It must be counted as a surprise that George Clooney did not win a Tony Award this past Sunday for his portrayal of Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway version of “Good Night and Good Luck.” The show is breaking box office records and at times explicitly, as in its coda focused on contemporary media and “fake news,” aligns with current liberal sensibility. The play clearly sets out to lionize Murrow for his role in confronting Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist Red Scare crusade, which one has to believe that the Democratic Clooney sees as having current-day resonance in MAGA politics.
To be sure, Murrow and CBS News deserve credit for enterprising reporting about those wrongly tarred by McCarthy’s brush, such as the Air Force officer Milo Radulovich, cashiered without due process because his family members subscribed to leftist publications. There is no doubt that McCarthy, like the House Un-American Activities Committee, did not distinguish between the liberal Left and Communist Party members, and was willing to ruin reputations and lives without justification. That he was eventually denounced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower makes the point.
But close attention to “Good Night and Good Luck” leads to an additional observation: that Murrow laid the foundation for a concerning change in journalism that continues to define it today. In his “See It Now” broadcasts, recreated onstage, Murrow chose not simply to let powerful stories tell themselves through strong reporting. He took up the self-righteous role of pontificating in his own voice about the meaning of the stories and the state of the nation. In doing so, he made himself both a target and a story, setting the stage for our current-day advocacy-infused, personality opinionator journalism, which has thrived at the expense of shoe leather reporting.
Much of “Good Night and Good Luck” reflects well on CBS of the 1950s, digging for telling stories about blameless victims of the Red Scare and being willing to air them. But it also brings back to life Murrow’s over-the-top editorializing. He is notable for consistently denouncing not only McCarthy but his audience, in much the way that Hilary Clinton denounced those “deplorables.” The public is falling for McCarthy because “we are currently fat, wealthy and complacent,” lulled by “mass media … that is used in the main to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.”
The play reminds us that Murrow was unwilling simply to “show” the issues raised by McCarthyism through straightforward reporting. He felt emboldened to “tell” his public about its own shortcomings that had empowered the Wisconsin senator. He returned, again and again, to Shakespeare’s Cassius in Julius Caesar: “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Murrow was inclined to show his own erudition, though he turned down McCarthy’s request to have the era’s most erudite conservative, William F. Buckley, serve as his spokesman in an “equal time” broadcast.
Murrow, per the Clooney play, was willing to force feed the public the sort of pre-PBS style programming he was sure was good for us: “Just once in a while, let us exalt the importance of ideas and education. Let us dream to the extent of saying that, on a given Sunday night, the time given over to the Ed Sullivan [variety] show is given over to a clinical survey of the state of American education. … Would the stockholders rise up in their wrath and complain? Would anything happen other than a few million people having received education on subjects that may will determine the future of the country?”
What this had to do with Joe McCarthy, the subject of the broadcast, is far from obvious. In the wake of Murrow’s stories, pollsters surveyed the public not only on McCarthy but on Murrow. It was a first step on the road to the personality-based activist journalism that infuses the profession today. See everything from Morning Joe to Fox & Friends.
It’s a not very short step from Murrow’s flaw — self-righteous pontificating — to his CBS successor Scott Pelley’s recent, similarly self-important Duke University commencement speech.
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“In this moment — this moment, this morning — our sacred rule of law is under attack,” he said. “Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts. The fear to speak. In America?”
It’s that sensibility that has harmed Pelley’s 60 Minutes.
Murrow provided a public service through journalism that made clear the complexities and collateral damage of the Cold War and McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. But Clooney channels, too, Murrow’s excesses and their own ill effects.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.