Parallels Between Generations

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    After having watched Good Night and Good Luck for the second time, I couldn't help but compare it to the way the media operates today. In 1953, the year the film takes place, was the beginning of broadcast TV and cable news did not yet exist. The way CBS then and the current cable news landscape operate had similar traits. For one, the topic at hand, whether people were communist or not based on speculation is a way that the network could stir drama based on nothing. In an odd way, it reminded me of the 2020 election and the baseless claims that Donald Trump was making to try to prove that the election was fraudulent. An example from the movie is the Air Force officer, Milo Radulovich, being discharged from the service because his family were known communists and he refused to denounce them. This example is more believable than the others, but what crazed me was the example of the internal conflict CBS had related to communists. On one of the stories that Murrow's show was running, one of the team members has to recuse himself from it because his ex-wife attended communist meetings before they even met. This would have been a far-fetched accusation of him being a communist because of this association, had he been caught. 



    The parallels between broadcast TV back then and cable news now are strikingly similar. It's not even about the fact if someone is a communist or not, because who knows what that truly means. As it relates to media as a business, it seems as if the only reason CBS hyped the "suspected communist" narrative up and cared if they had communists working for them was because of the U.S. government's careful eye on who was a communist or not. CBS also had advertisers who were government contractors which made them extra careful about who they associated with that may have had even a remote communist attachment. Through this film, it was interesting to see how the dynamic of the TV narrative back then, in a sense, foreshadowed how the media operates today. 

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