Good, not great

Rating: 4/10 (29 November 2008)

George Clooney's black and white feature is about journalist Edward R. Murrow's effort to challenge the methods of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950's when he actively investigated and indicted members of the entertainment, media, and military industries for communist sympathies and Soviet membership. The film is decent and well acted, David Strathairn plays a very convincing Murrow, and Clooney's directing is competent. However, the film takes an entirely too simplistic moral view of its subject, it fails to acknowledge the paranoia of the period and has the benefit of hindsight. Additionally, the film makes CBS and Murrow's efforts more heroic then they actually were, Senator McCarthy certainly didn't have as much power as the entire CBS Corporation, and the journalists who brought him down weren't really risking as much as the film implies. Furthermore, McCarthy was not attacked until he investigated individuals with real power like high ranking officials in the military; the film fails to make this clear. An average work on the whole, but worth seeing none the less.