Review of the Movie Good Night and Good Luck

Good Night, and Good Luck is a movie about a group of newsmen who work for CBS. Who believe in the basic American freedoms, and Senator Joseph McCarthy is a man who could destroy those freedoms. Senator McCarthy goes on TV and tells who ever will listen; that he has unsubstantiated claims that there were large numbers of communists and soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government. He also calls people who have opposing views communist supporters. The man that confronts him is Edward R. Murrow, a television journalist for CBS, whose radio broadcasts from London led to a peacetime career as the most famous newsman in the new age of television. Murrow is offended by the statements that Senator McCarthy makes. He goes on his program and uses the senators own words and pictures to start the downfall of the senator. Murrow is backed by his producers and reporters, and supported by the leadership of his network; CBS even loses sponsors over the Murrow/McCarthy conflict.

There are times when it is argued with in CBS that Murrow has lost hid objectivity, that he is not telling "both sides." He argues that he is reporting the facts, and of the facts are opposing to McCarthy's ideas, they are still objective. In the recent years several reporters have taken such a stand, at the onset of Hurricane Katrina, we saw many reporters in the field who knew by their own eyes that the official help on hurricane relief was fiction, and they said so.

In my opinion the movies is not really about the abuses of McCarthy, but about the method by which Murrow and his team eventually brought down McCarthy, who died from acute hepatitis brought on by alcoholism in 1957.

The term "McCarthyism," started in 1950 as a reference to McCarthy's practices. Today the term is used more generally to describe reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents. Yes, in today's society