(Eloquently) Talking Heads

Kristine and I went down to the State Theatre last night to see George Clooney's docudrama on Edward R. Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck. The film was very well done, but what stood out to me most about it was how literate the reporting of fifty years ago was. The reproduced broacasts used transcripts from the originals, not watered down for today's audiences accustomed to showbiz journalism. Their language was precise, direct, and graceful. Even more astonishing, they did not shy from being intellectually serious.

I couldn't find a transcript of Murrow's 1953 broadcast on (Dexter, MI native) Michael Radulovich, the airman drummed out of service for having family members with alleged communist sympathies, which I thought was one of the best examples in the film of Murrow's ability to present issues seriously and engagingly. But his 1954 attack on Sen. Joe McCarthy is available, and presents some fine prose and very conscientious argument. Take Murrow's opening, for instance:

Murrow: Because a report on Senator McCarthy is by definition controversial we want to say exactly what we mean to say and I request your permission to read from the script whatever remarks Murrow and Friendly may make. If the Senator believes we have done violence to his words or pictures and desires to speak, to answer himself, an opportunity will be afforded him on this program. Our working thesis tonight is this question:

If this fight against Communism is made a fight against America's two great political parties, the American people know that one of those parties will be destroyed and the Republic cannot endure very long as a one party system.

We applaud that statement and we think Senator McCarthy ought to. He said it, seventeen months ago in Milwaukee.

Not sparkling prose by any means. But it does offer a serious idea as a proposition to be examined, which the show goes on to do at some length. How often do you run across that today, particularly on the commercial media? The formality and deliberateness
of the language conveys the importance of the topic, while telegraphing the nature of the critique to follow. Today, TV anchors tend to rely on somber emotion to preface matters of gravity (think Tom Brokaw), a gesture which never quite does justice to reporting of a truly grave event. Today, I think Murrow's lead-in would strike many audiences as excessively arch and quasi-academic, a prime example of elite media's supposed contempt for ordinary heartland viewers (and the mere mention of the word "thesis" might touch off flashbacks of horror in survivors of College Composition classes). I'd agree that this tone might not be ideal for the present day, but I think the style could be revised without sacrificing the rhetorical edge.

Murrow's summation of that broadcast has to be among the most memorable utterances in television history:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

The merits of this require no commentary to reveal. It's worth noting, though, that the last sentence of this would never get past most TV or magazine editors today--too structurally complex, too dense with ideas and allusions.

The quality of Murrow's reporting/editorializing stands out to me at the moment partly because of an example of the opposite I saw last week. Last Monday morning, Kristine and I were watching CNN in our cabin, getting the morning news from one of those shows where cheerful, attractive people sit on a couch and banter playfully with one another over coffee. They ended one segment with a story about the principal (also a professed monk) of a Catholic high school on Long Island who was cancelling his school's prom after receiving reports that the families of several students had raised $20,000 to rent a house in the Hamptons for an after-prom party. The principal felt this was an example of out-of-control materialism that shouldn't be condoned. The onscreen coffee klatch followed up with a debate about whether the monk-principal walked around in a "burlap robe," and scratched their heads about why someone would want to deny the kids their prom before lapsing into reminiscences about their own proms.

I don't know whether the principal's decision was sensible or not--certainly we didn't get enough information from the broadcast to form an intelligent opinion. But the story does raise issues that touch many people's lives (parenting, materialism, the limits of schools' authority over students) and are worth discussing thoughtfully. All the "journalists" could do was blurt out knee-jerk reactions shot though with presumptions worthy of a 13 year old.

Silliness and superficiality have their place in life, especially in private moments. They can offer great relief and pleasure at times. I just wish the public square wasn't overrun by them. Murrow's words from half a century ago remind us that it doesn't have to be.