Who was Edward R. Murrow?

On the eternal flight from Mexico I got to see two movies - on the way to Aguascalientes I saw a biography of Johnny Cash - Walk the Line.  I think, from what I know about Johnny Cash, the movie gave me a good idea of who he was as a person.  On the way back I got to see Good Night and Good Luck - George Clooney's biography of Edward R. Murrow.  Like many other movies about the McCarthy period - the junior senator is painted as a demagogue.  Indeed, I believe that is a worthy portrait.  But the opponents of McCarthy are painted by Hollywood as saints and that picture is not an accurate one.  Murrow was a fixture of 1950s television.  He was a presence that I remember well.  From what I have read he seems to have chosen to take on McCarthy as an act of genuine bravery.  The owner of his network seems to have been a willing accomplice, although he(Paley) was ultimately motivated by the economics of the new medium. What bothers me about the portraits in this movie and in other treatments of the era is the one sided notion that McCarthy was not motivated by anything by his own ambition. In Hollywood's view there was not a communist conspiracy, and the Hollywood 10 and all the other people who failed to respond to McCarthy's bizarre and inappropriate behavior were always wonderful.  That is simply not true. There were some communists and fellow travelers that sought either actively or passively to subvert the US.  The Rosenbergs were guilty. So were some of the Hollywood 10.  So the role of Murrow in exposing the truly subversive actions of McCarthy is critical to understanding the period.  I would have liked to have had a better idea of what drove him.  But what we got was like Spielberg's odd notion in Munich - an almost complete distortion (the Israelis who responded to the tragedy of the Olympics really di not have second thoughts at least according to interviews I have heard of the actual team members). The movie gave me an understanding  of Murrow's genuine command of the language but not an idea of what he was trying to do. I would have liked to understand how he fit in the environment and I did not get that. George Clooney (the director) seems to have let his ideology get in the way of a very good and interesting story. Sure McCarthy rolled over several very good Americans, but his role in uncovering some very real conspiracies should not be ignored. Had Clooney made the movie three dimensional instead of trying to perpetuate a myth, the movie would have been a great one. Murrow's role in all of this is an important footnote to the era both because he understood the power of the new media and because he seems to have had a part in changing a bad part of our history - so this distortion is especially disappointing. What is interesting to me about this is that two of the five movies up for best picture engage in this kind of historical revisionism. (As noted in another post Munich also seems to distort the truth.)