Good Night, and Good Luck
A candid Clooney takes on Communism and the Fourth Estate.
By Karl Rozemeyer
Photographed by Jennifer Cooper
Never one to shy away from expressing a strong stance on issues ranging from the current government to the War in Iraq, George Clooney took advantage of Wednesday’s press conference for his second film as director “Good Night and Good Luck” to call into question the role of contemporary television journalism. Asked if he had decided the time was ripe to raise the debate about television reporting in light of recent domestic and political events, he responded: “I think that certainly we saw some real teeth in the journalism that we saw in the last two weeks that has been missing at times…There is a lot of good journalism going on. But there certainly was a pause taken. I am the son of a journalist. My father was an anchorman for thirty years and there are always the same sort of fights: there are the dangers of being called unpatriotic if you ask difficult questions during difficult times…As my father says - not just as a journalist but also as an American citizen - …it is not just your right, it is your duty to question authority. Always. No matter who is in charge. Because we all know that authority unchecked and unchallenged always corrupts.” When the packed audience breaks out into loud supportive applause, he quips with self-deprecation: “That was more family members by the way.”
“Good Night and Good Luck” is Clooney’s black-and-white homage to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, a man remembered for standing his ground against Senator Joseph McCarthy, the leader of the witch hunt for Communist sympathizers during the 1950s. Murrow was one of handful of reporters that brought about McCarthy’s political demise and ended a terrifying inquisition that gripped the nation for years. “Three quarters of the country thought that McCarthy was wrong but they didn’t know it, “ says Clooney. “They all thought that they were in their rooms by themselves and when Murrow came out and said: ‘Everybody step out who thinks that this bullshit,’ suddenly they were thirteen to one. It was the power of television for the good at that point to come out and say: ‘Guess what? We are not descendent from fearful men, we are not a panicked community. We actually believe in the right of the individual and civil liberties. The same thing happened with Howard Dean when he jumped up all of a sudden and we were shocked by how many people actually said ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ about the war. I think that we get overwhelmed at times by things on television seeming like that is the end all and be all and it represents so much more than it does.”
The press conference was attended by George Clooney, who writes and directs as well as plays the role of television journalist Fred Friendly, by writer and producer Grant Heslov, by Patricia Clarkson who is Shirley Wershba in the film and by David Straithairn who took on the daunting task of representing the well-known figure of Murrow.
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