Clooney: I think, in general, this is all cyclical, don’t you? You can go back and see where yellow journalism came from, and it was 150 years ago — these are issues that are constantly renewed, and come up, and we go, “Well, we didn’t ask tough questions for that period of time,” and then people get pissed off, and they go, “Hey, we want real information, we want the truth.” And you get that for a while. And then something happens, and people panic, and we do dumb things again. It’s cyclical.

I think we’re evolving. We used to burn witches at the stake, and then we had the Senate investigating people, and now we just have pundits being sort of unkind.

Public Eye: I read that you had screened “Network” to some young people.

Clooney: They didn’t think it was a comedy.

Public Eye: Why do you think that is?

Clooney: Because all the things that Paddy Chayevsky wrote about came true. … The idea of the anchorman being a bigger news story than the news story. The idea of a reality show following terrorist groups around is not far-fetched. Sybil the Soothsayer is not [far-fetched] — the idea that you would dress up news to look like entertainment. Or dress up entertainment to look like news.

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