George Clooney's new movie about Edward R. Murrow's devastating attacks on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Good Night, and Good Luck, gets everything right but the truth.

George Clooney's new movie about Edward R. Murrow's devastating attacks on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Good Night, and Good Luck, gets everything right but the truth. He has the chain-smoking, the unconscious sexism, the stiffly gelled hair of the time all perfectly rendered--right down to filming it all in atmospheric black-and-white. Yet, for the purpose of rendering Murrow as a lone hero who slew the Republican dragon, Clooney omits the entire Cold War (and the hot one in Korea). What might have been a nuanced historical drama turns into a medieval morality play with you-know-who as Lucifer and the media--but of course!--reprising their traditional role as savior. Watching Good Night, one might be forgiven for thinking that the entire Communist menace--indeed, the very presence of KGB agents and sympathizers in this country-was invented by the crazed McCarthy to hoodwink us all. It's as if, having exhausted his time researching the manners and paraphernalia of the early 1950s, Clooney couldn't spare a moment to read the Venona decrypts that demonstrate the intensity of the Soviet espionage and subversion effort in the United States. In its airbrushing of history, Good Night is right up there with the greatest hits of old-time propaganda.