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Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Good Night, and Good Luck,' airing June 7 on CNN, draws parallels between 1950s and 2025
In a scene from the 2005 movie 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow is anchoring an episode of "See It Now" about Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who shot to fame with his claims that more than 200 'card-carrying' communists had infiltrated the U.S. Department of State. After reviewing McCarthy's unsubstantiated accusations and false claims for viewers, Murrow notes that the politician didn't create the climate of fear that exists in 1950s America, the era of the Red Scare. McCarthy is just exploiting it. Quoting from Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar,' Murrow says, 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves,' an eloquent way of saying that most people are too afraid of becoming his next target to confront McCarthy about his smear tactics. The acclaimed movie starring and co-written by George Clooney is a stirring tribute to journalism and a cautionary tale of what leaders will do in their quest for power. The script is peppered with references to due process under the law, the right of habeas corpus and freedom of speech, all principles mentioned in the Constitution that were under assault by McCarthy. When CNN airs a live broadcast of the Broadway adaptation of 'Good Night, and Good Luck' at 7 p.m. on June 7, the parallels to 2025 will be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the latest headlines. But the takeaway from Murrow's courageous stand may not be the same today as it was 20 years ago. The fault, dear viewers, is not in our stars, but at least partly in our news media. CNN is doing a fairly extraordinary thing by showing the hit play, which has earned five Tony nominations and been available only to those who are in New York City and able to afford the exorbitant ticket prices. A quick online search this week for June 6's evening performance revealed a handful of seats were still available for $329 to $849 each. Clooney and his filmmaking partner, Grant Heslov (producer and co-writer of the original movie), are behind the production, which has broken box-office records. As in the movie, Clooney again leads the cast. Only this time, the older and grayer superstar has switched from playing 'See It Now' co-creator and producer Fred Friendly to portraying Murrow (a part filled on the big screen with melancholy gravitas by David Straitharn). The CNN broadcast will be the first time a live Broadway play has been televised. So why would a cable news network be the one making TV history? Because this isn't "The Lion King" or "Sunset Boulevard." Although the narrative is set in 1954, the questions raised by "Good Night, and Good Luck" are similar to those being asked now about to President Donald Trump's attempts to redefine executive power as something so vast and unfettered that it overshadows the other two branches of government, Congress and the judiciary, and, possibly, the Constitution itself. Like the popular phrase says, 'History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.' The movie version of "Good Night, and Good Luck," like "All the President's Men," is one of the best arguments for watchdog reporting ever put on the big screen. Yet watching it through the lens of 2025, there is a certain sadness The movie now feels a bit like an elegy for broadcast journalism and a critique of how TV news may be rushing its own demise. In the movie, the standoff between Murrow and McCarthy begins quietly enough after a staff meeting, when Murrow casually asks Friendly, 'You ever spend any time in Detroit?' Murrow brings up a Detroit News story on a man from Dexter, Michigan, Milo Radulovich, who has been thrown out of the Air Force because, essentially, his dad read a Serbian newspaper. The charges against him were kept in a sealed envelope and not shown to him or his attorney. 'He was declared guilty without a trial and told if he wanted to keep his job, he'd have to denounce his father and his sister. … He told them to take a hike,' says Murrow. A CBS News team is dispatched to Michigan to interview Radulovich, even though the network's business side would rather leave the matter alone. Despite that and the military's stonewalling of requests for comment, Murrow stands firm on the need to do the reporting. 'I've searched my conscience. I can't for the life of me find any justification for this,' he says of Radulovich's predicament. 'I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.' On the air, Murrow puts it in even plainer words. Referring to what was inside that sealed envelope that decided Radulovich's fate, he asks: 'Was it hearsay, rumor, gossip, slander or hard, ascertainable facts that could be backed by credible witnesses? We do not know.' Murrow keeps on examining McCarthy's scare tactics, telling viewers that dissent must not be confused with disloyalty. "We must remember always that accusation is not proof," he says, "and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of the law.' The movie's image of TV journalists is, admittedly, nostalgically romantic and severely outdated. Newsrooms are no longer limited, thank goodness, to white men in white dress shirts with rolled-up sleeves who smoke cigarettes and drink Scotch habitually. The technology and speed of news delivery has evolved beyond anything Murrow could have imagined. Yet 'Good Night, and Good Luck' is also a reminder of how much influence TV news has lost as a trusted information source since the days of Murrow. Corporate media owners no longer care as much about the prestige of having a top-notch news team or the civic responsibility of staffing it adequately. When ratings go down, so does their funding. Cable news has devolved into too much news talk and too many pundits arguing over the topics that drive ratings. Broadcast networks don't really focus on news anymore beyond their nightly 30 minutes and their puffy morning shows. So-called newsmagazines airing in prime time have become a vast wasteland of true crimes and celebrity scandals, aside from '60 Minutes' on CBS. Even "60 Minutes," as popular as it is respected, seems under threat. This spring, its executive producer, Bill Owens, quit over interference in his journalistic independence. Not long after, CBS News head Wendy McMahon parted ways as tensions remain over Trump's $20-billion lawsuit against CBS News over a "60 Minutes" report on then-Vice President Kamala Harris. It is difficult now to picture a modern-day version of 'See It Now' outside of PBS, which is facing its own existential woes with the White House's request to Congress to take back more than $1 billion in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Who will be our Murrow, the person trusted enough by both sides of the political divide to encourage a national conversation that fosters unity? Can there even be a Murrow-like figure in an age when so many people are dismissing traditional news outlets as the lamestream media and relying instead on Tik-Tok, extremist podcasters, YouTube influencers and other dubious online voices as their main sources of information? Murrow used to sign off the air by saying, 'Good night, and good luck.' If we're lucky, broadcast journalism will find a way to keep providing the steady drip, drip, drip of legitimate news that can wear down the voices of disinformation and conspiracy theories. That, or Murrow will have to keep rolling in his grave. Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@ A live performance from Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre 7 p.m. June 7 The broadcast will air on CNN's cable network and also stream live, without requiring a cable log-in, through This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'Good Night, and Good Luck' airing on CNN at a dark time for TV news
Asia Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Asia Times
Chinese student visa ban will keep US behind the curve
We don't need no education We don't need no thought control No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teacher, leave them kids alone Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone! – Pink Floyd And so it appears the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (see here) was never properly rescinded. The US State Department released the following statement on May 28th: Under President Trump's leadership, the US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields. We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong. Chinese international students are caught up in two Trump presidency fixations – to topple elite universities as leftist bastions and to wage economic war on China. The Department of Homeland Security has revoked Harvard's ability to enroll international students partially because the university was 'coordinating with the CCP on its campus.' The assault on Chinese international students is occurring concurrently with intensified sanctions on semiconductors and export restrictions on commercial aircraft components. It is difficult to decipher whether headline-grabbing Trump policies are expressions of America's long-term political direction or just this peculiar president chasing headlines and/or venting momentary frustrations. In recent weeks, Trump has suffered a series of setbacks. DOGE did not amount to much. The courts blocked Homeland Security from barring international students from Harvard as well as the president's emergency powers to implement tariffs. China is slow-walking restoration of rare-earth exports, likely in response to new semiconductor-related sanctions. While it all could be just Trumpian rage, the special focus on Chinese international students does have almost two centuries of historical precedent. Cases of Chinese American scientists accused of espionage, hounded for years by the FBI, bankrupted by legal expenses and ultimately exonerated by the courts are legion. Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare originated as a panic in response to 'losing China.' Countless Americans were persecuted and blacklisted. Caltech physicist Qian Xuesen was deported to China, where he subsequently founded China National Space Administration (CNSA) and helped develop China's fission and fusion nuclear bombs. Revoking Chinese international student visas is just the latest expression of the 'yellow peril' which grips the Western world in times of anxiety and stress. Like a witch hunt, a case of yellow peril is only recognizable after the fever has passed – and after many 'witches' have been drowned in the river or burned at the stake. This current witch hunt is occurring at a moment of spectacular historical revelation and is, all things considered, very silly. Debating whether or not Chinese international students pose a security risk is a bit like General Motors debating how to protect its technology from BYD. The US is now behind the curve but refuses to accept it. In a stroke of infinite woke wisdom, Harvard chose a Chinese international student to speak at one of its graduation ceremonies. She delivered a generic 'let us all hold hands and sing Kumbaya' speech, which sounded a lot like President Xi Jinping's 'community with a shared future' to hypervigilant MAGA ears and insufferable Westernized elitism to status-sensitive Chinese ears. It was so Harvard, it hurt. MAGA haters accused her of being a CCP mole. Weibo (Chinese Twitter) haters accused her of mediocrity by dodging the gaokao (China's notorious college entrance exam) and getting into Harvard with internships and recommendations secured through family connections. Like most social media hate campaigns, none of these allegations have been substantiated. What this kerfuffle does reveal is that Harvard, once spoken of with reverence in China, is now mocked, fairly or not, as an institution for China's mediocre nepo babies. This comes on the heels of a delicious admissions/corruption/sex scandal involving Barnard College (which may or may not be Columbia University) and Beijing Union Medical College, perhaps China's most prestigious medical school. Beijing Union Medical College apparently admitted an undistinguished economics major from Barnard College because of her family connections. She committed the additional high crimes of claiming to be a Columbia University graduate, having an affair with her married physician boss and botching a procedure which resulted in her boss/paramour arguing with the head