our great country about who's decent? He wouldn't know decent if decent hit him in the face. He's a lawyer, folks. Worse, he's a card-carrying member of the ACLU." "Word out of Washington is that it was Welch's wife who actually suggested him to represent Communists. Next up, Dick Morris tells us why Hillary Clinton may be behind Welch's obviously coerced speech." "If you wanted to reduce communism, you could abort all communists represented by Joseph Welsh, we could wipe out most of communism. It would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do but the communist rate would go down." This is precisely why I simply do not watch TV news channels, and prefer to get my news from good old fashioned newspapers, as well as the newfangled internet. (or as Bush would say, internets)