Why George Clooney's Broadway Broadcast Was an Epic Miscalculation

The actor's revival of 'Good Night, and Good Luck' on the Great White Way failed to understand why a CNN broadcast was bound to miss the mark.

George Clooney on Broadway as Edward R. Murrow DKC/O&M via msn.com

For anyone who could not afford the $300-$700 ticket price to see George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck onstage, the play’s free CNN broadcast on June 7th looked like a great bet. So why did it seem to miss the mark?

Certainly, it was not because of the actor. Ask anyone who was alive during the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s—or anyone who’s seen clips on YouTube. They’ll confirm that Clooney’s channeling of the legendary pioneer of broadcast journalism Edward R. Murrow was credible.

And it’s not because the play or the simulcast failed to capture the verisimilitude of the eponymous 2005 film upon which it’s based. Indeed, one of the play’s five Tony nominations is for scenic design, which conveys the immediacy of a TV studio and control room with remarkable realism.

On a surface level, Good Night, and Good Luck is a record-breaking juggernaut. The first play in history to rake in $4.2 million during the first week, it picked up four other Tony nominations for best actor, best sound, best lighting, and best costume design. The play’s backers recouped their $9.5 million investment in just seven weeks. And for the most part, the reviews have been good.

So what’s not to love?

First off, watching a play on TV is not the same as seeing a live performance in a theater. There’s no sense of community. You’re not sitting in a room with other members of the audience, who’ve gone to the trouble of buying a ticket, getting dressed in something other than sweats, and traveling to a specific location. All for the same reason. To feel and experience together the communal power of live theater.

Strange as it may seem, no play is ever the same every night. Regardless of how rehearsed the actors might be, a play is changed by the energy of each audience. See a play on Monday night, and it will feel very different if you see it again a week later.

When you attend a live performance, you become a participant, a subtle co-author of that night’s production. When you watch the same thing on TV, all of that is lost. As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” It’s as important, if not more important, than the content itself. Because it shapes and informs how you experience and process that content.

That was George Clooney’s first mistake in choosing to broadcast the play.

Here’s the second and more important miscalculation

Despite its best intentions, Good Night, and Good Luck feels less like a play than a sermon with a bunch of characters running through it. As a theatrical retelling of what happened during Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade of the early 1950s, Clooney’s play certainly hits the proverbial nail. It’s a very effective sermon.

All these years later, you can still feel the urgency of Edward R. Murrow’s historic 1954 broadcast on See It Now, which exposed the senator’s questionable methods, abuse of power, and the unsubstantiated accusations that damaged the reputations of innocent Americans. It was Murrow’s broadcast that led to McCarthy’s eventual downfall.

But the America of 1954 is not the America of 2025. Back then, World War II was still a fresh memory and a slow-healing wound. Morally and on television, we lived in a black-and-white world. We were still painfully aware that thousands of sons, lovers, husbands, brothers, and fathers had given their lives to stop fascism.

We knew Edward R. Murrow from his iconic overseas reports during the London blitz. Which may have played a role in swaying U.S. public opinion enough to get America into the war. He was man of integrity. His influence was substantial. There isn’t a journalist anywhere today who comes even close in terms of credibility or impact.

One reason? There were only three television networks in the 1950s. Except for 30-minute weekly programs like See It Now, the daily newscast on each network was only 15 minutes. It wasn’t until 1963 that CBS expanded its news to 30 minutes, and the other two networks followed suit a short time later. Journalism was a powerful component of American democracy, and the Fairness Doctrine helped to keep it honest with itself. Briefly put, whenever you broadcast an opinion, you had to give equal time to the other side.

The play reveals just how slow that process could be. After Murrow delivered his televised skewering of Senator McCarthy, viewers had to wait an entire week to see the senator’s response. And a week after that for Murrow’s rebuttal.

Today, we can get that kind of back-and-forth via split screen within the same program, regardless of how far away the contributors might be geographically. Not only do we have more network newscasts than we can count today, some networks deliver nothing but news all day long. As for the Fairness Doctrine—it went the way of the dodo bird when Ronald Reagan got rid of it in the 1980s.

Beyond the Age of Information

We have moved beyond the Age of Information into the Age of Inundation. Now entire networks exist, whose main purpose is to shape news content to conform with political ideology.

During the play, CBS founder William Paley anticipates this when he raises an important question in the final moments. You’ve opened the door by bringing commentary into the news, he tells his friend. That may be fine when Murrow does it. Because everyone knows that Edward R. Murrow has integrity. But what happens when someone else does the same thing? Or when everybody does it? How do you know what’s real? How do you know the truth?

It was this point that columnist Bret Stephens addressed during CNN’s panel discussion after the play. He said the news should confine itself to the facts. It should not try to convey the truth because truth can be subjective.

As a former TV journalist, I wondered about that.

What exactly is the truth?

The dictionary says it’s the quality of being in accordance with fact or reality. It refers to statements, beliefs, or propositions that accurately represent what is the case. But it turns out that truth is more complex than that and depends on several theories and categories.

Correspondence Theory, for instance, views truth as a relationship between a belief and the real world. Coherence Theory suggests that truth is determined by the coherence of a belief within a system of beliefs.

Then there’s subjective truth, which refers to what an individual believes to be true. While objective truth refers to what’s considered true by a larger group or by scientific consensus.

And how about normative truth, which refers to what a group of people agree upon as being true—versus absolute truth, which refers to something that is always true, regardless of time or place. For example, 5 x 4 = 20.

In Good Night, and Good Luck, the legendary icon of See It Now reminds the audience that truth, integrity, and courage matter. Abuse of power and outright lies threaten those things. The movie version of this play was written twenty years ago. But staging it on Broadway during the second administration of the man who tried to overthrow the last election is to draw a thru-line between the McCarthy era and the present moment.

A wider net

If the live telecast of the play was an effort to make that case to a larger audience, it should have thrown its net wider. CNN was the wrong venue, in the wrong medium, at the wrong time. Clooney’s play preaches to the choir. It should have been broadcast on Fox, home of the political market that does not see truth the same way Edward R. Murrow seemed to mean it.

Anything broadcast on CNN would likely never reach the people who voted for today’s political leadership. Despite the best intentions, the play’s simulcast fails to recognize that a good chunk of them wanted the current disruption. As well as lower prices and better control of immigration.

But did they also want a burgeoning police state that allows armed-and-masked ICE agents to shove people into unmarked vans without identifying themselves or allowing for due process? Did they also want someone to shrink the government to the extent that we can no longer provide aid to our neighbors overseas the way we used to? Did they want an America that would turn its back on its allies and the very freedoms the nation fought for during World War II?

Who knows? But it would be as wrongheaded as McCarthyism itself to lump them all into the same soufflé. As Clooney’s Ed Murrow states early in the play, assumptions are not facts. And yet, there’s a good chance that today Joseph McCarthy could easily find a venue for his rhetoric on any number of sympathetic news venues.

And that’s the problem. With so many different versions of “the truth” to consider, how will America ever recover from its current catatonic polarization? Maybe someone will eventually produce a play that can be broadcast on both Fox and CNN. One that finds the common unifying thread that links these two groups. Without which there can be no truly United States of America with liberty and justice for all.

©2025 Andrew Jazprose Hill / All rights reserved.

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