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Journalists and the truth

Mark Lawson

GEORGE CLOONEY has become the commander-in-chief of Hollywood's anti-Bush forces. In the conspiracy thriller Syriana, he porks up to put his weight as an actor behind the idea that the Iraq war was fought for oil and that the CIA assassinates foreign politicians who threaten the Texaco flow. And in Good Night, and Good Luck he gives his heft as director-writer-actor to the view that journalism has become a spineless adjunct of governments, frightened of reporting anything that might make politicians or advertisers uncomfortable.

While the politics of Syriana are a familiar song from the Left (Michael Moore plus a bit more), Good Night, and Good Luck is arguing something much more original and provocative, which should cause sleepless nights across the broadcast spectrum from BBC to CBS.

Shot artfully in black and white, Clooney's biopic of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965) is alternately nostalgic and topical. The quaintness lies in scenes of Murrow (David Strathairn) smoking live on camera (now a greater impossibility in U.S. broadcasting than campaigning journalism) and being cued, in the days before discreet earpieces for anchors, by his producer, Fred Friendly (Clooney), sitting under the desk and jabbing a pen into his leg.

The film's immediacy, however, comes from the central professional crisis of Murrow's career, when he used his weekly current-affairs half-hour See It Now to editorialise against Senator Joseph McCarthy, chief communist-hunter. The clear contemporary moral, from Clooney's liberal perspective, is that journalists should stand up to the Bush administration over excesses of power such as Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and the Patriot Act.

Murrow began as a reporter (whose rooftop dispatches during the London blitz were a pinnacle of frontline journalism) and developed into a studio-based editorial commentator. Clooney clearly approves of this journey, but it is directly opposed to the absolute impartiality that the BBC seeks to impose on its political presenters and the even-handedness to which American TV has also aspired, although — being less regulated than the British — less severely.

This campaign for advocacy journalism comes at a time when many viewers, listeners, and broadcasters have questioned whether reporting that seeks to treat two sides equally is the best approach for all stories. In cases such as the death of Dr. David Kelly or the violent row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, does even-handedness risk giving moral equivalence to benign and malign positions?

Clooney, through Murrow, seems to argue that it does. But the bad luck for Good Night, and Good Luck is that Murrow and Friendly bet the farm on a horse with questionable legs. Whereas Woodward and Bernstein — in All the President's Men, the clear spiritual twin of Clooney's film — amassed facts that unseated a President who would otherwise have served out his two terms, Murrow bombarded with commentary a Senator who would almost certainly have imploded anyway under the unsustainable weight of his paranoia or the contempt of congressional colleagues.

Even so, let us ignore these objections and impose the Clooney-Murrow model on British broadcasting for a moment. Imagine a BBC anchor speaking to camera about why he believes so strongly in freedom of speech that, if we go to the BBC Newsnight website now, we will find the Danish cartoons on Muhammed posted in full. Or another anchor suddenly halting a panellist during BBC TV's Question Time to deliver a personal statement on why he believes that Tony Blair is so morally bankrupt after the Iraq fiasco that he must step down now. Both of these fantasies would clearly be examples of "journalists speaking truth to power," as Clooney has commended in interviews, but they begin to buckle under the question that always unsettles partisan journalism: whose truth?

Clooney wants journalists to switch from a two-hands approach to a single jabbing punch on such issues as Iraq and oil. But what about viewers who back George W. Bush and the drilling barons? Do they just switch off or turn to Fox News, an existing rightwing application of the Murrow-Clooney rules that scarcely encourages other such experiments?

So, for all its intelligence and elegance as a movie, Good Night, and Good Luck is not the DVD that trainee journalists should be given on their birthdays. That honour remains with All the President's Men, which makes a hero of reporters; Clooney's movie, rather more questionably, puts up a statue to pundits.

Good Night, and Good Luck: good film, but bad logic. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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