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Fuck it! We’ll do it live! These, of course, are the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly. But George Clooney had a similar thought recently—involving a different former CBS newsman—when he decided to mount a live televised production of Good Night, and Good Luck, a Broadway play that he cowrote, based on a movie that he cowrote, based on Edward R. Murrow’s famous takedown of the demagogue Joseph McCarthy in the fifties. (In the movie, Clooney played Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly, but in the stage show, he plays Murrow himself.) While numerous Broadway shows have been filmed for subsequent distribution in recent years—think Hamilton on Disney+—broadcasting live is unusual. Clooney has suggested that he was motivated to do it, in part, by the fact that Murrow’s newscasts went out live. (“There’s no safety net,” he told the New York Times, “and it’s a fun thing to do.”) Putting the show on TV also offered a chance to see it without shelling out for a ticket, the average price of which has hovered in the three-hundred-dollar range. CNN agreed to air it for free.
Of course, Clooney and CNN were also interested in televising the show because its subject matter is supremely relevant right now, as every journalist covering it dutifully pointed out. The historical echoes “are extraordinary,” even “eerie,” CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote, noting the play’s themes of “unrestrained political power, corporate timidity and journalistic integrity.” Clooney told the Times that, “unfortunately, this play always is timely. What journalists do for a living is always going to be challenged by people in power—they don’t like it unless they can control it. And there are some things about this that are more timely right now.” He added, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, that Trumpism is even worse than what McCarthy did. The latter “wasn’t anywhere near as pervasive as it is right now,” he said, referencing the “fear that you see kind of stretching through law firms and universities.”
On Saturday evening—after some preamble lionizing Murrow and hyping the significance of the event (“We’re just minutes away from history,” anchor Pamela Brown declared, which was, at least, true in a very literal sense)—CNN’s airing of the play began. From the start it was, as promised, catnip for journalism nerds, and evocative of the industry’s present challenges—Clooney as Murrow quickly gets into an argument about bothsidesism with CBS honcho William S. Paley (“I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument”); a military official leans over Friendly’s desk to warn him against running a contentious story; there’s a lot of righteous finger-jabbing—all playing out on a gorgeous set bedecked with big cameras and other old-school-newsroom impedimenta. Occasionally, the action is scored with live singing. At one point, as Murrow’s team burrows into its work, we hear the lilting melody of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”
There may be trouble ahead, and, of course, there is: Murrow challenges McCarthy’s reign of terror; McCarthy responds—and it’s actually McCarthy, in one of several astute uses of archival footage that punctuate the action—by labeling Murrow a Communist sympathizer; Murrow debunks this; and so on. The play is strongest in this focused, tense stretch of point and counterpoint between Clooney and the ghost of his adversary, aided by the transmission of Clooney’s monologues in black-and-white, via a screen. (It surely helps that Clooney is a screen actor; perhaps surprisingly, this was his Broadway debut.) On the whole, though, I found the play to be confusingly paced and somehow off-key. (At one point, Friendly quips that Murrow has a “face for radio”—a joke that really doesn’t land when aimed at the handsomest actor on earth.) And the invocation of journalistic ethics—which climaxes with a hellish montage of modern-day cable-news clips playing over one another while Murrow stands onstage looking sad—is desperately unsubtle; at times, I felt as if I was watching a dramatized civics lesson rather than a work of art about real people who once lived and breathed. The exchanges about the appropriateness of infusing perspective into capital-J Journalism, or the perception thereof, occasionally had promise. (I enjoyed Murrow firing back, after Paley asks him why he keeps calling McCarthy “the junior senator from Wisconsin,” that it’s because he is the junior senator from Wisconsin.) But for me, they stopped frustratingly short of interrogating the murkiness of where the lines actually lie when pushing back on a demagogue. Murrow is styled as an old-school newsman—but the very existence of the play is a testament to his moral authority, a quality that may be seen as uncontroversial in Murrow’s case but, when invoked today, often makes old-school newsmen uncomfortable. McCarthy was the junior senator from Wisconsin. But identifying him as such was a choice.
The intended lesson—that, when demagogues lie and smear, the only response is to stand up to them—was, at least, clear, and worthwhile. Ahead of the broadcast, Clooney told CNN that he hoped the play would offer viewers a hopeful message at this dark moment, reminding people that the US has been through “challenging times and that we survived it as a country,” and that “we do find our better angels,” even if “it takes a minute.” This last point is worth dwelling on—if a motif of American popular culture is the good guy winning out by the time the credits roll (or, in this case, the actors bow and the credits roll), in real life, the heroic resistance part can take longer to arrive. As the historian Beverly Gage wrote in The New Yorker earlier this year—with reference, among other things, to a Truman-era loyalty probe of federal workers and the infamous case of the alleged spy Alger Hiss—key events of the Red Scare “took place before most Americans had ever heard the name Joe McCarthy,” who was an obscure figure until “he came along, several years into it all, boasting that he had in his hand a list of two hundred and five Communists in the State Department.” (As a different historian, A. Brad Schwartz, wrote in Time, even this—false—claim perhaps only blew up due to a combination of historical contingency and irresponsible media reporting.) Further back still, as early as the late thirties, it was a a still-obscure member of Congress, Martin Dies, who pioneered the tactics of McCarthyism (helping, among other things, to undermine a visionary New Deal–era program for writers, as I explored for CJR in 2020).
