On Saturday, CNN aired George Clooney’s Broadway show Good Night, and Good Luck, a remake of the 2005 film about journalist Edward R. Murrow. In a Friday op-ed, CNN’s Brian Stelter claimed the show mirrors today’s media battles, likening Murrow’s fight against McCarthyism to the press’s clashes with Donald Trump.
“The historical echoes in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ are extraordinary. Some might even say they’re eerie,” wrote Stelter. “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.”
But this framing only makes sense if you know nothing about McCarthyism or the Trump phenomenon, and even less about Murrow’s brand of journalism and how it compares with today’s establishment press.
Murrow possessed enormous credibility with the American public. His groundbreaking and vivid live radio coverage from London during the Blitz earned him widespread acclaim and the trust of millions. His harrowing on-site coverage of the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945 brought home the horrors of the Holocaust and reinforced his reputation as an unflinching truth-teller. By the 1950s, when his famous broadcasts brought McCarthy’s Red Scare to its knees, Murrow’s moral authority was unimpeachable.
Contrast this with the legacy media recently exposed by Stelter’s CNN colleague Jake Tapper. Whereas Murrow boldly exposed Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s deceit with factual rigor and moral clarity, today’s legacy media — framed as the “good guys” in Stelter’s morality play — worked overtime to conceal and obscure the greatest political scandal of the century by covering-up former President Joe Biden’s infirmity. This anti-Murrow journalism rendered the country virtually leaderless and the public increasingly cynical.
It’s possible the Stelters of the world still don’t appreciate the damage they’ve done to American journalism during their tenure. Today, the institution is loathed — a Gallup poll from earlier this year showed that a paltry 31% of Americans said they trust the establishment media “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” Its most prominent figures, multi-millionaires all, are openly mocked as self-aggrandizing clowns and partisan hacks, which is the natural consequence of decades worth of selective coverage and blown stories.
And when circumstances made it impossible to control the narrative, they told Americans not to believe their lyin’ eyes. Weeks before the infamous presidential debate that revealed Biden’s true condition to the public, Stelter looked straight into the camera on CNN, a la Murrow, and described videos of Biden wandering aimlessly as “distorted, out-of-context videos chopped up in certain ways, that’s what we’re seeing.” Four years earlier, CNN took the same approach to its coverage of the 2020 riots, which it famously described as “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful.”
There is nothing Murrow-esque about any of this. And one can only imagine Murrow’s reaction to instances like these, or what his estimation of such “journalists” might be.
Some on the Left characterize Trump’s aggressive posture toward the media as echoing McCarthy. His use of phrases such as “fake news” and “enemy of the people,” they maintain, bully targets in the same way as McCarthy’s Red Scare. But unlike McCarthy’s baseless witch hunts, Trump’s criticism often targets real instances of wrongdoing.
For years, the establishment media reported that Trump had called white supremacists “very fine people” when in context he clearly hadn’t — even Left-wing fact-checker Snopes now acknowledges this. Biden built his entire 2020 presidential campaign around this falsehood, and he was never challenged on it. “Fake news” is an appropriate moniker for this kind of coverage.
In the run-up to 2024, they repeatedly reported the falsehood that Trump promised a “blood bath” if he lost, when he was clearly referring to the auto industry. That didn’t stop CNN anchors from repeating the lie for weeks as it dominated the news cycle. Is it fair to characterize journalists who purposefully whip up fear about violence based on a lie as “enemies of the people”? Especially in a political climate suddenly rife with violent riots and assassination attempts? It might be a little harsh, but it’s not outside the ballpark.
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The avalanche of errors and deceptions perpetrated by Stelter’s “good guys” in recent times makes Trump’s “fake news” charge not only appropriate but obvious to the vast majority of Americans. Trust in mass media began cratering long before Trump hit the scene. Between 1976 and 2015, the percentage of Americans who trust the media fell from 72% to 40%. Trump only gave voice to what Americans had already long believed.
Stelter’s claim that Good Night, and Good Luck mirrors today’s media landscape only works if you’ve been zapped by one of those memory-erasing wands from Men in Black. Or, as is likely the case for Stelter and co., you’ve been so thoroughly embubbled as to believe the modern press is Murrow’s heir, not his antithesis.