Howard Beale: Ever More Prophetic

“We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our TVs while some local newscaster tells us today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

“We all know things are bad. Worse than bad.  They’re crazy. It’s like everything’s going crazy. So we don't go out any more.  We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. 

“Let me have my toaster and my TV and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything, just leave us alone.

"Well, I’m not going to leave you alone.  I want you to get mad …”

— Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976). I always made that movie the capstone of my journalism ethics class.