Even after McCarthy burst onto the scene, it took Murrow a while to challenge him. Over the weekend, Paul Farhi, a media reporter (and contributor to CJR), re-upped a story that he wrote over thirty years ago in the Washington Post in which he reexamined “the Murrow-McCarthy myth”; he wrote that Murrow did not bring McCarthy down (the latter’s power was already on the wane), that many of Murrow’s colleagues believed he should have taken McCarthy on sooner, and that others in the media led the charge quicker. Indeed, writing in the Post last week, Larry Tye argued that Good Night, and Good Luck lionizes the wrong journalist, and should instead have told the story of Drew Pearson, whose earlier critical coverage so enraged McCarthy that he went after Pearson’s sponsors, marked his name on a baseball bat he kept by his bed, and physically kneed him in the groin at a dinner dance. (Details, it must be said, that might also have made for a more entertaining play.)
It’s hard to know, I think, exactly where on this timeline we stand today: we’re a decade into the Trump era, but it’s still not clear whether Trumpism will be the defining -ism of this political age, or a way station to something darker still. (Clooney, for what it’s worth, seems to think the former, telling Cooper that when Trump “is finished—and he will be finished—they are going to have to go looking for someone that can deliver the message that he delivered with the same kind of charisma, and they don’t have that.”) Even this, of course, assumes that we’re on this sort of timeline at all. The past can educate, and it often rhymes. But it does not predict. Well-timed Broadway plays alone are not saving anyone from anything. For that, people will have to act. Many journalists are already standing up to the demagogues of this era. But some are not. And that’s before we get into the matter of their corporate masters.
Clooney has said that before he turned Good Night, and Good Luck into a movie, CBS was supposed to run it as a live special—only for the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction during the network’s coverage of the 2004 Super Bowl to put it off the idea. (“Suddenly I got a call from the head of CBS saying, ‘We’re out of the live TV business,’” Clooney recalled.) If Saturday’s live broadcast was timely, this was in no small part thanks, again, to the CBS hierarchy: watching McCarthy attack Murrow, it was impossible not to think of Trump attacking the network in the modern day, via a risible lawsuit that Paramount, the owner of CBS, nonetheless seems poised to settle as it seeks federal approval for a corporate merger. It might be overly dramatic to say that a settlement would constitute CBS getting out of the journalism business, but it would be a shameful step in that direction.
If a play ever gets written about it, the owners of CBS won’t be the good guys. Again, though, the journalists might be. 60 Minutes, the show in Trump’s crosshairs, has continued to sharply cover his administration—and veteran reporters there have spoken out in defense of press freedom. After the televised curtain went down on Saturday, CNN’s Cooper discussed the play with high-profile journalists, including Scott Pelley, of 60 Minutes, who recently infuriated right-wingers when he gave a commencement address and warned, in memorable and somewhat Murrovian language, that journalism is under attack because “ignorance works for power.” Cooper played a clip from the speech back to Pelley, and asked him to reflect. “I am echoing the sentiments of Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly,” he said. He then puzzled over the reaction: “I simply ask you: What does it say about our country when there’s hysteria about a speech that’s about freedom of speech?”
Other notable stories:
- Over the weekend, Trump activated nearly two thousand members of the National Guard in response to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles, the first time a president has taken such a step over the heads of state leadership since 1965; Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, described the move as unnecessary and intentionally inflammatory. (While there have been some violent attacks on law enforcement, the demonstrations have mostly been peaceful; asked on The Daily whether the response seemed proportional, Shawn Hubler, the New York Times’ LA bureau chief, replied, “No.”) At least two members of the press were struck by police projectiles over the weekend, including Lauren Tomasi, a correspondent for the Australian network 9News, who was hit by a rubber bullet live on camera.
- Late last week, an appeals court overturned much of a lower-court ruling that ordered Trump to restore access to the Associated Press, which Trump had banned from various settings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”; Trump will still have to let the AP into larger spaces like the East Room of the White House, but can keep its reporters out of other areas while litigation continues. Elsewhere in Washington, the Supreme Court reined in a ruling ordering the Department of Government Efficiency to share records with a watchdog group. And ABC suspended Terry Moran, a correspondent, after a post in which he characterized the Trump aide Stephen Miller as driven by hate enraged the administration.
- Last week, a jury in Malta convicted two men of supplying the bomb that was used to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist, in the country in 2017; three other men had already been convicted in relation to the killing, while the alleged mastermind, a businessman named Yorgen Fenech, is still awaiting trial. Caruana Galizia’s family welcomed the verdicts, but warned that “the institutional failures that enabled her murder remain unaddressed and unreformed.” (ICYMI, CJR’s Yona TR Golding interviewed Paul Caruana Galizia, Daphne’s son, who wrote a book about the killing, in 2023; you can read the interview here.)
- Earlier today, The Guardian debuted a new tool, called Secure Messaging, that it built in collaboration with the University of Cambridge in the UK, and allows sources to securely share tips with Guardian journalists via the paper’s app; unlike other such tools, Secure Messaging “conceals the fact that messaging is taking place at all” by making it “indistinguishable from data sent to and from the app by our millions of regular users,” the paper says. It has also published the source code for the tool, allowing other organizations to build on and use the technology for themselves.
- And, also in the UK, the conservative Telegraph retracted a story about a supposed high-earning family that claimed it can no longer afford to go on vacation due to a spike in private-school fees caused by the Labour government—after it emerged that the family does not appear to exist. (A photo accompanying the story was a stock image depicting models.) According to Press Gazette, the story was based on a real interview set up by a PR firm, but the testimony turned out to be fake.
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