Daily Dialogue — July 24, 2017

“Oh, if none of us had ever read a dangerous book or had a friend who was different, never joined an organization that advocated change, we’d all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. We’re gonna go with the story… because the terror is right here in this room.”

— Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), written by George Clooney, Grant Heslov

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Television.

Trivia: Each morning, George Clooney would gather his cast members together, and give them copies of the newspapers from that day in 1953. He’d then give them an hour and a half, working on old manual typewriters, copying out the stories from the paper. He would then hold an improvised news conference with hidden cameras, in which the cast members would then pitch their stories to the editor, just like a real newsroom.

Dialogue On Dialogue: The dialogue is from a scene in which members of the CBS news team gather in advance of the next newscast in which Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) is going to directly after the Nemesis of the story: Senator Joseph McCarthy. One member of the staff relates how his ex-wife had attended Communist party meetings and therefore, the newsman offers to absent himself from the broadcast so as not to prove a liability. It was a dark time in the history of the United States, the paranoia of the so-called ‘Red Scare’.