{"id":28961,"date":"2016-04-26T23:05:54","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T23:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28961"},"modified":"2016-04-26T23:05:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T23:05:54","slug":"the-pop-of-king-lights-in-a-box","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-lights-in-a-box\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: Lights in a box"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a>George Clooney\u2019s film about Edward R. Murrow and the early days of TV news is probably sending many audience members on extra trips to the snack bar and bathrooms out of sheer claustrophobia. It almost never leaves the stark confines of the CBS newsroom and editorial offices. This will come as a shock to 21st-century viewers accustomed to seeing Anderson Cooper (CNN) and Brian Williams (NBC) being blown around by hurricanes, and Katie Couric wearing a pair of cute goggles, working on Habitat for Humanity houses in Rockefeller Plaza.
\nThat isn\u2019t the only contrast between news then and news now, in the land of 500 channels. The difference everyone will notice is the cigarettes; almost everyone in Good Night, and Good Luck smokes like a chimney. That includes Murrow, who died from lung cancer. (Mike Wallace, also never without a cigarette in the \u201850s, apparently has the lungs of an alligator… or Keith Richards.) And then there are the news clips\u2014film reels that get rushed to the projection room at the last moment, often just in time for the commentator to do a live voice-over narration.
\nThere are similarities, too\u2014celebrity interviews, for instance. The conflict between Murrow (beautifully played by David Strathairn) and the Commie-hunting senator Joe McCarthy (played by him-self, in old kinescopes) is at the movie\u2019s center, but we also see Murrow conversing with Liberace, who explains that of course he wants to be married. Just as soon as he meets a nice girl like Princess Marga-ret. Save for the black-and-white photography and Murrow\u2019s cigarette, it could be Larry King talking with Janet Jackson. Of course it was a wardrobe malfunction, Larry.
\nThe major similarity\u2014and the reason I suppose Clooney wanted to tell this story\u2014is that the struggle for the soul of TV news continues unabated. Nobody really likes watching the news, since so little worth reporting is good news\u2014thus the tendency is still to kill the messenger for the message. Lefties today think the news media have gotten soft and scared; they point to the gloves-on way TV handled the Bush administration\u2019s run-up to the war in Iraq as an example. The righties think the me-
\ndia are just a tool of the left wing (of guys like Clooney… and let\u2019s throw in Alec Baldwin for good measure), and that anchors won\u2019t be happy until anarchy rules Iraq and abortion clinics are as common as ATMs.
\nAs in the day of Murrow, the job of today\u2019s newscasters is to be heard in spite of these conflict-ing voices. The danger is that in trying to please everyone, they\u2019ll provide no real coverage at all. In its most disturbing scene, GN&GL suggests that network topsiders wouldn\u2019t mind that. When Murrow is called on the carpet by CBS head honcho William Paley (played to lizardlike perfection by Frank Lan-gella), Paley says: \u201cPeople want to enjoy themselves, they don\u2019t want a civics lesson.\u201d Later, Murrow points out to his pal Fred Friendly (Clooney) that the most trusted man in America is Milton Berle. \u201cYou should have worn a dress,\u201d Friendly responds.
\nToday the dress is worn by Oprah, of course. I have no doubt she\u2019s the most trusted person in America, but that doesn\u2019t mean she should be doing the evening news. What would come next\u2014Jerry Springer as Nightline host? Why not? Then we could get Howard Dean and Karl Rove throwing chairs at each other, or Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice pulling hair. It wouldn\u2019t be discourse, but it would be entertaining: reality TV news.
\nIt\u2019s maybe not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. With the advent of more and more cable info-channels, the not-quite-blind urge to mate news and entertainment seems to be growing ever stronger. Murrow\u2019s decision to go after McCarthy was an act of amazing bravery in 1954, and controversial enough to cause his See It Now sponsor (Alcoa) to drop the show. But such talking-heads stuff probably wouldn\u2019t play today, when viewers watch car chases in high-def and \u201cIf it bleeds, it leads\u201d has become the battle cry.
\nEven more dismaying is the last decade\u2019s \u201cnews-flation,\u201d with its unforgivable shoot-from-the-lip scare journalism. Thus, we are told that there may be 10,000 dead in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, that doctors euthanized patients at the height of the chaos (allegations that are still unproven), and that bird flu may soon depopulate the earth. Not to mention nightly updates on the Natalee Holloway \u201cstory\u201d\u2014BREAKING NEWS!\u2014while Africa starves and the Mideast burns.
\nThe best moment in GN&GL? Easy. When Murrow finishes his Liberace interview (with a promise to visit Mickey Rooney and his lovely new wife the following week), he signs off and the harsh studio lights go out. As they do, an expression crosses his face, as fleeting as a brief muscle cramp. It is weary distaste. Speaking to an industry audience some four years after the McCarthy debacle, Murrow says: \u201c[Television] can illuminate and yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that hu-mans are willing to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.\u201d It\u2019s some-thing to think about the next time you sit down in front of news that may be more flash than fact: It\u2019s merely lights in a box.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Clooney\u2019s film about Edward R. Murrow and the early days of TV news is probably sending many audience members on extra trips to the snack bar and bathrooms out of sheer claustrophobia. It almost never leaves the stark confines<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28961","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28962,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28961\/revisions\/28962"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}