nurse for 40 minutes while a patient remained drugged-out on the operating table. While applicants to American universities will surely collapse as Trump makes getting a US degree a high-risk proposal, Chinese international students studying in the US last year were already 25% below their 2019 peak. The reputation of American universities has been on a downward trend as China quickly figured out that the students who went overseas often did so to avoid the rigors of preparing for the gaokao. Many employers have found overseas graduates entitled and not as rigorous as local grads. This ire is not just directed toward graduates of middling institutions but all the way up to the likes of Harvard and Barnard College (which, for the record, is technically part of Columbia University but has its own admissions office and all Barnard grads should know not to claim the technicality – c'mon lady). There is a growing understanding that China's universities, especially elite ones, produce (or at least admit) higher-caliber graduates given admissions through objective examination, which has no room for nonsense like feeding orphans in Tanzania or excellence in ridiculous sports like squash. Like many things, China is getting in front of the curve. Consider the following two tables of university rankings. In the Nature Index, which tracks the number of publications in 146 top scientific journals, 16 of the top 20 universities are Chinese while three are American. In the Times Higher Education rankings, which weighs multiple factors with faculty and research 'reputation' the most important, only two of the top 20 are Chinese while 13 are American. 'Reputation' is subjective by definition and a lagging indicator. Over time, the Times High Education rankings should converge with Nature Index rankings as students and faculty realize that Chinese universities are running away from the pack in research output – in both quantity and quality – especially after Trump threw wrenches into research funding and the pipeline of graduate students. For naysayers (and there are legion), Nature Index conclusions have been confirmed by similar studies conducted by Japan's National Institute of Economic Policy (NISTEP), the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI), Ohio State University, numerous multinational investment banks, Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) if not the global economy where China has taken over and dominated industry after industry. China's labor market, students and online trolls have cottoned onto the corruption, posturing and mediocrity at the heart of American elite education (see here). Trump is merely putting the final nail in the coffin. While the Chinese have been getting with the program, what have Americans been doing? The MAGA mob are high-fiving and back-slapping each other – take that Harvard and SeeSeePee Chinese students – as they indulge in momentary delight that foreigners and egghead elites have been taken down a peg. Elite parents stroke their chin and smile imperceptibly, mentally calculating that little Timmy's Ivy League chances just increased by 9.3537%. Both reactions are defeatist, nihilistic and an exercise in self-harm. Chinese international students pay full tuition, making up a sizable portion of many university budgets, subsidizing grant and work-study programs. As mediocre as they may be domestically, elite American universities still hold Chinese international students to a high academic standard, setting a benchmark of excellence. American universities could go the way of American car companies, consigned to eternal mediocrity for lack of international competition. If America or Americans dispense with their denial and grow a pair, they would get in front of the curve. An American STEM PhD-inclined high school junior (yes, they do exist) should ask themselves what the state of science will be like in 10 years, about the time they will be finishing their PhD programs. The trend lines are merciless. By 2035, China should have at least lapped the US in research output, perhaps multiple times if international graduate students abandon the US en masse. China will likely be the center of all important scientific inquiry. To not have access is to be permanently on the outside. Any forward-thinking policymaker in Washington should recognize this eventuality and devise programs to send tens if not hundreds of thousands of American students to China. But of course, forward-thinking policymakers do not exist in Washington. That, however, does not prevent individual Americans from recognizing the obvious.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Free screening of 'The Disappearance of Miss Scott'
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) — The Hindsight Film Festival presents a free screening of The Disappearance of Miss Scott, a PBS American Masters film. The film tells the story of Hazel Scott, the first Black American to have her own television show. Scott was also an early civil rights pioneer who faced down the Red Scare at the risk of losing her career and was a champion for equality. Immediately following the film there will be a Q&A with Emmy Award winning director Nicole London and Adam Clayton Powell III, a journalist and the son of Hazel Scott and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York in 1945. This event is co-sponsored by The Better Angels Society (Ken Burns Prize for Film) and CinemaSavannah. For more information, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Brain Drain: How Trump's Policies Could Wreck American Innovation for Generations
70 years ago, at the height of the Red Scare, the United States deported Qian Xuesen, a pioneering Chinese-born aerospace engineer. The government accused Qian of being a communist, which he denied. Back in China, Qian continued his work, becoming known as the father of Chinese rocketry and laying the foundations for the nation's missile and space programs. Former US Under Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball called Qian's deportation 'the stupidest thing this country ever did.' Now, the Tr
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Hew to the truth': Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of Texas Observer, has died at age 95.
