26-05-2025
Shari Redstone's Standoff With Trump Is Playing Live on Broadway Stage in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck'
It's powerfully strange that a play starring George Clooney about the perils that government bullying once posed to journalistic inquiry at CBS News is being staged every night just down the street from CBS News in one direction, and a few blocks from corporate parent Paramount Global in the other.
The play coincides with our current reality: CBS News is currently being bullied by our government. The play is at the Winter Garden on 51st Street. Paramount headquarters is on 44th Street; CBS News is on 57th Street. And Trump Tower is on 56th. That's a mighty small fishbowl for the future of democracy and a free press.
The question is, will real life turn out differently from the play?
'Good Night, and Good Luck,' about legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow challenging the Red-baiting terror of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, parallels the dilemma facing Paramount's controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. She is under pressure from the journalists at CBS News because she is seeking to settle a specious, $20 billion lawsuit from President Trump over CBS News's '60 Minutes'' editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last year.
The lawsuit is a bully tactic to get Redstone to cave to Trump as she waits for FCC approval of her pending deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media for $8 billion.
McCarthy used bully tactics too, like smearing Murrow's reputation by claiming falsely that he had Communist ties, and by pressuring CBS President Bill Paley to get Murrow to back down.
Like Redstone, Paley wavered.
Reprising the project he directed as a film in 2005, Clooney is telling a fable for our times and issuing a warning. Murrow was one of a few household names in America at that time who had the credibility to take on McCarthy as the power-hungry Senator demanded that friends and family members rat each other out in public hearings on Communism and our military. He ruined the careers and reputations of those who came in his cross-hairs.
McCarthy was not president, but he was arguably as powerful in his day as the power-hungry Trump is in ours. And there is another tie: political operative Roy Cohn, who trained and counseled Trump in the art of lying and manipulation — a relationship detailed in the recent movie 'The Apprentice' — was McCarthy's chief counsel during those 1954 hearings, and assisted investigations of suspected communists.
Bill Paley, the just-as-legendary head of CBS who built the company into a media powerhouse from 1928 to 1946 and beyond, moved 'See It Now' to a time slot far out of prime time, where fewer were likely to see it. He didn't fire Murrow. And unlike the recent resignations at '60 Minutes' and CBS News, Murrow didn't give in.
The play is a reminder that the boundaries of our democracy have been tested before. (My colleague Brian Lowry has written about yet another challenge CBS faced over airing an expose of the tobacco industry on '60 Minutes' while a merger with Westinghouse hung in the balance.) Freedoms were strained mightily – lives were ruined, in the play one staffer takes his own life – but overall our democracy held. CBS News lived to fight another day. And McCarthy had his downfall.
But not without principled warriors like Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly who were prepared to pay the price when the risks were high – drawing McCarthy's counterpunch, losing nervous advertisers, alienating viewers. They joked about leaving the country.
Last month Redstone reportedly asked her CEO George Cheeks if '60 Minutes' could avoid reporting on the Trump administration until her Skydance merger was done. Despite the resignations at the news division, it does not appear that '60 Minutes' has done so.
She might do well to remember Murrow's words, spoken solemnly by Clooney to an audience this weekend and night after night during this Broadway run:
'We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.'
Murrow's reports contributed to a turning point, the infamous moment when the senator was publicly called out during a hearing – 'McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?' – which led to an investigation and vote of censure by his colleagues.
No such exit ramp seems open to us at this time. It is hard to imagine censure or public shame being effective today. Trump simply has no shame, and leads a cowed and paralyzed Republican Party and Congress.
At the Winter Garden the audience cheered and cheered at the drop of the curtain. To them, the stakes were clear and the path once guaranteed in our Constitution necessary. But there is no Murrow-hero coming to save us.
The current deadline for the Paramount-Skydance deal is July 6, though an extension is possible.
I wonder if Shari Redstone has seen 'Good Night, and Good Luck.'
Editor's Note: The play 'Good Night, and Good Luck' will be televised on June 7.
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