Last night I watched the film Good Night, And Good Luck. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. It is currently available on DVD.
The movie is about the 1953 CBS News team (led by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly) that successfully went head-to-head with the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. How closely the situation in 1953 mirrors today is disturbing, but CBS’s success gives us hope.
The film begins and ends with the 1958 Radio-Television News Directors Association & Foundation Convention in Chicago, during which Murrow gives a critical yet inspiring speech. Here is a quote from the very end I’d like to share with you:
I began by saying that our history will be what we make it. If we go on as we are, then history will take its revenge, and retribution will not limp in catching up with us.
We are to a large extent an imitative society. If one or two or three corporations would undertake to devote just a small traction of their advertising appropriation along the lines that I have suggested, the procedure would grow by contagion; the economic burden would be bearable, and there might ensue a most exciting adventure–exposure to ideas and the bringing of reality into the homes of the nation.
To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
Stonewall Jackson, who knew something about the use of weapons, is reported to have said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The trouble with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.
So how about it? Can we use the medium of television, which some seem to despise, for good?
