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I don’t pay to see movie stars who
are venomous, liberal, anti-American, Bush-bashers. Sorry Lance. Iz (Oh, no—now
we have to put up with more Dylanisms from From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of 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 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 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 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 Mr. Clooney, meanwhile,
is fast becoming 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 |
