Some handy tips from the Clooney and Murrow School of Journalism

Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's superb account of CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow's very public fight with self-annointed Communist exterminator US Senator Joseph McCarthy during 1953, is a film that deserves all the public praise it's been lumped with over the last year or so. In the climate of fear that followed the Second World War, Murrow became the first journalist to publicly question the tactics and investigative methods used by McCarthy when questioning members of the public over their Communist links, a time when hearsay and innuendo were considered hard evidence just so long as they suggested guilt. Clooney's film, which he wrote, directed and played a staring role, is not subtle in its themes - the power and the responsibility of the press, the basic right to one's civil liberties, and commercial coercion inside our media - and is not subtle in suggesting Murrow's crusade, and courage, is as important today as it was in the staunchly paranoid environment of the 1950s in which he worked. Mild coercion is obviously not what Clooney aims for, at least not in Good Night, and Good Luck, although one can always argue the average American cinema-goer may have trouble with any level of nuance, so I'll let Clooney can pass on that one.

If you're a journalism student, reporter or media commentator - and I guess I'm a conflation of all three - then you can't go a minute in Good Night, and Good Luck without either throwing your hands up in despair, ready to give up on the whole notion of a free press or becoming energised to fight even harder for it - mostly, for me anyway, it was the later. At one point during the film though, I couldn't help wondering why us journos are so often at our happiest when we're feasting on and devouring our own, rather than the carcass of some deserving - notice the word deserving - politician. One of the film's most wrenching moments involves not Murrow or McCarthy, but fellow CBS journalist and television host Don Hollenbeck, who commits suicide after his wife leaves him, and after he is subsequently labelled a "pinko" and a former Commie writer by a prominent US newspaper columnist. Again Clooney doesn't just hint, he makes his point loud and clear, but it's duplicitous this time: sure Clooney wants to make sure we understand it was America's new-found culture of fear, and the stigma associated with being labelled a Communist in the 50s that led to Hollenbeck's death, but he's also taking a slightly more benign swipe at the media's bloodthirsty nature in general. Even after Hollenbeck's suicide, instead of an obituary or a carefully worded "we went too far", the columnist responsible for labelling him a dirty "pinko" decides to use the reporter's death as an opportunity to dig the knives in even further. It was one point in the film where I questioned whether it is actually all worth it - the bloody smears, the rumours and the gossip, and all the other shit you have to put up with when your name's in print.

Invariably you have to have a thick skin when you're working in journalism, and I have to admit that one of the few things I admire about someone like Andrew Bolt is his ability to take a whipping. But many columnists, along with a few reporters, just don't fight fair, playing very loose with the facts, and with little regard for their consequences. I know I'm not really one to go anywhere near a highhorse, but I try, as hard as possible, to engage the ideas, and not the person who's writing them. There's a wider debate to be had here about the responsibility bloggers need to bare if they expect themselves to become entrenched in the free exchange of ideas and become respectible media players, but that's another debate for another time. But just remember, and I've said it before, this is journalism fellas, not a bloodsport.