How Truth Was Destroyed By The 1970s Most Iconic Movie

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 24 seconds ago

Americans used to believe the news was unbiased, and, whether that was ever true or not, for a long time, there was an attempt to make it seem true. Eventually, the news media dropped even the pretense of being factual and went full force into openly delivering sensationalist propaganda, but they couldn’t have gotten away with it at scale if their viewers hadn’t already been conditioned to accept it.

That conditioning first began working on the public with one hugely influential movie that twisted viewers into thinking it was condemning irresponsible television, while subtly convincing them that irresponsibility was the only path to truth. And maybe, just maybe, it was right.

This is the story of how Network Screenwashed audiences into accepting fake news.

Network’s Story Of Corruption

Network follows aging news anchor Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, as he learns he’s about to be fired after years of declining viewership. In a moment of despair, Beale announces on live television that he plans to kill himself during a broadcast. 

The shocking moment briefly boosts ratings, and when Beale returns to the air, he delivers a furious rant urging viewers to shout from their windows that they are “mad as hell.” Sensing an opportunity, ambitious producer Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) reinvents the news broadcast as a spectacle built around Beale’s emotional tirades. 

The script presents this as a horrifying corruption of journalism. But the film’s structure quietly and intentionally undermines that message at every turn. It does that using a four-step persuasion pattern.

Screenwashed By Affective Conditioning 

Affective Conditioning is a persuasion process where repeated emotional cues are paired with a person, idea, or behavior so audiences automatically feel positively or negatively about it without consciously evaluating the argument.

Beale’s tirades are honest and compelling. His rants about alienation, corporate power, and media manipulation resonate because the film never actually proves him wrong, and they accurately mirror what people in the 70s were beginning to suspect about the true nature of their world.

Meanwhile, Beale himself is a true believer in what he’s saying and one of only two people in the film who isn’t a liar or a hypocrite. More on who the other one is, in a moment.

Though Beale is breaking all the rules and standards, you can’t help but feel good about him.

Screenwashed By Poisoning the Well

Poisoning the Well is a rhetorical tactic where the people criticizing a position are themselves portrayed as corrupt, immoral, or evil, so the audience dismisses their criticism before considering it.

Network tries to seem like it’s offsetting sympathy for Beale by framing him as mentally ill, using other characters who are shocked by what he’s doing. But every character who calls Beale insane or condemns his editorializing rants is portrayed as morally repulsive and unreliable.

The network executives exploiting him are greedy opportunists. The corporate leadership is portrayed as cold and sinister. When these characters insist Beale is unstable, the audience instinctively distrusts those accusers, because our opinion of them has already been poisoned. 

The only character truly defending traditional journalism is Max Schumacher (William  Holden). Unfortunately for the argument he’s supposed to represent, Max spends the entire movie cheating on his wife and enabling the very circus he claims to oppose. His moral authority is nonexistent, and the institution he defends collapses with him.

What Howard does is far more authentic than the fake dog and pony show of normal news that 1970s news consumers have been watching in the real world. At first, Howard’s tirades are largely anger and frustration. His ratings soar and audiences flock to him. When he demands they open their windows and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” into the wind, city streets echo with the sound of outraged voices.

That’s when we meet the only other honest character in the film.

Screenwashed By Revelation Framing

Revelation Framing is a persuasion technique where information is presented as if it’s a shocking truth that the audience is just now discovering. Instead of arguing a point, the message is structured like a reveal: first, something seems confusing or wrong, then the “hidden truth” is exposed. 

This often produces a feeling of emotional release or catharsis, because the audience feels like they’ve finally figured out what’s really going on. The power of the technique comes from making people feel like they’ve had an awakening, rather than feeling like someone is trying to convince them.

By framing an idea as a profound revelation rather than an argument, the audience is encouraged to accept it as insight or enlightenment rather than critically evaluate it as a claim. Instead of exposing Beale as a lunatic, the film validates him.

Howard Beale has begun trashing his network’s parent company, and so he’s brought to a meeting with conglomerate chairman Arthur Jenson, played by 1970s powerhouse Ned Beatty. Arthur Jensen doesn’t dismiss Beale’s warnings about corporate power. He confirms them. In one of the film’s most famous speeches, Jensen explains that the world is run by vast economic forces beyond the control of nations or voters.