Ronnie Dugger, a titan of Texas journalism and founding editor of the Texas Observer, died this morning in Austin following a history of Alzheimer's disease. He had recently turned 95. "Ronnie was a man who towered over his colleagues in Texas journalism for decades," said Ben Sargent, retired Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist for the American-Statesman who now contributes to the Texas Observer. "His career, his passion for the Texas Observer and its mission, and his powerful and fearless body of work were always directed toward the noblest things about the American democracy, toward the good of the people, and most of all toward the truth. We can only hope that Ronnie will serve as an inspiration and example to the journalists who need to take up those causes going forward." In 1954, at a time when the conservative wing of the Democratic Party dominated politics in the state, Dugger, who had studied journalism at University of Texas before attending Oxford University, agreed to lead the progressive Texas Observer newspaper. He wrote this statement for the paper's masthead: "We will serve no group or party but will hew to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it." More: Tom Spencer, civic leader and Austin PBS talent, dies at age 68 While editor of the UT Daily Texan newspaper (1950-1951), Dugger became known to a group of leaders who organized the Texas Observer to give the state's liberals a voice. "Ronnie had been a liberal crusader during his tenure at the Daily Texan, whose public denunciations of the demagogic U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare had attracted the attention of progressive Democrats in Texas," said Don Carleton, founding director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. "He accepted their offer after they agreed to give him exclusive editorial control of the journal." As, at various times, a writer, editor and publisher at the newspaper over the course of some 40 years, Dugger attracted and guided some of the leading literary and journalistic talents of the day, including Billy Lee Brammer, Molly Ivins, Willie Morris, Kay Northcott and Jim Hightower. Among the newspaper's other distinguished staff and contributors — some of whom arrived after Dugger's tenure there, but share in the tradition he molded — were the first woman to serve as Texas Secretary of State, Minnie Fisher Cunningham; folklorist and author J. Frank Dobie; humorist and First Amendment defender John Henry Faulk; economist James K. Galbraith; writer and editor Dagoberto Gilb; investigative reporter Jake Bernstein; novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry; and photographer Alan Pogue. In his classic 1967 memoir, "North Toward Home," Morris described Dugger as "not only one of the great reporters of our time in America; more than that, he had imbued an entire group of young and inexperienced colleagues with a feel for Texas, for 'commitment' in the most human sense, and for writing." Early on, Dugger tangled with conservative Democratic Gov. Allan Shivers, who ran for office on a racist platform and supported Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. "Dugger dug his talons into Gov. Allan Shivers," journalist and author Larry L. King wrote in his book "In Search of Willie Morris." King listed other Dugger targets: "conservative state legislators, uncaring corporations, fat-cat lobbyists, the reactionary Dallas Morning News, LBJ, and any person or institution who failed his high standards of honesty and caring." Dugger took particular aim at the most powerful Texan, future President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who unsuccessfully tried to enlist the journalist as a confidant. "Lyndon Johnson loathed what Ronnie wrote about him because it was so on target," said Bill Moyers, journalist and White House Press Secretary during the LBJ administration. Dugger "constantly tried to figure him out so he could either convert him or compromise him — he failed." More: Late Lee Kelly, former Austin American-Statesman society columnist, influenced civic life During an interview conducted in the White House dining room while LBJ was president, Dugger asked bluntly: "Mr. President, you've told us in the first half-hour of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia, 400 million people will die. Now: What should a journalist like me tell the people out there about that?" "Johnson told me a joke, then got mad at me for asking the question," Dugger told the American-Statesman in 2012. "While he was cursing me for being a liberal that didn't understand the problem, Johnson says, 'I'm the one who has to mash the button. I'm the one.'" "Dugger's editorials were fearless and often deeply contrary to the political views of even his financial backers," Carleton said. "For example, his editorials attacked the federal oil depletion tax deduction that benefitted the oil and gas industry, despite the discomfort of one of his strongest supporters, wealthy oilman J. R. Parten. Other editorials strongly criticized the insurance industry, despite the critical financial backing he received from insurance company executive Bernard Rapoport. In later years, when Rapoport was asked to make a comment about Dugger, he said that Dugger's strength was 'in his total commitment' to his causes. 