Network Got It Right: The Legacy of a Scorching Satire

At a time when “another civil war” has become a familiar phrase in American news reports, how do we grasp the prescience of a 46-year-old movie in which the protagonist proclaims that “at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain”? The speaker is, of course, Howard Beale (Peter Finch), news anchor of the fictional UBS-TV in Network. The ostensible target of screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s excoriating 1976 satire was the monolithic broadcasters bastardizing the news in their rabid pursuit of ratings… Read Full Article