In the Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow (George Clooney) allows himself a moment of doubt, as his program “See It Now” embarks on a series of reports on the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.
“It occurs to me,” he says, “that we might not get away with this one.”
It is a small but important line. We know Murrow’s story — exposing the red-baiting demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy — as history. And history, once set down on the page and stage, can seem inevitable.
But Murrow’s success was not preordained. It required hard, exacting work. It required guts. It required journalists to risk personal ruin and some of them to experience it.
It’s a point worth remembering. And it hits especially hard at this moment, when CBS News, headquartered just blocks away from the Winter Garden Theater, is again under political and financial pressure to rein in its coverage of the powerful. History is repeating, this time perhaps as tragedy. (CNN is airing the play’s June 7 evening performance live, as if to give the news business a shot in the arm.)
In “Good Night, and Good Luck,” adapted from the 2005 screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslov, all ends well, more or less. (The “less” is implied in the stage production by a “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-like closing montage that ties the division and chaos of the past several decades to the cacophony of media.)
Murrow ultimately received support — however nervous and limited — from his network. Its chief, William S. Paley (Paul Gross), fretted about pressure from politicians and from the “See It Now” sponsor, the aluminum company Alcoa. But while Paley complained about the agita Murrow brought him, he did not pull the plug on the McCarthy investigation.
Today, CBS News is again under political attack. But the present management is looking less than Paley-esque in its resolve.
CBS’s owner, Paramount, is in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit from President Trump over the editing of a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. Legal experts have called the suit baseless and likely to yield an easy victory for CBS. Paramount, however, is also depending on the administration to approve the company’s multibillion merger with Skydance, a Hollywood studio. That’s worth a whole boatload of Alcoa ads. (President Trump and the company have said that the lawsuit and the merger are unrelated matters.)
Journalists within CBS News have already complained of interference. The executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned, citing encroachments on the newsmagazine’s independence. The leader of CBS News was forced out, amid continuing conflicts between the news division and corporate. In a recent commencement speech at Wake Forest University, the “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley spoke out, asking: “Why attack journalism? Because ignorance works for power.”
A settlement — which the senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden have suggested might amount to bribery — has not yet been reached.
But whether or not it comes to pass, the thing about settlements like this is they settle nothing. (ABC News also settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump, then the president-elect, in late 2024.) There can always be another lawsuit. The president has already threatened one and made noise about pulling CBS’s “license.” (Broadcast networks do not have licenses, but their affiliate stations do.) Why not wave the cudgel again if it worked once? Why not swing it at someone else?
Standing on principle is easier to do on a stage. Clooney’s Murrow is heroically all-business. He is analytical and dispassionate; the most heated thing about him is the glowing tip of the cigarette that precedes him onstage. He feels compelled to expose McCarthy, but he also pushes his staff to stick to facts over opinion and never to state a conclusion they can’t prove.
It would be absurd to claim that the play has no current political overtones, of course, with its story lines of attacks on journalists, sidestepping of due process and persecution of academics. (On the nose? Sometimes that’s how history is.)
And any topical partisan subtext became text at the Tuesday performance I attended, whose audience included Barack and Michelle Obama. The theatergoers gave them a standing ovation, and Clooney — himself an influential Democratic fund-raiser — told them from the stage after the performance, “We miss you guys.”
But the play is mainly a warning about the media business, as well as a tribute to the power of TV. In many ways, watching it is really like watching television: In the reproduced broadcasts, your attention is drawn more to Clooney’s features on a massive screen than to the actor onstage, dwarfed by his projection. Senator McCarthy is not played by an actor but represented by archival footage.
McCarthyism may have been stopped by dogged reporting. But the senator himself — sour-faced and grumpy in his video clips — was also undone by being bad on TV. Giving an equal-time rebuttal on “See It Now,” he came across petulant, defensive and vindictive against the real-life Murrow. (The New York Times TV critic Jack Gould wrote of McCarthy’s appearance that “the Senator more effectively confirmed the commentator’s thesis than the commentator did.”) Against George Clooney, the guy doesn’t stand a chance.
Real life today has not teed things up for CBS News this nicely. Its antagonist is not a junior senator but the president, a TV performer with the full executive branch behind him. Its ownership has more layers, bigger deals at stake and a less existential investment in the integrity of its news brand.
It also doesn’t have what Murrow and his generation of newscasters could depend on: If not complete social consensus, then at least some sense of shared belief in news institutions and a broad subscription to the same sets of facts.
In the era of cable and the internet, CBS is not the colossus it was. Yet if a company like Paramount can’t stand up to political pressure, who can?
As a drama, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is decent and earnest, the equivalent of a well-crafted pay-cable docu-movie. But as an alarm, its tone is keening and its timing supernaturally perfect.
Journalists should be the least susceptible to the magical thinking that “it can’t happen here.” They have, after all, seen it happen everywhere, at many points in history. “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a reminder that journalistic and democratic principles can win out — but they are not guaranteed to.
The play’s title is taken from Murrow’s signature sign-off phrase, the salient words of which are “good luck.” There was an element of fortune in the way Murrow’s showdown with McCarthy — and our national episode with the senator — ended. It did not have to go that way; it required that people with something to lose stick to their convictions and take a gamble.
It could go differently the next time, and the next time could be right now. We might not get away with this one.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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