Good Night and Good Luck

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Recommended: Roles of media in democratic society

Good Night, and Good Luck is an American drama film based on actual events during the early 1950’s in the United States. This film portrays the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era and its threats to freedom of the press.
The film, Good Night, and Good Luck, discuss the main conflict between Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin and the staff of CBS news. This conflict was due to McCarthy’s anti-communist actions with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy was accusing various people of being involved with communism. Due to the minimal amount of media outlets these accusations made it near impossible for the people “blacklisted” to find work and destroying their quality of life to the point that many committed suicide (Sasanow, 1).
Through CBS’s investigation of Senator McCarthy the staff faced various consequences. Some of the staff was accused of being communist. Dan Hollenbeck was accused in print, and later committed suicide. The film made it seem that is suicide was directly influenced by him being blacklisted. Edward R. Murrow, the main reporter, was accused of having been a member of the leftist union: Industrial Workers of the World, however he stated that this accusation was incorrect. One of the major consequences of attacking Senator McCarthy was that CBS could lose their license to air. In the film there was a conversation that discussed that the people Murrow was attacking on air are the same people they are fighting with to keep their license.
The media’s role in a democracy is to advocate on the public’s behalf and serve as a “watchdog” for the public’s interest. This is portrayed, in the film, by Murrow defending Milo Radulovich. Milo was going to be discharged from the United S...

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...t that we not over-romaticize the significance of these tools because being able to publish and being heard are not the same thing (Sasanow, 3).”
“Murrow, McCarthy and the media frontier analyzed” also discusses how “we as a country walked into the war in Iraq without the media doing its job…It may be official blacklisting or maybe not, but deception is just as possible today in different forms (Sasanow, 3).”
The type of media we saw in the McCarthy era still exists today in political media. Journalist such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Keith Olbermann keep the Murrow public service attitude very much alive.

Works Cited

Sasanow, A. (2010, April 19). Murrow, McCarthy and the media frontier analyzed. Tufts Daily. Retrieved March 13, 2014, from http://www.tuftsdaily.com/murrow-mccarthy-and-the-media-frontier-analyzed-1.2226577?compArticle=yes#.UyIjC8JOXIU

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