The sanctimonious proto-Communist bait of Good Night, and Good Luck
Activist-actor George Clooney confirms his hyphenate status by adapting his vapid 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck for the Broadway stage. The show, selling at astronomical ticket prices ($700 and up), resembles a personal political fundraiser for Clooney.
Clooney inserts himself into politics — most outrageously through last year’s involvement with the cover-up of Biden’s mental decline, then with the Biden removal-coup as laid out in his July 10, 2024, New York Times op-ed. Following up with the Broadway version of Good Night, and Good Luck cannot be excused as an artistic gesture; it’s another blatantly dishonest effort at using media as propaganda.
It valorizes ’50s CBS TV news personality Edward R. Murrow (played by Clooney) as an icon of journalistic probity, primarily for his single-minded attack on Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose efforts to expose Communist infiltration in the U.S. led to the Red Scare of the 1950s. (The Red Scare still haunts Hollywood for exposing its venal essence.)
On stage, Good Night, and Good Luck, co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, fails to scrutinize the Red Scare legend. The Murrow figure is used against video footage of McCarthy in an ahistorical manner. It’s a performative version of John Ford’s famous motto in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”
But Clooney sponsors Murrow’s legend to perpetuate the lie that McCarthy was wrong while TV icon Murrow was unassailably correct, even prophetic. The Murrow perspective allows Clooney and Heslov to ignore the actual Communist contamination of both the media and the government. To promote the show, Variety posted a podcast on which Clooney boasted about his risk-taking photo ops in Sudan, bragging about his own activist journalism to Broadway’s leftist virago Patti Lupone.
In this newest cover-up, Clooney repeats his film’s original failing — its nostalgic salute to the power of electronic media suasion. Once again, Clooney has chosen the wrong hero. The show perpetuates corporate media’s retaliation against those who oppose its leftist, Marxist, Communist, socialist agenda — the ideological myth favored by superficial and supercilious showbiz types ever since All the President’s Men and Network. (In this sense, Broadway shares the same ideology as the Beltway and Hollywood.)
Clooney baits the audience in one of the play’s angry-liberal speeches:
I wake up in the morning, and I don’t recognize anything. I feel like I went to sleep three years ago and somebody hijacked [America] . . . as if all reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind.
The Hollywood Reporter writes that there was “showstopping applause” when a New York City audience swallowed such sanctimony wholesale. It voiced their elitist feelings of embattlement — not just post-Covid, but post-Biden, too.
Leftist paranoia being the current rage, Good Night, and Good Luck appeals to the sense of beleaguered bad luck felt by out-of-power leftists. Clooney enjoins his comrades to feel justified in twisting journalism from objectivity to partisanship. Murrow worked on Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign while at CBS, excusing his partiality as moral and intellectual superiority.
This is unmistakable when Clooney and Heslov’s stage script emphasizes Murrow’s speech from his 1954 weekly primetime newsmagazine, See It Now: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. . . . We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.” It’s the same self-justification used by every anti-Trump journalist (whether in print or on CBS’s 60 Minutes). An observant reader or viewer knows it’s also the exact same hypocrisy.
Hollywood hack Clooney mounts this broadside against media objectivity simply by supporting corporate virtue against a democratically elected opponent, be it Senator McCarthy or President Trump.
Since Trump is not a Red-baiter, Clooney must adjust his hoary defense of the Democratic Party to fit the left’s new partisanship. Ignoring the present-day enemy within by sentimentalizing the past, Clooney drops the film’s disingenuous subplot about black Communist Annie Lee Moss. He calculates a cornball proto-Communist angle (the same perversion behind the media term “Democratic-socialist”) that denies the birth of contemporary media’s Stalinist witch-hunting and character-assassination tactics. It is Clooney’s purpose to mount a legend/lie that vindicates leftist tactics.
The stage version of Good Night, and Good Luck (titled after Murrow’s snide sign-off at the end of each show) opens and closes with Murrow’s speech in 1958 at the annual meeting of the Radio and Television News Directors Association. The play doesn’t reveal the guerrilla warfare by local and national TV news directors but valorizes their sanctimony, with Clooney himself reading/quoting Murrow: “There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, and indifference. It is a fight for the very soul of this republic.”
Although Clooney/Murrow avoids the buzzword “democracy,” his intent seems the same as today’s anarchists, when Murrow asks: “What are you prepared to do?” The obvious answer is Clooney’s narcissism.