If you want a deeper appreciation for the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” co-written by George Clooney and starring Clooney as the iconic television journalist and CBS correspondent, Edward R. Murrow, take a time machine back to 2005, and then watch the original movie that was co-written and directed by Clooney.
There isn’t much difference between the story itself or the telling of it in the film and the subsequent play. Like the movie before it, the Broadway show, which opened earlier this month with celebrity fanfare at the Winter Garden Theatre, dramatized the moment when Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly, took on “the junior senator from Wisconsin,” Joseph McCarthy, during the Red Scare of the 1950s. The play is faithful to the movie script and both seamlessly weave live-action performances with archival television footage. The play even manages to capture the look of the film, which was shot in black and white.
What’s striking is how differently the story resonated with audiences in 2005 than it does with contemporary Broadway theatergoers in 2025. The 2005 filmmakers and audiences (I among them) still identified with the depiction of a 1950s media ecosystem dominated by broadcast television. The national news, delivered daily by print newspapers and nightly on television by a handful of white men, was portrayed with gauzy nostalgia, but was still familiar and relatable to 2005 adult viewers.
By comparison, it was easy to dissociate from the story’s social context — the government overreach, the brazen denial of constitutional rights, and the federal mob looking to root out “unpatriotic” thoughts and dismantle the political left. You didn’t have to be naive in 2005 to dismiss communist witch hunts as part of the dissonant, unevolved past.
But what was once up is now down. Twenty years later after the release of the film, entire generations have abandoned legacy news and broadcast platforms for social media, streaming and mobile devices. Instead of the coast-to-coast village that used to ritually gather around television sets like a national campfire, algorithms now dictate and atomize our media consumption, coaxing us to collide against one another like angry particles.
By 2025, it’s the political setting, not the media landscape, of Broadway’s “Good Night, and Good Luck” that is all too familiar. It’s impossible to sit in the theater and not viscerally recognize the fearmongering, retributional blacklisting, censorship, and disregard for due process that is depicted. In Joseph McCarthy we find the inspiration for Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. The communist menace of the Cold War could easily be swapped out for the “wokeness” witch hunts of today. Like the Air Force reservist, Milo Radulovich, whose cause was championed by Murrow in 1953, today legal residents, because of their immigrant identity or political beliefs, are dragged through Kafkaesque ordeals by federal law enforcement without even being charged with a crime. And when the government threatens CBS and demands patriotism and “loyalty,” it’s easy to see Trump’s assaults on any press institution that dares to hold him accountable. If the movie was a parable, the play stands as allegory.
The political morality of “Good Night, and Good Luck” is straightforward, but the journalistic ethics are slightly more murky. Murrow is heroic and impeccably principled in his fight against censorship and domestic facism, but Clooney is careful to note that early in Murrow’s career at CBS, he actually signed a loyalty oath to the network, and by default, to the United States. Also, Murrow is shown to be selective, even stingy, in his willingness to take on other government and civilian bullies of the day.
But we find Murrow battling Goliaths on multiple fronts, as he is both triumphant over and put in his place by advertisers and the CBS President who pays his salary, William S. Paley. The play sensitively explores the balancing acts between the often competing interests that shape journalism: Advertising and editorial. Publisher and editorial. Information and entertainment. News and commentary.
When Murrow complains that the comedian Milton Berle is the most trusted man in America, should we join him in his lament or dismiss him for his smugness? When Murrow leads his crusade against McCarthy, is he a reporter? A pundit? A propagandist? By today’s standards — shaped by the internet, media oligarchy and the post-truth, and the Fox News-ification of reporting — these questions feel rather quaint. And perhaps that’s the point, or at least should be. We don’t need to reclaim the self-satisfied, white male-dominated, press paradigm of the past. We may no longer even have the luxury of re-litating what journalism integrity looks like. But what we do need is the national courage to ensure all journalists can, without fear or reprisal, responsibly inform our citizenry and safeguard democracy.