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Clooney says he's not trying to pick a fight with McCarthy revisionists, such as Ann Coulter, who has written that many of McCarthy's targets were, indeed, Communists and traitors. The film makes no case for the innocence of anyone McCarthy accused. Instead, it argues, as Murrow did, for due process and the right of the accused to a fair hearing. It's not hard to see where Clooney is going with this; you can make out the shadows of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in the background of "Good Night."

There's also a kind of parallel commentary on the role of media sensationalism. As McCarthy was attacking Murrow's patriotism, a lesser-known CBS newsman, Don Hollenbeck, was being regularly smeared by a popular redbaiting columnist, Jack O'Brian, of the Hearst-owned New York Journal-American. As the bigger drama with McCarthy unfolds, the film tracks Hollenbeck (Ray Wise) as he unravels under the relentless press attack.

This is something Clooney knows a little about. In addition to fending off paparazzi -- living most of the year in a villa outside Lake Como, Italy provides some isolation -- he has engaged in a hit-and-run verbal brawl with Fox News's O'Reilly over the years. Among other things, O'Reilly has challenged Clooney's integrity in the management of funds the actor raised for victims of the 9/11 attacks. At one point, after the flop of Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and "Solaris," O'Reilly declared that Clooney's outspoken liberal views had harmed his movie career.

But Clooney is quick to draw distinctions: Bill O'Reilly not only isn't Joe McCarthy, he isn't even Jack O'Brian.

"No one ever elected O'Reilly to an office," he says. "He's never had our vote or our proxy to use against us. . . . Plus, the media is so fractured these days that nobody can hurt you like they did years ago because nobody has as big an audience. There used to be three networks. Now there's hundreds and hundreds.

"Besides," he adds, unable to resist a tweak, "I don't believe McCarthy was ever accused in a deposition of telling a female employee she should use a vibrator" -- a reference to a claim made in a sexual harassment lawsuit, since settled, by one of O'Reilly's former producers.

O'Reilly declined to tweak back, but Fox News spokesman Paul Schur responded, "We are disappointed that George has chosen to hurt Mr. O'Reilly's family in order to promote his movie. But it's obvious he needs publicity considering his recent string of failures. We wish him well in his struggle to regain relevancy."

Ultimately, Clooney liked the Murrow story because of what he believes it says about journalism and news reporting. By his reckoning, the two great "high-water marks" for TV news were Murrow's confrontation of McCarthy and Walter Cronkite's declaration on CBS News in February 1968 that the war in Vietnam was an unwinnable "stalemate." Both were moments when "broadcast journalists had impact," he says. "They had an immediate effect on policy."

Most broadcast journalists would agree that those were extraordinary moments in TV history. But they were also highly unusual. Murrow and Cronkite -- each referred to in his time as "the most trusted man in America" -- almost never stepped out of their roles as neutral reporters to advocate a position, particularly on issues so freighted as McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. Today, such direct advocacy might be regarded as partisanship.

"The fact that in 50 years you can point to only two instances shows you how rare those comments were," says Barbara Cochran, a former Washington bureau chief of CBS News and now president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association. Murrow and Cronkite weren't being partisan, she says; rather, they were "speaking as news analysts, based on decades of reporting."

In any case, Clooney contends the news media have lost something since then. "I'm not a journalist, I'm just an observer," he says, "but there are times when the media takes a bit of a pass at asking the tough questions. The bigger concern is when Judith Miller writes stories saying there are definitely weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq], and then the New York Times later apologizes because they say, 'Listen, we should have asked tougher questions.' That's a dangerous place to go. . . . When I was growing up, my father's argument was always, it's not just your right, it's your duty to question authority. Always."

Later, talking with a group of broadcast journalists, Clooney expresses sympathy for Miller, who is in jail for refusing to divulge her sources to investigators in the Valerie Plame-Karl Rove leak case. He then contrasts this with Miller's misreporting on Iraq. "Maybe," he jokes, "Judith Miller should go to jail for a couple of those stories!"