The movie’s supposed madman is suddenly the only person who understands reality. For unstable Howard Beale, it’s a revelation. He says he believes that he has just seen God.

Howard stops his tirade against the company and begins preaching a deeper truth to his audience. Not because he’s been corrupted, but because he’s been converted by revelation.

Screenwashed By Martyrdom Framing

Martyrdom Framing is a narrative device in which a character is killed or punished for their beliefs, signaling to the audience that their message must have been true or threatening to powerful interests.

Howard Beale’s reputation as a truth teller is cemented in the mind of the audience by the film’s ending, in which Beale is murdered live on air. Like Jesus Christ, Socrates, and many others throughout history who were right, Howard Beale is made a martyr for speaking out, further cementing his status as a hero in the minds of Network’s viewers. 

How Network Created What It Hated

The film’s director, Sidney Lumet, may have intended Network to be a cautionary tale, but instead it subtly conditions the audience to accept the very thing it’s supposed to be warning them against by making the man who perverts the news into a hero surrounded on all sides by evil.

You might think that could be a positive, since Howard is a truth teller and Network persuades the audience they’d be better off with news men who stand up and voice their opinions, than those who sit and read copy. That would be accurate if audiences could tell who was telling the truth and who wasn’t, but they can’t.

When Network normalized the idea of news men voicing opinions, it normalized the good along with bad, creating a new vector for mass media manipulation.

How Network Changed The World For The Better

There’s another way to read it. A look back at history reveals that maybe news was never truly neutral; it was simply better at pretending to be. 

Anchors delivered narratives with calm voices and professional posture, and the performance of objectivity made those narratives feel like facts. If Network helped strip that mask away, it may have exposed something that was already there. 

Opinion didn’t invade the news; Network may have inadvertently helped it stop hiding. The result of that is messier and often more manipulative, but it’s also more honest about what the medium actually is: people interpreting events, not machines reporting them. In that sense, the loud, openly opinionated era of media may be less deceptive than the quiet one that claimed neutrality while shaping the story all the same.

George Clooney Proved Network Right

Decades later, the 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck would quietly (and accidentally) prove Network’s point by trying to screenwash audiences into believing the opposite. Good Night, and Good Luck was the retelling of how, in 1954, CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow used his television news program See It Now to directly challenge the methods of Joseph McCarthy, who had built national fame by accusing government officials, soldiers, and entertainers of communist ties. 

Rather than doing a straight report on the controversy or giving the audience facts, Murrow devoted an entire broadcast to criticizing McCarthy’s tactics. He assembled character assassination clips of the senator’s own speeches and interrogations with the clear goal to persuade his audience into sharing his point of view: that McCarthy’s investigations were fraudulent and must be stopped. 

Murrow then cashed in his reputation as an unbiased newsman to deliver an ultra-biased closing editorial warning that the United States risked damaging its democratic principles if suspicion replaced evidence. The broadcast was one of the first major television moments in which a national news anchor openly used his platform to challenge a powerful political figure, helping turn public opinion against McCarthy and marking a turning point in the senator’s influence.

The only difference between Beale’s fiction and Murrow’s history is framing. In the George Clooney-directed movie, Murrow’s opinionated broadcast is presented as courageous journalism through a series of familiar narrative tricks. These are designed to distract the audience from the bias in Murrow’s broadcasts.

Murrow is intentionally depicted as the opposite of Howard Beale. He’s calm, rational, and morally steady. His opponent appears mainly through his most extreme moments. The black-and-white cinematography, cigarette-smoked newsrooms, and restrained dialogue all signal integrity even though there is none. 

The audience isn’t just hearing Murrow’s argument. They’re being conditioned to experience it as responsible and sane, whether it is or not. Strip away those cues, and the act itself looks very familiar: a television newsman abandoning neutrality to tell the public what they should believe. Howard Beale and the real anchors who followed Murrow simply did it louder and more obviously.

Network’s Brave New World

Whether Network meant to or not, it prepared audiences for a new kind of journalism. One where the anchor isn’t pretending to be neutral anymore. One where outrage replaces reporting. One where the loudest voice in the room becomes the most trusted one. In other words, it helped create exactly the world we live in now. 

Congratulations news puppets, you’ve been screenwashed.