Christianity Today's Partisan Movie Review

Stefan Ulstein's irritating review of Good Night and Good Luck promotes the dominant media's leftist view of the McCarthy era.

Having just finished reading the chapters on the McCarthy era in Ann Coulter's book Treason, I challenge reviews that see George Clooney's movie as anything other than another piece of leftist, Hollywood agitprop. Even without the overwhelming evidence that Coulter documents, Ulstein's review clearly lacks care for historical fact. Ulstein's careless association of Senator Joseph McCarthy with the House Committee on Unamerican Activities forms a salient example, hypocritical in light of his statement that "McCarthy's twisting of facts created guilt by association." Whereas the review mentions Murrow's painful, obligatory production of puff pieces instead of covering "real" issues, Coulter documents how Edward Murrow conducting a dishonest, libelous attack against McCarthy that contributed to McCarthy's professional and personal destruction.

As proved by the Venona project, which monitored communications between the Soviet Union and its spies in America, McCarthy's and others' concern about Communist infiltration of the U.S. government, even to the highest level levels, had solid justification. The hysteria, it seems, came not from anti-communists, but from a Democrat-dominated establishment whose loyalty the emerging facts challenged.

I hate to see Christianity Today play into George Clooney's partisan rewrite of history and the demonizing of a flawed public servant who, it turns out, was right.