Fine Film - Surprising Fact Mixed with only a bit of fiction

Rating: 8/10 (14 May 2006)

You can see the great pains this film took to tell a story about the most important moment in media journalism in this country, and then the unfortunate consequences of that moment. Edward R. Murrow achieved greatness by using the truth to bring down Joe McCarthy. Murrow used Joe against himself. He did it with honestly & integrity, which sadly were missing from media journalism almost since this happened. The film shows the hard work behind getting the truth & the pains involved in telling the truth. It shows that truth does not get rewarded in this type of work. It proves how hard truth is to get. The acting is perfect, the telling of the tale is perfect though a bit static, definitely not for the action picture crowd. The ending surprised me in how well it tells to truth. This will spoil it for you but at the end of all this, William Paley, head of CBS, calls Murrow into his office with the ultimate good news-bad news agenda. The good news is Ed that you show is now going to be an hour instead of 30 minutes. The bad news is, your show is moving from prime time to Sunday afternoons, effectively killing your show. This shows how much power & influence government & corporations already had on the media in 1954. Murrow later quit CBS in disgust before he died. It proves that the media has not been accurate since then. To prove this, a quote from Dan Rather in the 1960's on seeing the home movie of John Kennedy being killed - "Kennedy jerked forward when he was shot in the head." Rather was the only pool media reporter allowed to see that film, and when he filed one of his journals just before he retired from the CBS EVENING NEWS- he aired it again, word for word. For a film which can make you think, Good Luck, because the media will never ever get back to 1954, to telling the truth the way Murrow had the guts to do.