A&EI wanted to ask you a little bit about the McCarthy revisionism because you were already working on this movie when it began; the Ann Coulter book came out ...

Sure, Page Six did a story, just before we started, saying that I was about to start shooting a liberal piece about McCarthy, you know, when we really realized that he wasn't such a bad guy after all! And we've found out since then that a lot these people were spies! There's a lot of that. There were actors on the set who said, "But Annie Lee Moss was a spy. Did you read Ann Coulter's book?" And, of course, the dumb-ass thing that she does -- and, you know, if she was a good journalist she would understand this -- is that if you watch the whole [episode of Murrow's "See It Now," when Murrow questioned McCarthy's persecution of Moss], at the end of the show he says, "You will note that neither this reporter nor the senator knows whether or not Annie Lee Moss is or is not a Communist." They simply demand that she has a right to face her accuser, which is what we based our Constitution on, you know.

That's the point of it: that once we get to that place where we start, you know, putting people in Guantánamo Bay -- now they very well may be terrorists, and if they are they should be tried. But either you are a prisoner of war and you have Geneva Convention rights or you are a criminal and you have habeas corpus and you have the right to an attorney and a speedy trial. Giving away those things damages our fiber, all the things that we have fought so long for.

We do this every 30 or 40 years; we just sort of, you know, go crazy. Something scares us: The Russians test a bomb and all of sudden we start rounding up anybody we think is un-American. Or, you know, Pearl Harbor gets bombed and we pick up every Japanese-American and stick them in a camp. And we come to our senses and we figure it out, and it gets better every time; we're not burning witches at the stake anymore. At least we're improving, we are evolving. And that's why I think the movie's optimistic, actually.

You also, though, focus pretty critical attention on the role of the media, and not just Murrow, the hero here, but also the eager lapdogs of power, the characters like Jack O'Brian, the Hearst columnist who was a friend of Walter Winchell's and a huge redbaiter.

A real McCarthyian. Hearst wasn't allowing us to use it.

They weren't going to grant you rights to quote from his column?

They weren't going to grant us rights. And then I pulled out -- you know he wrote for the [New York] Journal-American -- I pulled up other papers; the front page of the New York Post says "Don Hollenbeck kills himself," and just inside it says, "Jack O'Brian blamed for his death," which makes [O'Brian] a news story. His articles were now newsworthy because they were part of a story. So as far as I was concerned, I was welcoming a suit from the Hearst Corp. They backed down eventually.

So his columns were fair game because of the role they played in Hollenbeck's suicide -- interesting. I found out that O'Brian is dead, which is too bad, because I was curious whether he'd ever regretted those columns, if he'd ever recanted.

All I know is that you don't hear anywhere near the worst of what he said about Hollenbeck, because I felt people wouldn't believe it. The reason I [showed actual footage] of McCarthy in the film is because I felt people wouldn't believe us if we had an actor play him. And I thought it was best, in the same way that Murrow did, to have McCarthy, to have him in his own words.

But, you know, the O'Brian stuff was insane. He was, like, "Good riddance" -- I mean literally the day after he died. And the lead-ups to it, it was just, it was a barrage, it was a nonstop barrage. And, you know, Don wasn't strong enough. He was a local anchor. Nobody really went at Murrow because Murrow was tough and was trusted and well liked.

And do you see O'Brian-like tactics today?

Sure. Well, yeah, there are some interesting similarities. I've certainly been a -- I won't say victim because I don't feel victimized -- but I've certainly been a target of specific ones myself. They haven't damaged me because the media's so fractured now, especially broadcasting. There were always a lot of different newspapers, but [back then] in broadcasting there were three networks. And now there's, you know, 5,000. So getting beaten up by one guy who gets a million viewers ...

Your career was once pronounced over, if I recall.

Oh yeah, Bill O'Reilly did a whole show about why my career was over because of my political stance. He brought some guy on I'd never heard of. But you know, the bottom line of that is, fine. At least it's not the government bringing me in and questioning me. So we've evolved one step further ahead. And there isn't a kind of power that television media -- although it has a lot of power, it isn't concentrated in one specific area, because if you're a conservative person you turn on Fox News, and if you're a liberal you listen to National Public Radio; you find yourself going to the place that plays to what your political and social agenda or beliefs are.

The unfortunate thing with that is that it means that people are starting with completely different facts. You know, if you watch Fox News -- my aunt and uncle are conservative, and if you had a conversation with them before the war, Saddam Hussein was the reason for 9/11, was attached to al-Qaida, all of those kinds of things. So it's just an interesting development in a confusing time in media. It's also about 24-hour news. I actually thought it was interesting to watch these guys this week, from here at least, mad, you know; they seem to really have taken up going at people.

You know where else they did it, in a way, was during the Terri Schiavo thing. That's when I thought we had finally lost our minds. All through the Terri Schiavo thing I thought, Well, this is it, this is ... we've really finally snapped. And then they started doing polls, and you found out that 80 percent of the country, including the Bible Belt, thought the government should stay out of our hospital rooms. And then I went, "Oh, we're still here. Our country's still alive."

Well, particularly cable news can create an illusion that the whole country's feeling one way when in fact they're not.

And that was the interesting thing with Murrow in a way. He was very cautious about what he was doing, but the minute that he came out and called bullshit on this guy, they realized that calls were coming in 13 to 1 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in Lexington, Ky., in favor of [Murrow], and not in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, not in the metropolitan cities that you always expect to be liberal. All of a sudden you realized that most of the country said, "Wait a minute, man." They all had their own personal beliefs and they kept them quiet, but when Murrow stood up and said, "Shut up," everybody stuck their head out and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too."

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