[TruthTalk] Fw: McClooneyism

[Lance Muir]

----- Original Message ----- From: Lise Struthers To: 'Lance Muir' Sent: November 26, 2005 08:46 Subject: McClooneyism Being the movie buff you are I thought you might like this.  Lise   McClooneyism National Post, November 25, 2005 Peter Foster   The movie Good Night, and Good Luck is terrific except for one essential fact: At its heart is a Big Lie. Brilliantly directed and cleverly co-written by George Clooney, the Hollywood star who first throbbed hearts in the television series ER, it revolves around one of the foundational myths of modern liberal/Democratic sentiment: that corporations have unconscionable power to subvert the media. And they use it. The film centres on the confrontation between legendary radio and television journalist Edward R. Murrow (portrayed iconically by David Strathairn) and Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by his newsreel self) at the time of McCarthy's infamous anti-Communist "witch hunt" in the mid-1950s. According to the film, the price Murrow paid for his attack on McCarthy was to have his show terminated by CBS because the Aluminum Co. of America (now Alcoa) withdrew its sponsorship. Alcoa, you see, had important military contracts and didn't want to offend the powers that be. Now it is entirely reasonable for any corporation to withdraw support or advertising from a show that isn't boosting either its sales or its reputation. However, Alcoa in fact stood with Murrow's See It Now during his fight with McCarthy, who was already on the media ropes. Indeed, it signed up for another season before eventually pulling its support. According to a history of the company, Alcoa "remained Murrow's sponsor until after McCarthy's political influence drowned in its own backwash of hysteria." Beyond that significant skewing of the facts, however, the movie's Big Theme is that of the world according to Noam Chomsky: that corporations and big money "control" the media. Alcoa has suffered for having once been an evil "monopolist" that was broken up by the U.S. government at the end of the Second World War (which it helped win). However, Alcoa's monopoly was remarkably benign, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter noted. Between 1890 and 1929, as Alcoa's annual output rose from 30 tonnes to 103,400, the price of aluminum dropped by a factor of 12, to the enormous benefit of consumers and industrial users. Alcoa remained a monopolist for so long because it was so good at what it did. However, this "skeleton" in the corporate closet may be one reason why the company shies from addressing history. Alcoa's spin on the Clooney movie is that (a) it has raised the company's profile and (2) the company has bigger battles to fight nowadays, in particular with environmentalists. Recently, Reuters ran a story suggesting that Alcoa had pulled off some kind of placement "coup," since a 30-second ad from the 1950s had run in Mr. Clooney's film, "All without paying a dime"! Alcoa acknowledged that it had let Mr. Clooney use the ad in the film, "as long as you don't say we're scoundrels." Apparently being cast as subverters of truth and justice was OK. Alcoa pointed out to Reuters that it was behind Murrow's "vigorous editorial stand in a matter of national importance and controversy." But didn't it notice that the film took exactly the opposite point of view? Was the company frightened of getting on the wrong side of Hollywood? After all, just like Senator McCarthy's hearings, Hollywood can put the corporate sector "on trial" without presenting evidence, or while carefully editing "the facts" to suit the underlying ideological message. If Alcoa wants to get its profile up by courting opponents, it must be upset that it didn't get more play in last year's Canadian crockumentary The Corporation, a pack of misrepresentations that paints big businesses as Nazi-supporting psychopaths. As it happens, the head of Alcoa Australia did take part in a journalistic round table on The Corporation. He offered not one word of criticism. Instead, he peddled the pablum that Alcoa's main corporate challenge was to be "in tune with society." Mr. Clooney, meanwhile, is fast becoming Hollywood's leading liberal light: Alec Baldwin with brains. This week saw the release of another, much more controversial Clooney epic, Syriana, which is chock-a-block with Big Oil skullduggery in the Middle East. In an interview in the Post this week, Mr. Clooney remarked, "I know we're not providing the answers, but we're asking a lot of questions." Like: When did you stop beating your wife? Far from being skillful manipulators, corporations in fact tend to be babes in the wood when it comes to defending either their own operations or those of the enterprise system more generally. They choose rather to proliferate their "corporate social responsibility" initiatives while proudly touting their commitment to "sustainability," and/or selling out completely to the climate-change lobby, just as Alcoa has. When it comes to the message of Good Night, and Good Luck, one reality check is to ask whether CBS -- and the media more generally -- has been frightened away from controversy by its big advertisers and its lust for profits. Has it been scared away from "taking on" government? Well, it was CBS broke the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in comprehensive and lurid detail. Unfortunately, the same producer who outed Abu Ghraib, Mary Mapes, went on to self-destruct in her eagerness to take down George Bush on the basis of falsified documents. She took down Dan Rather instead. But guess what, Ms. Mapes has just published a book in which, in the process of attempting to self-exculpate for her egregious cock-up, she claims that investigative journalism is "endangered" by all that corporate power. As usual, the capitalists did it. Or if they didn't, they might.   © National Post 2005