Although this film is more conventional and less explosive than his debut, the brilliant “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”, George Clooney’s second feature is also about television, this time a quiet, smoky meditation on journalism and freedom of speech in the McCarthy era. The facts are slightly muddled—Jack Schafer on Slate pointed out that, among other things, Edward R. Murrow was hardly the first to take on McCarthy—but the errors seem forgivable in a Hollywood biopic.

In any case, the irony of fudging facts in a movie celebrating honest journalism perhaps makes a larger point: impersonal, unbiased, perfectly accurate news stories are impossible by definition. Inaccuracy is unavoidable in the act of telling stories, and journalists are storytellers every one of them. Character counts in the equation, too, and Clooney seems more interested in spotlighting the integrity and high seriousness Murrow brought to his work. In Clooney’s Murrow is embodied the journalist’s sacred responsibility to try and tell the truth as accurately as possible. This legend of early TV news reminds us that how journalists approach finding facts is often as important as the facts they find.