Most high school students who learn about the 1950s have been trained to hate Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who intimidated the government from 1950 to 1954 with his allegations of communism. Students who learned about McCarthy in a history class should probably have been told that most of the people he accused of being communists turned out to be communists. "McCarthyism," though, was always about using the lowest of tactics, usually intimidation, to get someone to admit something. It was also about casting a wide net in an attempt to catch a few people who may have been genuinely guilty of a crime.

But Good Night, and Good Luck isn't about whether or not McCarthy's ends were right. The film -- as Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) makes clear -- is about the means by which McCarthy goes about accusing actors, Congressmen, and Army officers of being communists. McCarthy's strategy was to break down his opponents, embarass them, and generally bully them with rhetoric that didn't make sense but sounded good on television. In the film, Murrow acknowledges that, while it is important to investigate allegations of Communist infiltration, it is equally important to adhere to due process. McCarthy's tactics revived the phrase "witch-hunt," meaning an investigation undertaken with guilt presumed and all facts used to support that presumption of guilt. Indeed, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible during the 1950s as an allegory of "McCarthyism," the modern-day synonym for "witch-hunt."

The film depicts Murrow as a crusader for democracy, armed with only producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney, who also directed the film) to defend him against the power of television. CBS, the station on which Murrow appeared, wasn't as worried about the political bent of Murrow's newscasts against McCarthy as it was worried about the loss of advertisers due to the broadcast of such a controversial topic. The end of the film reinforces a truth that holds to this day: no matter how good a televison program may be, if it doesn't bring in ratings, it's gone. Clooney depicts Murrow as someone who stands up for what he believes in; Murrow suggests it's his duty to take on McCarthy, as he believes that there is no justification for what McCarthy is doing. He urges the higher-ups to let him take on McCarthy because, as he puts it, sometimes there aren't two sides to an issue: sometimes, something is just flat-out wrong. There's no way to present McCarthy objectively because there is no objective way to say that his tactics are somehow justifiable; any moral person would understand that what he is doing is totally wrong, and for the press to pretend that there is a morally upstanding "pro-McCarthy" side would make them complicit in his witch-hunting.

Given this article from The New York Times Review of Books, it looks the media today are in trouble. Large media corporations -- Clear Channel, Infinity Broadcasting, Viacom, the Sinclair Group -- are buying each other up and consolidating within markets. A few years ago, Congress eased restrictions on how many media outlets a company could own within a given market. News is no longer about reporting facts; it's about making money. Arguably, our pining for a time long since past when the media were objective might be romanticizing the history of media, but what about Edward R. Murrow? What about Woodward and Bernstein? What about people who have searched for the truth? I'm remided of the motto of my hometown newspaper, The News-Herald: "Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a virtue." (Turns out that that quote comes from ... Joe McCarthy! No, just kidding; it comes from a 19th century French writer, Anne Louise Germaine de Stael.)

The lesson -- and there is a lesson -- to be learned from Good Night, and Good Luck is that you shouldn't back down when you know you're right. There are a lot of people out there who are afraid to speak up about the truth of things like, oh, I don't know, the Iraq War. We've seen that the administration consistently smears these people, even when they come from the Republican party. We've seen that corporate news companies -- the "mainstream media" -- will print only what will sell newspapers, not what is true. It's high time for this to change. Anchors from CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and the major networks -- as well as the owners of all those networks -- should look at Strathairn's Edward R. Murrow and be ashamed of themselves.