Is ‘Good Night and Good Luck’ Actually All That Timely?

In the CNN aftershow to the Broadway version of Good Night and Good Luck, Walter Isaacson marvels at the timeliness of this play. Anderson Cooper, to his credit, notes that Good Night and Good Luck first appeared 20 years ago. And, of course,  the events of Good Night and Good Luck itself, depicting journalist Edward R. Murrow’s fight against senator Joseph McCarthy, took place 70 years ago. What does it mean, exactly, for something to be constantly seem relevant regardless of what era it is?

But let’s start with some more positive appraisal. Broadway shows, despite their preeminence in American culture, are very weird in that only a relatively small audience can watch them. To a far greater degree than other media, more people hear about Broadway shows than actually watch them. So what are the advantages, really, of scripting Good Night and Good Luck for Broadway instead of just watching the movie? Is watching the Broadway live show on CNN a significantly different experience?

Surprisingly enough, yes. The stylistic changes are all pretty neat. The large stage that has to hold all the sets does so with excellent space economy, and the restrained camerawork emphasizes the smallness of the characters in their larger environs- a very appropriate visual metaphor for the significance, or lack thereof, for journalism fighting against the halls of power. Even George Clooney just being older adds a surprising degree of gravitas to the performance. Not because he makes Edward R. Murrow more important, far from it. Clooney just depicts him as far more exhausted by petty broadcast politics.

There’s more humor–a running subplot about two employees being secretly married and musical interludes in the studio itself keep the show going at an excellent rhythm. The show even improves upon the movie’s main visual flourish–the use of real-life footage–to excellent effect, by having the actors actually interact with recordings with the same restrained clip. Nobody would ever script or shoot a movie like this in the modern day but I often felt that someone really should. There’s no trickery involved. Which is another excellent metaphor for the themes of the show, about what journalism ought to be.

But alas, Good Night and Good Luck is not just its own story. It’s a metatext in its own right. You’ve probably seen constant thinkpieces marveling about the relevance of the story just as Walter Isaacson does in the aftershow. And regrettably, Good Night and Good Luck straight up ends with a montage of all the horrible skepticism people have had about journalism over the years, ending with Elon Musk doing that weird high energy salute thing, for some reason. Not the timeliest end point, given that Trump and Musk have now separated and many are trying to decide whether this means Musk is good again or not.

The great irony of this montage is that it has to skip over the main thing that happened in the 21st century that you can most closely compare with the McCarthy era. I’m referring to when people continually accused Donald Trump (and some still occasionally drop this claim) of being a secret Kremlin spy for no other apparent reason than that there are people in the government and media who found this to be an agreeable idea and presumed anyone who wanted to see the actual evidence for this claim to be Trump-lovers. Indeed, just by bringing this up at all I’m sure a few of you are already suspecting as much of me.

 There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene in the telecast, incidentally, which notes that the Hearst newspapers sided with McCarthy and continued to do so even after Murrow humiliated him. The reason being that Murrow notes how McCarthy didn’t actually accuse Murrow or anyone else at CBS of saying falsehoods, he just called Murrow a communist and figured that was good enough. I bring this up because Good Night and Good Luck doesn’t even broach the topic of whether or not people actually trusted mainstream media in this historical time period. Conventional wisdom says that’s true, but is it?

And why was Murrow specifically trustworthy? Well, in the context of the play at least, it was because he focused on accurately describing and showcasing McCarthy in McCarthy’s own words. And even that wasn’t good enough for some people. This isn’t something the media really does anymore. And I’m not talking about Trump, but rather the ongoing, bizarre scandal of the former President Biden being both senile and apparently also having had cancer while he was in office. The only people even willing to suggest such a thing was true were the right0wing media that Good Night and Good Luck’s final montage explicitly mocks.

And now Jake Tapper of CNN is promoting a book where he acts as if he’s speaking truth to power for having known about this all along when it’s trivially easy to find clips of him belittling any guest who came onto his show that would dare make any such suggestion. George Clooney himself, ironically enough, was one of the first major liberal names to openly state that Biden in person was exactly as he appeared on television, and his own allies brutally attacked him for that. So credit given where it’s due, at least Clooney understood his own play’s moral lesson.

In general, though, Good Night and Good Luck isn’t an especially good analogy for the modern day. McCarthy didn’t create anti-communist fear. Good Night and Good Luck somewhat counterintuitively implies that McCarthy’s real crime was being very incompetent and actually finding any communists, and the America-loving journalists were more patriotic than he was, despite McCarthy’s entirely correct, but contextually difficult to easily explain, claims about Murrow’s ties to the Soviets. Anti-communist fear didn’t end with McCarthy either. Bob Dylan fans who went to see A Complete Unknown last year might have been a little confused by the opening scene where Pete Seeger testifies in front of the House Unamerican Activities Committee several years after McCarthy’s death.

But this much long-term perspective is a bit much for a play that, however skillfully designed and well-acted, is well under two hours long and no substitute for an actual history book. Don’t get me wrong, the play’s quite good, and I would even go so far as to say the telecast is better than the original film. The trouble is, it depicts a journalistic institution that is more concerned with discussing things that are actually happening than it is about the metatextual narratives surrounding those things that are actually happening. The real villains of Good Night and Good Luck aren’t McCarthy and his ilk, it’s the various managers who see facts and truth as subordinate to reputation, rather than the actual basis of reputation.