Armentor Goodnight Sweet Prince

While the arena of Goodnight and Goodluck highlighted a major socio-political contraversey in our young history, the ideas in question, at least under the lens of a broadcasting station, are still as relevant today as they were in the 1950's. Although I feel some view this overall conflict as a fued between two men, McCarthy and Murrow, the film Goodnight and Goodluck serves not only as a political commentary on Habeas Corpus (highlighted by Eisenhower's speech at the end), but as an insight into the interworkings of a broadcasting station. The station encounters problems such as censorship, advertising disputes, and accusations of bias. Now if I were to ask Anderson Cooper if he encounters all three of these issues on a daily basis, would anyone think he would tell me no? One hears all the time of the apparent monopoly left wing politics has on Television, with syndecates such as MSNBC, CBS, and CNN holding more cards then poor little Fox News. It was interesting to see the backroom crafting of the news, how a story presented as objective really goes under intense scrutiny and editing before its presented as a 30 minute "product" for visual consumers. This sense of "inventing the news" is not only still practiced but has maybe even intensified; for example I can recall a few months back when the Sean Hannity show ran a clip in the fall depicting imagery from a protest in the spring (the trees gave it away) that was a blatant example of news fabrication.

About the only thing that has changed in this whole process is the scale and the audience. In the time of Ed Murrow, the variety of television was severely limited, making Ed Murrow's face a more widely recgonized face then that of Katie Kourac. But now, everythings bigger, the audience, the channels, the news stations...now there are specialized programming for different political slants, is not Rachel Maddow set up to serve a particular interest? But also, the whole idea of media has now changed. Whereas in 1950 when THE media was two television stations and newspapers, now with the internet, an intense new media culture has blossomed. With the spread of media has come accessibility and today everyone has access to all forms of news, allowing people to edit the news for themselves.