The Anchoress

I have read mixed reviews re George Clooney’s film “Good Night and Good Luck,” which left me rather incurious about it. I’m not a “fan” (although I did love his film “Out of Sight” with Ving Rhames) and my impression upon reading so many reviews was that Clooney had made a good film that has nevertheless given short shrift to the reality of Communist infiltration into the government and elsewhere.

While it is a conceit of the left to call the investigations into such infiltration a “witch hunt,” and - while Joe McCarthy descended into sputtering incredibility on that issue - the recently uncovered Venona encrypts have made it clear that Alger Hiss was no innocent and that the basis of the investigation itself was sound.

Then my l’il brother Thom went to see the flick and emailed me his thoughts:

I found it both thrilling and depressing.

Clooney is on to something. His last movie — “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” — was also about the media and its distortions. He grew up in this world, and is very much a product of it. Only someone who grew up in Hollywood, and who has been a modern equivalent of a matinee idol, and has been labeled the sexiest man alive, could understand the sham underneath the sheen. But he pulls the whole thing apart by looking at it through history. He doesn’t have to make any overt comments about what it all means. He has hindsight on his side.

Hmmmm…in our polarized nation, I can’t help but think that the fallout from this film - which sounds more interesting, given Thom’s take on it - will be that one side says “this is a wake up call for the press to stop serving up White House Swill (at least until Hillary gets in there!) and the other side will be saying, “this is a wake-up call for the press to stop reporting with Katrina-esque hysteria on every thing including the Bush White House’s damn advance work!”

Public Eye over at CBS has an interview with Clooney on the film wherein we get that word, “witchhunt” once again:

The film was not intended to change journalism, says Clooney, who suggests that too often some in today’s media “take a pass” on asking tough questions. “I think we’re evolving,” he said. “We used to burn witches at the stake, and then we had the Senate investigating people, and now we just have pundits being sort of unkind.”

With all due respect, I think the media only “take a pass” on asking tough questions, or reporting uncomfortable stories when it suits them They simply seem to reserve the tough questions for some, and give the pass to others, or to stories which are nettlesome to their most sacred cows.

I am a fan of journalism and journalists. Or I was, and I would like to be, again. If the press wants to recover its diminished lustre, perhaps it needs to move beyond the “left good, right bad” philosophy which it has embraced. Because I have to tell you, after watching the way John Kerry almost made it to the White House without ever having to come clean about his military records (still not simply “made public” as he promised), and with the press actively working to protect him and discredit his critics, I tremble. I anticipate a 2008 campaign that consists of Terry Moran and David Gregory slobbering over the Hillary/Obama ticket and incapable of asking a question beyond “how’d you guys get to be so great…” while busily inserting any GOP candidate into a wood chipper.

And what makes me tremble about that…is not that “my” party won’t win. It’s that no one…NO ONE…should be carried into the Oval Office on the shoulders of a sycophantic press unwilling to ask an uncomfortable question, and all too quick to do that person’s bidding. That is how we move, very quickly, away from democracy, and toward something chillingly like tyranny.

And yes, I’d say the same thing if the press “loved” Bush. A skeptically raised eyebrow - one for the left and one for the right - and the temperate question are essentials to healthy journalism and a healthy democracy. But it seems to me the press has - particularly over the last two years - forgotten how to raise one of those brows.