'A sense of outrage at injustice flows from his pen onto a piece of paper. That is his outstanding characteristic to me.'' Lou Dubose, who landed a job at the Texas Observer in the 1980s and served as political editor of the Austin Chronicle before becoming editor of the Washington Spectator, an independent political publication, admired Dugger's principles. "Ronnie was a quixotic liberal who never gave up on the ideal that by speaking truth to power, journalism could play a role in creating a just and equitable society, which seems like a quaint notion today," Dubose said. "When he hired me in 1984, he urged me to find my way into the homes of people who are left behind and ignored and write 'with Dickensian detail about the cracks in their walls and their broken lives.'" Through editorials and investigative journalism, Dugger tried mightily to improve society, but he remained unconvinced that people would end up doing the right thing. "I think there are two subjects that really ought to worry us," Dugger told the American-Statesman. "That is: The future of our own country, as citizens. And the extinction of the human race, by ourselves." Dugger was born April 16, 1930, in Chicago. In 2012, American-Statesman journalist Brad Buchholz wrote a long, admiring profile of Dugger as a "free man" at age 81. In one of the best descriptions of Dugger's independence and moral dedication, Buchholz described an incident when a 21-year-old Dugger reflected on life and its choices after his car broke down on a cold road west of Austin during the early 1950s. "While I was out there, the thought came into my mind that I was not going to do anybody else's work," Dugger told Buchholz. "I decided what I had to do with my life was sort of like the scout on Western caravans who went ahead and looked for the ambushes and big rivers, and came back and talked to the people who had to turn the wagons. "That's the way I see my life. ... It's kind of a lonely self-image. ... I tell people I'm closest to that I've always been lonely; I don't know why ... but the operative idea that night was that I'd rather disappear into total oblivion than to give my life over to anything but my own work." More: Austin WWII internment camp survivor Isamu Taniguchi built Japanese Garden in Zilker Park He married twice, first to Jean Williams and then to Patricia Blake, both deceased. He and his first wife had two children, Gary Dugger and Celia Dugger, health and science editor for The New York Times. Dugger left Texas in the 1980s after he married writer and editor Patricia Blake. He spent almost 20 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he inspired the populist movement Alliance for Democracy. After Blake died in 2010, Dugger came back to Austin. In 2011, Dugger won recognition for his cumulative career at the annual George Polk Awards, given by Long Island University for "intrepid, bold and influential work of the reporters themselves, placing a premium on investigative work that is original, resourceful and thought-provoking." "Ronnie was an outstanding example of an important American historical type: the muckraker," the Briscoe Center's Carleton said. "Although he never held office, his political opinions and reports were widely noted, if not well acknowledged. His work has shed much-needed light on public corruption, social injustice, the critical need to protect a liberal education and economic inequality." Dugger wrote books as well as articles for national magazines, and helped found progressive nonprofits. Yet his enduring legacy was the Texas Observer. "When I visited Ronnie at his home two years ago, Ronnie's grasp of the world around him was slipping away," Dubose said. "But he was making plans to start a movement like the Alliance for Democracy, the quixotic national progressive group he cofounded in the mid-nineties. We would publish a call to action in the Observer and begin a nonviolent progressive revolution." In March 2023, the board of directors of nonprofit Texas Democracy Foundation, which owns the Observer, announced that the newspaper would close down because of financial difficulties. Yet soon after, the staff led a fundraising campaign that kept it going. "I still think of Ronnie driving to Mayflower, Texas, a year after creating the Observer in 1954," Dubose said. "A subscriber had tipped him off about the murder of a Black teenager, treated as spot news by the local media. Ronnie was a white reporter from a liberal newspaper, walking into a Jim Crow town. He worked local sources to identify the murderer, walked up to his house to question him, and then asked the local sheriff if the shooter was on his list of suspects. "That work defined what Ronnie Dugger stood for as a journalist." This is a developing story. Check back for additional material. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas Observer founding editor Ronnie Dugger has died at age 95
