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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why ‘Good Night, and Good Luck's' 1950s story of media intimidation is eerily relevant in Trump's America
The historical echoes in 'Good Night, and Good Luck' are extraordinary. Some might even say they're eerie. On Saturday at 7pm ET, viewers around the world can see for themselves when CNN televises the blockbuster hit Broadway play starring George Clooney. The play transports viewers back to the 1950s but feels equally relevant in the 2020s with its themes of unrestrained political power, corporate timidity and journalistic integrity. Add 'Good Night, Good Luck' on CNN to your calendar: Apple / Outlook or Google The real-life drama recounted in the play took place at CBS, the same network that is currently being targeted by President Donald Trump. That's one of the reasons why the play's dialogue feels ripped from recent headlines. Clooney plays Edward R. Murrow, the iconic CBS journalist who was once dubbed 'the man who put a spine in broadcasting.' Murrow helmed 'See It Now,' a program that pioneered the new medium of television by telling in-depth stories, incorporating film clips and interviewing newsmakers at a time when other shows simply relayed the headlines. In the early '50s, Murrow and producing partner Fred Friendly were alarmed by what Friendly called in his 1967 memoir the 'problem of blacklisting and guilt by association.' At the time, the country was gripped by Cold War paranoia, some of it stoked by Senator Joseph McCarthy's trumped-up claims about communist infiltration of the government, Hollywood and other sectors. In a later era, McCarthy would have been accused of spreading misinformation and attacking free speech. Murrow and Friendly thought about devoting an episode to the senator and his investigations, but they wanted a dramatic way to illustrate the subject. They found it with Milo Radulovich, an Air Force reserve officer who was fired over his relatives' alleged communist views. Radulovich was a compelling, sympathetic speaker on camera, and Murrow's report on him not only stunned viewers across the country, but it also led the Air Force to reverse course. 'The Radulovich program was television's first attempt to do something about the contagion of fear that had come to be known as McCarthyism,' Friendly recalled. That's where 'Good Night, and Good Luck' begins — with a journalistic triumph that foreshadowed fierce reports about McCarthy's witch hunts and attempted retaliation by the senator and his allies. Clooney first made the project into a movie in 2005. It was adapted for the stage last year and opened on Broadway in March, this time with Clooney playing Murrow instead of Friendly. Both versions recreate Murrow's actual televised monologues and feature McCarthy's real filmed diatribes. 'The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one,' Murrow said in a pivotal essay about McCarthy, uttering words that could just as easily apply to Trump's campaign of retribution. A moment later, Murrow accused McCarthy of exploiting people's fears. The same charge is leveled against Trump constantly. 'This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve,' Murrow said, sounding just like the activists who are urging outspoken resistance to Trump's methods. In April, Trump issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to investigate Miles Taylor, a former Trump homeland security official who penned an essay and a book, 'Anonymous,' about the president's recklessness. This week Taylor spoke out about being on Trump's 'blacklist,' using the same language that defined the Red Scare of the '50s and destroyed many careers back then. 'People are afraid,' Taylor said on CNN's 'The Arena with Kasie Hunt.' He warned that staying silent, ducking from the fight, only empowers demagogues. Murrow did not duck. Other journalists had excoriated McCarthy earlier, in print and on the radio, but Murrow met the medium and the moment in 1954, demonstrating the senator's smear tactics and stirring a severe public backlash. Afterward, McCarthy targeted not just Murrow, but also the CBS network and Alcoa, the single corporate sponsor of 'See It Now.' McCarthy threatened to investigate the aluminum maker. 'We're in for a helluva fight,' CBS president William Paley told Murrow. The two men were friends and allies, but only to a point. Paley had to juggle the sponsors, CBS-affiliated stations across the country, and government officials who controlled station licenses. In a Paley biography, 'In All His Glory,' Sally Bedell Smith observed that two key commissioners at the FCC, the federal agency in charge of licensing, were 'friends of McCarthy.' The relationship between Paley and Murrow was ultimately fractured for reasons that are portrayed in the play. Looking back at the Murrow years, historian Theodore White wrote that CBS was 'a huge corporation more vulnerable than most to government pressure and Washington reprisal.' Those exact same words could be written today, as CBS parent Paramount waits for the Trump-era FCC to approve its pending merger with Skydance Media. Billions of dollars are on the line. The merger review process has been made much more complicated by Trump's lawsuit against CBS, in which he baselessly accuses '60 Minutes' of trying to tip the scales of the 2024 election against him. While legal experts have said CBS is well-positioned to defeat the suit, Paramount has sought to strike a settlement deal with Trump instead. Inside '60 Minutes,' 'everyone thinks this lawsuit is an act of extortion, everyone,' a network correspondent told CNN. In a crossover of sorts between the '50s and today, Clooney appeared on '60 Minutes' in March to promote the new play. He invoked the parallels between McCarthyism and the present political climate. 'ABC has just settled a lawsuit with the Trump administration,' Clooney said. 'And CBS News is in the process…' There, Jon Wertheim's narration took over, as the correspondent explained Trump's lawsuit. 'We're seeing this idea of using government to scare or fine or use corporations to make journalists smaller,' Clooney said. He called it a fight 'for the ages.' Trump watched the segment, and he belittled Clooney as a 'second-rate movie 'star'.' On stage, Clooney as Murrow challenges theatergoers to consider the roles and responsibilities of both journalists and corporate bosses. Ann M. Sperber, author of a best-selling biography, 'Murrow: His Life and Times,' found that Murrow was asking himself those very questions at the dawn of the TV age. Murrow, she wrote, sketched out an essay for The Atlantic in early 1949 but never completed it. He wrote notes to himself about 'editorial control' over news, about 'Who decides,' and whether the television business will 'regard news as anything more than a saleable commodity?' Murrow wrote to himself that we 'need to argue this out before patterns become set and we all begin to see pictures of our country and the world that just aren't true.' Seventy-six years later, the arguments are as relevant and necessary today.
