All my life I have been plagued with a compulsion to know more. Television shows, movies, newspaper or magazine articles and books sent me running to the library to find more information on whatever, or whoever, struck my odd fancy.

I remember one blissful summer during university when I lived right across the street from the public library.

Right across the street!

The hours I whiled away in the non-fiction stacks, thumbing through tomes on subjects so trivial I might as well have been aspiring to a career on Jeopardy. But it was heavenly.

While I still love researching “by hand”, I am more likely to google something today than not.

“Google it.”

Bestowing action on a noun. Did that become commonplace with the rise of the search engine? Or have we always been inclined to morphing words?

My latest search topic is Edward R. Murrow and McCarthyism.

I don’t recall spending a lot of time on Sen. McCarthy in school. Most of what I know about the blacklisting and persecution of that time, I learned through the movies and reading about the entertainment industry. For example my googling today is a result of watching Good Night, Good Luck last evening. Well, watching half of it anyway. It’s not riveting but so much of history – the really important stuff – falls into this category it seems.

The movie, and the era it chronicles, has modern day implications.

Instead of a black list, we have a no fly and watch lists.

Instead of the media calling American’s attention to the misuse of power and pointing out how easily it could happen to anyone, our media distracts – when it doesn’t aid and abet.

The movie is drier than dust and unless you know that time period, and the industry, it’s hard to figure out who the players are aside from Murrow, Fred Friendly and William Paley. However, the irony of the fact that it was the media using McCarthy’s own words to bring him down, and the fact that this first use of “sound-bites” is what is now killing democracy in the U.S. by inches and yards, makes it worth slogging through.

The movie starts with a 1958 speech Murrow gave that all but ended his career at CBS. My research indicates he was not unaware of the effect he’d had on the television news industry and was uncomfortable even with the tools he helped pioneer. The speech reflects this when he accuses television, in so many words, of being an opiate of the masses* when it should be a tool of enlightenment for them.

A good movie for election year viewing and a not uninteresting mini-research sojourn either.

*A little irony in my choice of phrases as Karl Marx first used it to describe religion which I guess you could say television replaced.