By David Swanson
I recommend the movie “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is named with the line with which Ed Murrow ended his news broadcasts on CBS News, back when CBS did news. It’s a well-made movie and ought to be heartening, except that it gives you an intense pain in your stomach when you realize that the corporate pressures Murrow was under have completely taken over, that we haven’t just lost the literacy and the cigarettes, that we’ve lost the ability of news reporters to report that official assertions conflict with facts. Murrow’s recent integrity-free illiterate successor at CBS, Dan Rather, was booted for less than anyone could make a movie out of. Here’s a take on that pathetic episode from a forthcoming book by a producer at CBS.