D.C. drama worthy of Hollywood

In 1954, with the support of my wife and family, I quit the only full-time job I've ever had to make my living as a freelance writer.

I had just sold articles to the Saturday Evening Post and Harper's, and it was a lot more fun than public relations. So I moved my office home and started a new life, full of excitement and contemptuous of risk. Then, a week later, the Senate hearings on the charges leveled by Sen. Joseph McCarthy against the U.S. Army started -- the most gripping soap opera on television, replete with heroes, villains and victims.

And it almost sank my new career at birth because, for more than six weeks, I abandoned my work to watch. We took a dangerous hit in income as a result, but those weeks kindled a political awareness that didn't exist before and a deep and lifelong aversion to bullies of every name and nature -- especially when they prey on defenseless people.

All of this played through my head again last week when I saw "Good Night and Good Luck," the story of how newsman Edward R. Murrow took on McCarthy at a time when the whole country was scared to death of him.

The movie is still playing in local theaters, and I strongly recommend it -- both as a reminder of a day when reporters didn't make news by selling out to their sources or making up facts and when mostly irrational fear was allowed to displace such abiding principles as justice and decency and fair play in how this country was run.

All of the arguments against Murrow taking on McCarthy publicly are given a fair hearing in this film -- and the same arguments prevail today. Especially how far to lean over backward for balanced editorial treatment of those who don't offer balance or truth themselves, and how -- if at all -- to factor in the reaction of advertisers who pay the bills for the media in question and carry always the threat to withdraw advertising if sufficiently offended.

It was my good fortune to work with national magazines at a time when there was no crossover between advertising and editorial. And when the Murrows of journalism had the guts and the reporting skills to take on the McCarthys of their time. Maybe films like "Good Night and Good Luck" will help strengthen the guts we need to take on the bullies of today who -- among many other outrages -- would rip us off at the gas pump and the pharmaceutical counter and call it treason when we exercise our rights to challenge their decisions.

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