Yahoo
3 days 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
Chicago Tribune
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: First modern Olympic games held
Today is Sunday, April 6, the 96th day of 2025. There are 269 days left in the year. Today in history: On April 6, 1896, the first modern Olympic games formally opened in Athens, Greece. Also on this date: In 1830, Joseph Smith and others met in Fayette, New York, to form the Church of Christ — now known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1862, the Civil War Battle of Shiloh began in Tennessee as Confederate forces launched a surprise attack against Union troops, who beat back the Confederates the following day. In 1917, the United States entered World War I as the House joined the Senate in approving a declaration of war against Germany that was then signed by President Woodrow Wilson. In 1954, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., responding to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's broadside against him on 'See It Now,' claimed in remarks filmed for the program that Murrow had, in the past, 'engaged in propaganda for Communist causes.' In 1968, 41 people were killed by a pair of explosions spurred by a natural gas leak at a sporting goods store in downtown Richmond, Indiana. In 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed when the jet they were riding in was shot down by surface-to-air missiles as it attempted to land in Kigali, Rwanda. In 2012, five Black people were shot, three fatally, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Jake England and Alvin Watts, who admitted to targeting the victims because of their race, pleaded guilty to murder and were sentenced to life in prison without parole. Today's Birthdays: Scientist James D. Watson is 97. Actor Billy Dee Williams is 88. Film director Barry Levinson is 83. Actor John Ratzenberger is 78. Baseball Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven is 74. Actor Marilu Henner is 73. Actor Michael Rooker is 70. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is 61. Football Hall of Famer Sterling Sharpe is 60. Actor Paul Rudd is 56. Actor Zach Braff is 50. Actor Candace Cameron Bure is 49. Musician Robert Glasper is 47.
Boston Globe
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Today in History: April 6, United States enters World War I
In 1862, the Civil War Battle of Shiloh began in Tennessee as Confederate forces launched a surprise attack against Union troops, who beat back the Confederates the following day. In 1896, the first modern Olympic games formally opened in Athens, Greece. Advertisement In 1917, the United States entered World War I as the House joined the Senate in approving a declaration of war against Germany that was then signed by President Woodrow Wilson. In 1954, Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, responding to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's broadside against him on 'See It Now,' claimed in remarks filmed for the program that Murrow had, in the past, 'engaged in propaganda for Communist causes.' In 1968, 41 people were killed by a pair of explosions spurred by a natural gas leak at a sporting goods store in downtown Richmond, Ind. Advertisement In 1994, Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed when the jet they were riding in was shot down by surface-to-air missiles as it attempted to land in Kigali, Rwanda. In 2012, five Black people were shot, three fatally, in Tulsa, Okla. Jake England and Alvin Watts, who admitted to targeting the victims because of their race, pleaded guilty to murder and were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Associated Press
06-04-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Today in History: April 6, United States enters World War I
Today in history: On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I as the House joined the Senate in approving a declaration of war against Germany that was then signed by President Woodrow Wilson. Also on this date: In 1830, Joseph Smith and others met in Fayette, New York to form the Church of Christ—now known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In 1862, the Civil War Battle of Shiloh began in Tennessee as Confederate forces launched a surprise attack against Union troops, who beat back the Confederates the following day. In 1896, the first modern Olympic games formally opened in Athens, Greece. In 1954, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., responding to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's broadside against him on 'See It Now,' claimed in remarks filmed for the program that Murrow had, in the past, 'engaged in propaganda for Communist causes.' In 1968, 41 people were killed a pair of explosions spurred by a natural gas leak at a sporting goods store in downtown Richmond, Indiana. In 1994, Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed when the jet they rode in was shot down by surface-to-air missiles as it attempted to land in Kigali, Rwanda. In 2012, five Black people were shot, three fatally, in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Jake England and Alvin Watts, who admitted targeting the victims because of race, pleaded guilty to murder, and were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
