Doctorkenyon’s Weblog

Good Night, and Good Luck

After it featured so heavily in yesterday’s lecture about Edward R. Murrow I found Good Night, and Good Luck in our university’s library. It’s actually a pretty good film if a little hard going at times. There were some interesting discussions about whether Murrow and his team were crossing the line into editorialising or comment. In my opinion they did overstep that boundary, but in the circumstances it’s very hard to say that they were wrong to do so.

It was well acted (David Strathairn and Ray Wise were particularly brilliant) and the black and white style works. I’d recommend it to other journalism students for the debates on the line between news and comment alone.

It was interesting to see the evidence of a scary media phenomenon in the film: the moral panic. Seeing communists being turned into an almost supernatural bogeyman was interesting for the parallels we might find today. It seems ‘communist’ was a term thrown around in the fifties as much as ‘terrorist’ is now.

I’ve reached the end of this post and I’m still not convinced ‘editorialising’ is a real word. According to Wiktionary it is… according to the dictionary by my computer I just made it up. Ho hum.