TELEVISION SETS: Kyle Smith on George Clooney’s adaptation of Good Night and Good Luck for Broadway. As Smith notes, “luxuriate in your fears for $300 a seat, which is the average price for tickets to George Clooney’s stage version of his 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck (at the Winter Garden Theatre through June 8). Clooney, who seldom fails to remind interviewers that he is the son of a journalist, cowrote both the movie and the play with Grant Heslov, originally conceiving this hagiography of CBS News’s mid-century television drama queen Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn in the movie and now by Clooney himself on Broadway) as a response to the George W. Bush* administration’s decision to make war in Iraq. Now, of course, the Red Scare Scare is pointing to Donald Trump:”
But his own script shows that Murrow was a preening, showboating editorialist. Positioning himself as merely an objective reporter, he strayed further and further into self-righteous, openly partisan grandstanding. Abandoning his bona fides as a war reporter, he became an on-air columnist on the program See It Now, deploying euphemism, half-truths, deliberate obfuscation, and other rhetorical maneuvers to engage in a public debate with McCarthy over his anti-Communist hearings. Far from being the opposite of today’s cable-news attention-seekers, he was essentially Rachel Maddow with a cigarette. (In an amusing montage of silly moments in television news played on a screen, the all-hysterics Maddow network gets dinged for pushing the Trump–Russia hoax, as do commentators who insisted President Biden was sharp as a tack before Clooney himself helped usher him into retirement via an open plea to step aside in The New York Times.)
Clooney simply can’t see how badly he undermines his own case here. After Murrow denounces McCarthy, CBS grants the senator equal time to respond, and McCarthy unloads on the newsman, noting that he led a Soviet “educational” front group and hence took paychecks from Moscow in 1934 while being a member of the Communism-lite group International Workers of the World. Rebutting the rebuttal on air, Murrow says nothing about serving as a Stalinist stooge in the educational group (because it was true) but issues a clipped denial of IWW membership. Oh? Wherever, then, could McCarthy have gotten the notion? Wrote Murrow’s biographer, A. M. Sperber,
To Ed Murrow, the IWW would always have the aura of the great lost cause, a soft-focus memory of stalwart men and great songs and failed native radicalism. . . . . [W]hile he alternately claimed or denied membership in later years—his lifelong favorite song would be “Joe Hill”—no one could ever prove he had or hadn’t carried the red card.
Er, if Murrow himself ever claimed membership in the IWW, McCarthy would appear to have had a decent reason to mention it, and the matter was certainly relevant to viewers who might have wondered whether Murrow’s thundering denunciations of the senator were based in ideological differences rather than objective reporting.
As is usually the case with those promoting the Red Scare Scare, the crux of the dispute is mere semantics; support for the immense evil that was Communism was to be waved away unless the ideologue in question went so far as to formally register as a member of the Party (a similarly fine distinction is at the heart of the movie Oppenheimer). The intellectual vapidity of this game is evident.
So Murrow was at least Communist-curious, and Carl Bernstein’s parents “were secret members of the Communist Party USA:”
“A case can be made that [Bernstein] should have disclosed the conflict of interest he brought to his Watergate exposes,” wrote New York media consultant Sidney Goldberg in 2003. “After all, he was brought up as a Nixon hater and readers might have been told that his family regarded Nixon as vile, as an enemy.”
As Zhou Enlai never said, “The French Revolution? Too early to say.”
* Speaking of which, wait, that George W. Bush? Oceania Has Never Been at War with East Dubya: Liz Cheney Pleads With George W. Bush to Take the Uniparty Plunge and Endorse Kamala.
Flashback: Legendary Hollywood Leftist Pines for the 1950s: Good Night, and Good Luck review: George Clooney makes his Broadway debut in a sleepy newsroom play.
And then there’s blacklist subtext of any film or play about McCarthy. That’s a topic that should never be touched by Hollywood again, since the industry has spent the last quarter century blacklisting anyone to the right of Stalin – and even blacklisting lefties who have made anti-blacklisting movies. Or as Glenn wrote in late 2020, “After a decade of seeing leftists doxxing people and getting them fired for expressing a forbidden opinion, I have to ask what’s their beef with Joe McCarthy?”
He had an (R) after his name, of course.
More: David Marcus: CNN’s airing of ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ proves it has learned nothing.
After the play, there was an assemblage of journalists, speaking before journalism students about the importance of what they had just witnessed. Of course, the closest thing CNN had to a conservative was Brett Stephens, a nice guy, but widely acknowledged as the Washington Generals of conservative political punditry.
Needless to say, they congratulated themselves on being so enlightened and brave and speaking truth to power, while the handful of people watching threw up a little in their own mouths.
You almost have to admire the audacity of CNN. Just weeks after bombshell books and reporting finally confirmed the obvious about Biden’s incapacity and the liberal media’s lies, the network aired a play in which it dressed itself up as brave heroes of the newsroom. It’s amazing.
It’s also informative. This bizarre effort by CNN to paint itself in historical glory is proof positive that the network has learned nothing from its lies over the past eight years, and there is no reason to believe it will start being honest anytime soon.
Still though, I’m sure the simulcast worked wonders to recruit new leftists to the cause:
