My greatest passion

It is no wonder that journalists are responding warmly to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney's second film as a director. Yes, the film-star-turnedfilmmaker's 90-minute slice of history is elegantly made and dramatically compelling, but it's also a timely plea that reporters be allowed to report on facts without interference from their money-minded bosses.

In telling the story of American TV news man Edward R Murrow and the fallout from his 1954 unsympathetic report on the anti-Communist Senator McCarthy, Clooney explores the role of Murrow's seniors at CBS, notably the network chief Bill Paley. When Murrow criticised Senator McCarthy's witchhunts on air, sponsors dropped out and angry politicians started calling Paley. Paley wasn't happy.

It's a subject close to Clooney's heart. That friction between revenue and news, he believes, was never more evident than it is in today's US TV landscape, where conglomerates such as News Corp and Viacom face pressure from political forces not to rock the boat in their news programmes. Broadcast news has an increasingly tarnished reputation.

"I have friends who run big companies and they talk about very disturbing things at times," explains Clooney, who won a best screenplay prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, for the script he co-wrote with Grant Heslov.

"Les Moonves [today's CBS chief] is a good friend of mine and has been talking about making television news a bit more like MTV and pepping it up. I don't envy his position, because he has to go back to shareholders and tell them that they're not going to make as much money from the news as they could. It's a constant battle between entertainment and news."

Clooney should know. His father was a news director and anchorman at a Cincinnati TV station for 35 years, and George grew up with an awareness of the issues surrounding news reporting. "Growing up as the son of a newsman, I found it was the reporters who always wanted to run those stories which asked the tough questions," he says.

"They always wanted to go at [the President] - but it was their bosses who stopped them, saying that they didn't want to lose future access. But I believe that there is responsibility in terms of news, because power unchecked and unchallenged always corrupts."

It's no secret that Clooney leans Left in his political views. He runs the risk that Good Night, and Good Luck, named for Murrow's signing-off catchphrase, will alienate Republicans in the US. But the actor, who talks more intelligently about contemporary issues than most "bleeding-heart liberal" film stars, says he was determined not to create a piece of anti-Bush propaganda.

"I didn't want to preach," he insists. "I've always believed that polarising people doesn't do us any good; that just means I appeal to 48 per cent of this country and nobody else opens their eyes and their ears. The trick is to go in and say that this is a debate, the issues are more complicated than right or wrong. When Murrow says we must always find a way to protect the rights of the individual and the state at the same time, it's not easy. That's the difficulty of democracy."

Clooney has fought his own battles with the television news world in the past decade, boycotting the daily Entertainment Tonight when a sister programme aired footage of him filmed without permission in 1997. He argues that news should not include frivolities just to win ratings.