Media-dog watchers worried that the long-running feud between the actor and the Fox News scourge had cooled last week when O'Reilly was invited to a VIP screening of "Good Night and Good Luck," Clooney's movie about the 1953-54 clash between CBS eminence Edward R. Murrow and Communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy....And Clooney puts O'Reilly on the mat!
"O'Reilly actually said some nice things about the movie," Clooney told us Friday at the opening night of the New York Film Festival.
This comes as high praise indeed, considering that the movie's archival footage of McCarthy reminds some people of the "No Spin" pundit. The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper wrote, "You don't have to squint too hard to recognize O'Reilly — who makes it his business to shout down and then de-mike his guests on the air — in the hectoring robot-voiced McCarthy."...
...in fact, Clooney thinks it unfair to compare O'Reilly and McCarthy.
"Unlike McCarthy," a broadly grinning Clooney told us, "O'Reilly was never elected to public office. What's more, Joe McCarthy was never accused of telling one of his female staff members she should use a vibrator" — one of the sex-harassment claims former Fox News associate producer Andrea Mackris made against O'Reilly, who denied her allegations.
I definitely want to see Clooney's new movie. I'm not sure I buy the usual retelling of the Murrow-McCarthy duel (Murrow being responsible for single-handedly saving America, in the usual fable) but it's nice to remember an era when America had the capacity for self-correction.
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