"We don't make the news. We report the news."

Lauren Miller
lm221005@ohio.edu

"Good Night, and Good Luck", a film directed and co-written by George Clooney, is set in the early 1950s, when everyone was at high alert for communists. A Wisconsin Senator, Joe McCarthy, was exploiting these fears in order to rid the government of Communists. However, his tactics were faulty and unethical. Edward R. Murrow, a prominent broadcaster for CBS, and his friend and co-worker, Fred Friendly decided to shed lights on his actions.

In any industry, there will always be an abundance of pressures that influence and alter our decisions. "Good Night, and Good Luck" depicts how much pressure a journalist experiences, especially since this is in the very early days of broadcast television. Murrow and Friendly must decide whether the public’s right to know outweighs the needs and demands of CBS.

Within the film, the chief executive of CBS, William Paley, tells Murrow, “We don’t make the news. We report the news.” Murrow and Friendly were cautioned about running this story and about the implications it would cause the company. Instead of being passive, these two, and their team, decided to be proactive and investigate a story that the public must hear. The pressures were difficult to handle, and Murrow was even accused of Communist affiliations, but the public’s need was greater than any other stakeholders’.

When writing any story it is important to take all of our stakeholders and influences into consideration, but I firmly believe that we all have a moral responsibility to inform the public and to keep watch over society. No, we should not make the news, but we shouldn’t simply report it, either. We must investigate and dig beneath the surface to make the truth known.