The heart of the play is the clash between Murrow and the anti-communist crusader of the early 1950s, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was first elected to the Senate in 1947 and remained in office until his death in 1957.
“Good Night, and Good Luck” is a needed reminder in these Trumpian times. So says George Clooney in a 60-Miinutes interview. He co-wrote the play, now on Netflix, and he plays the main role as famed newscaster Edward R. Murrow. Clooney referred to similarities between the play “and the modern-day challenges journalists encounter in seeking the truth, including lawsuits brought against news organizations by Donald Trump and his administration.”
Near the start of the play, Murrow gives a speech (see here for the actual 1958 talk) in which he says that future historians of all three networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, “will there find recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.” (Unless otherwise indicated, quotes from the Netflix broadcast of the play are taken from the play’s script, which generally reflects the play’s Netflix airing.)
About the same time as Murrow’s criticism, his friend the poet and Lincoln scholar Carl Sandburg stated that “when we reach the stage where all of the people are entertained all of the time, we will be very close to having the opiate of the people."
And, "More than half the commercials are filled with inanity, asininity, silliness and cheap trickery." About three decades later Neil Postman wrote (in Amusing Ourselves to Death) that “our politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business,” and that “we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”
The heart of the play now on Netflix is the clash between Murrow and the anti-communist crusader of the early 1950s, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who was first elected to the Senate in 1947 and remained in office until his death in 1957.
He shot up to fame following a February-1950 speech he gave in Wheeling, WV. In it he claimed that he possessed a list of communists working for the State Department. The late 1940s were a befuddling time for many U. S. citizens. To many of them it was puzzling how, although they thought we had played the leading role in winning World War II (which ended in 1945), by 1950 communists--either Soviet or Chinese--controlled a wide swath of territory from Eastern Europe, across the vast USSR, to the Chinese mainland, which they conquered in 1949.
McCarthy offered a simplistic explanation--U. S. traitors. In the State Department and in other important areas, he claimed, were people aiding the communists, either willingly or unknowingly. He clashed with President Truman and then, after Gen. Eisenhower’s presidential electoral victory in 1952, McCarthy’s relationship with the former general became increasingly tense.
Nevertheless, with communist North Korea attacking South Korea in mid 1950, and the Korean War lasting until mid 1953, McCarthy and his charges against communists and communist sympathizers remained popular with much of the U. S. electorate.
But he became increasingly reckless in making charges, was eventually censured by the U. S. Senate in December 1954, and his popularity plummeted. According to Gallup polling in January 1954 he had a 50% favorable and a 29% unfavorable rating; but by November 1954, it was 35% favorable and 46 unfavorable.
One of the major reasons for this sharp decline in 1954 was the March 1954 airing of a Murrow presentation of the TV program “See It Now.” It consisted mainly of clips of McCarthy speaking, but interspersed with Murrow’s remarks and ending with his summary.
Here are some of his words that the Netflix presentation repeated. “On one thing the Senator has been consistent. Often operating as a one-man committee, he has traveled far, interviewed many, terrorized some, accused civilian and military leaders of the past administration of a great conspiracy to turn the country over to communism.” Murrow also indicated some of the false statements made by McCarthy. For example, “Twice he said ‘the American Civil Liberties Union was listed as a subversive front.’ The Attorney General's list does not and never has listed the ACLU as subversive, nor does the FBI, or any other federal government agency. And, the American Civil Liberties Union holds in its files, letters of commendation from President Truman, President Eisenhower, and General MacArthur.”
A little later, the Netflix presentation again repeats some of Murrow’s words from that famed 1954 “See It Now” program:
The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between internal and the external threats of communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men -- not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. [This long quote is from Murrow’s actual speech, but is almost exactly repeated by Clooney in the Netflix version of the play.]
The battle between McCarthy and Murrow continued one month later in April 1954, as Murrow explains in the Netflix production. CBS had assured McCarthy that he could publicly rebut Murrow on its show. And he accepted, calling Murrow “the symbol, the leader, and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual communists and traitors.” The week after the above clash, Murrow used the next “See It Now” program to answer some of the charges that McCarthy made against him the previous week. The ongoing exchange did not help McCarthy. His approval rating continued to drop.
