Good Night, and Good Luck

By Ezra

Spent last night at the movies seeing Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, his black and white hagiography of CBS's Edmund Murrow. For those who don't know the story, Murrow was a newsman who cut his teeth during World War II, becoming a famed correspondent and parlaying the notoriety into a television show. Fast-forward to the McCarthy era when Murrow, using his perch at CBS, publicly took on McCarthy, making him look both a bully and a fool.

It's a good film. A bit overblown, sure. Murrow's hand in McCarthy's downfall has become part of the period's mythology, but was not necessarily such a crucial element of the senator's self-destruction. But in some ways, that's not the point. The more interesting portion of the flick is the idea of the news anchor as advocate, the concept that enormously trusted, unelected individuals could be beamed into millions of homes and use their status and reach to shape tomorrow's stories, not just publicize yesterday's tales. That was real bias. But maybe it was better.

Hacker and Pierson's new book, Off Center, does a very good job of listing all the ways one party rule can warp the system. With Republicans controlling both Congress and the executive branch, there are few outside actors able to exert pressure or oversight upon them. Certainly not the Democrats. And nowadays, neither can the media. Whether it was planned this way or just happened, Dan Rather's memo-based destruction, when combined with the retirement of Brokaw and the death of Jennings, robbed the media of respected, powerful voices able to act as independent arbiters of the public realm. The current crop of newsmen could editorialize, but it's unclear that anyone would care. And that means, without divided government, that we are in an effective one party state; never a safe spot. When Murrow took on McCarthy, he based his program on a quote uttered by the junior senator from Wisconsin. The quote was:

The American people realize this cannot be made a fight between America’s two great political parties. If this fight against Communism is made a fight between America’s two great political parties the American people know that one of those parties will be destroyed and the Republic cannot endure very long as a one party system.

The story of the past few years has been the Republican party's attempt to recast the war against terrorism as a choice between the parties, one party who will fight and the other who will capitulate. And using that, they retook the Senate in 2002 and held the White House in 2004, consolidating control over the government and marginalizing the Democrats' ability to exert oversight. And now, with no Murrows able to call politicians to account, the system has veered vastly out of balance. Good night and good luck indeed.