Good Night, Luck, and Murrow

(Originally posted June 10, 2025)

It was a weekend for theatre enthusiasts, that’s for sure. I watched the live performance of the Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck on CNN Saturday, and the Tonys on CBS on Sunday (both time-shifted, mind). This got me musing… It may seem odd that an ostensibly “news” network is airing something that is a narrative, creative work, live, right? - so how did we get to this point? And how, why, and when is it OK to for a creative narrative to illuminate a real-world situation, both from legal and political standpoints, with real-world journalistic content, as Good Night, and Good Luck does?

Cable News Network (CNN) - the first 24-7 news channel in the USA, was founded by Ted Turner in 1980. It paved the way for the era of constant news on TV we now live in, which is very different from the world of regular broadcast evening news on the Big Three Networks that Good Night, and Good Luck is set within. While a traditional network like CBS, ABC, or NBC had its news division separated from its entertainment division(s) in the past, the vertical integration of the broadcast networks that arguably started with the watershed moment of Disney buying ABC in 1995, has largely destroyed that model. Traditional broadcast network media consolidation only continued apace in the 30 years since. NBC is now part of NBC Universal, owned by parent company Comcast; CNN itself is now part of Warner Brothers Discovery.

Good Night, and Good Luck uses real-life news footage of Joseph McCarthy. The intent was as clear in the story as it was in the method of the storytelling: the quotes are straight from the horse’s mouth. And there are very real modern-day legal and political risks in the use of much more recent footage toward the end of the production, ranging from Peter Jennings anchoring the evening news, to Jerry Springer hosting one of his usual talk-show guest shouting matches, and ending on Elon Musk, giving that salute. Using all those clips doubtlessly required some rights and clearance review (as I’ve explained elsewhere, this doesn’t necessarily mean getting permission) in order to avoid lawsuits, and some very careful thought over any political repercussions.

CBS News grapples with the threats of McCarthyism in Good Night, and Good Luck. An Edward R. Murrow Award is still held up as representing excellence in journalism. In the modern-day, CBS the network is up for a major merger with Skydance via its parent company, Paramount Global. However, it is currently caught-up in a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump, alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris damaged his 2024 election campaign. He is seeking $20 billion in damages. CBS says the interview was edited in a normal way, just as any other interview would be. But it appears that if this merger is to go through, the broadcast licenses to the CBS local affiliate stations issued by the current administration’s Federal Communications Commission, would have to be approved. The chair, Brendan Carr, claims that Trump’s lawsuit would not hold up these license approvals. This doesn’t seem to be borne out by the facts: CBS has seen two high-profile resignations in the past few weeks: 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens in April, and the president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, in May. Whether these high-ranking resignations at CBS (part of Paramount Global) are a type of pressure from the FCC, or from Skydance, or both, the parallels to the McCarthyism depicted in Good Night, and Good Luck, and the devastating chilling effects that it had on journalists’ professional and personal lives are very clear. (CBS reporter Don Hollenbeck commits suicide off-stage in the play.)

Maybe that’s part of the nub of it: where do the creatives’ or media companies’ rights to make money from artistic expression or a creative piece of IP/media outweigh the rights of the public and the electorate to be well-informed, by reporting the facts? If I had that solution, maybe I’d be a lot richer than I am today!

Good Night, and Good Luck is a stage adaptation of a film made 20 years ago, of events that occurred 50 years before that. The same questions are still getting asked – what is news, what is entertainment, and what is “politically informed” vs. “political interference”? The threat of legal repercussions for using clips in a creative play should not be comparable to the threat of lawsuits from any USA political officeholder over a journalistic news show. One prospect is about risk to IP and its legally rightful income, and the other is about the survival of democracy itself.

I’ll leave it there with a pertinent-to-the-characters involved thought, as a genre sci-fi fan. Years ago, the film rights for Star Trek were held by Viacom, but the television rights to the franchise were held by CBS. All that legalese difficulty preventing one company from making content for the platform they didn’t have the rights for disappeared when they became the same company - ViacomCBS (now: Paramount Global). As for the repercussions of that vertical integration referred to here: Mr. Spock himself once said in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (a story with a megalomaniacal, eugenicist villain): “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Captain James Kirk replies to him, “Or the one.”

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