Happy Saturday! We're here with a weekend edition to preview tonight's historic CNN broadcast from Broadway. Plus: An appeals court rules against the AP, Hunter Biden drops his Fox News lawsuit again, and Elon Musk deletes some tweets. |
The historical echoes in "Good Night, and Good Luck" are extraordinary. Some might even say they're eerie.
Tonight you can see for yourself. In a Broadway first, CNN is televising the smash hit play starring George Clooney live around the world. Join us starting at 6:30 p.m. Eastern for a live pre-show anchored by Pamela Brown. I'll be with Brown outside the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway, and Harry Enten will be in the crowd talking with theatergoers.
⏰ The play begins at 7pm ET. You can watch it on CNN and CNN International; stream it on CNN's website without a cable login; or stream it on Max. (But only live, not on-demand! It's a communal live TV event.)
Right after the performance, Anderson Cooper will convene a live discussion with a group of journalism students and professors, plus
Abby Phillip,Connie Chung,Jorge Ramos,
Walter Isaacson,Bret Stephens, and
Kara Swisher. Cooper will also have interviews with Marvin Kalb, who was hired by Murrow in 1957, and Scott Pelley, who recently made waves with his Wake Forest commencement speech.
Let's dive in...
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The 'blacklist,' then and now |
The play transports viewers back to the 1950s but feels equally relevant in the 2020s with its themes of unrestrained political power, corporate timidity and journalistic integrity. As you probably already know, the real-life drama took place at CBS, the same network that is currently being targeted by President Trump — one of the many reasons why the play's dialogue feels ripped from recent headlines.
"The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one," Murrow said in a pivotal essay about Senator Joseph McCarthy, uttering words that could just as easily apply to Trump's campaign of retribution.
"This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve," Murrow said, sounding just like the activists who urge outspoken resistance to Trump's methods. Consider Miles Taylor, the former Trump homeland security official who wrote "Anonymous" and is now a Trump DOJ target. This week Taylor spoke out about being on Trump's "blacklist," using the same language that defined the Red Scare of the ’50s and destroyed many careers back then.
"People are afraid," Taylor told Kasie Hunt. He warned that staying silent only empowers demagogues. Murrow surely would have agreed — although even he approached McCarthy with care. Other journalists had excoriated the senator earlier, in print and on the radio, but Murrow met the medium and the moment. He "exposed McCarthy as a cowardly and dangerous fraud," the aforementioned Kalb wrote in the book "Enemy of the People." Within a few months, "the senator was censured by Congress, and his notorious career was brought to a shattering end."
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NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images |
In the past couple of weeks I re-read Ann M. Sperber's incredible biography, "Murrow: His Life and Times," and checked out his producing partner Fred Friendly's memoir for the first time. A few points jumped off the pages:
– Murrow and Friendly's "See It Now" program was revolutionary at the time. The two men basically invented television documentaries — pioneering the new medium by incorporating film clips, interviewing newsmakers and telling in-depth stories at a time when other embryonic shows simply ported radio to TV and relayed headlines.
– Murrow worried enormously about what TV would become. As early as 1949 he wrote notes to himself about "editorial control" over news and about whether corporate owners would "regard news as anything more than a saleable commodity." He wrote that we "need to argue this out before patterns become set and we all begin to see pictures of our country and the world that just aren't true."
– Murrow's famous 1958 sermon about these issues — known as his "wires and lights in a box" speech, and dramatized by Clooney in the play — was industry-shaking in a way that we can't fully appreciate now. Read the full speech here.
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Helpful background before you watch |
From 1951 onward, Murrow and Friendly talked a lot about devoting a "See It Now" episode to the senator and his investigations, but they wanted a dramatic way to illustrate the subject. They found it in 1953 with Milo Radulovich, an Air Force reserve officer who was fired over his relatives' alleged communist views. Radulovich was a compelling, sympathetic speaker on camera, and Murrow's report on him not only stunned viewers across the country, but also led the Air Force to reverse course.
"The Radulovich program was television's first attempt to do something about the contagion of fear that had come to be known as McCarthyism," Friendly recalled in his memoir.
"Good Night, and Good Luck" shows this journalistic triumph, then segues into the fierce reports about McCarthy's witch hunts and attempted retaliation by the senator and his allies. The play is incredibly faithful to the facts, including about the corporate tensions. I wrote about it in detail here.
Looking back at the '50s, historian Theodore White wrote that CBS was "a huge corporation more vulnerable than most to government pressure and Washington reprisal." Those exact same words could be written today, as CBS parent Paramount tries to get the Trump-era FCC to approve its merger with Skydance.
When Murrow took on McCarthy, CBS boss William Paley had to worry about the fact that two key commissioners at the FCC were "friends of McCarthy," as Sally Bedell Smith wrote in her Paley biography "In All His Glory."
Today Shari Redstone has to wonder if FCC chair Brendan Carr is just doing Trump's bidding. Puck's Eriq Gardner recently pointed out that if/when Paramount pays Trump to make his frivolous "60 Minutes" suit go away, the FCC could use the settlement to justify "more regulatory scrutiny."
>> In a new WSJ column this weekend, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. observes that Skydance chief David Ellison and his father Larry are also "missing an opportunity" to show some Murrow-style courage: "Nothing is stopping them from strongly emphasizing their intention to close their purchase of CBS regardless of the Trump case."
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'Is there a Murrow in the house?' |
That's what Kalb asked in a column for The Contrarian earlier this year. He said the answer is no: "Newsrooms today live in fear of antagonizing a president who is clearly on a warpath."
"Good Night, and Good Luck" is "a reminder that journalistic and democratic principles can win out — but they are not guaranteed to," NYT TV critic James Poniewozik wrote in a recent appraisal.
That's partly what Clooney wanted to convey with the play. "Although McCarthyism was bad, it wasn't anywhere near as pervasive as it is right now, the kind of fear that you see kind of stretching through law firms and universities," Clooney told Cooper in this sit-down.
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Behind the scenes of tonight's shoot |
CNN will be airing the play without commercials, "in keeping with the Broadway experience," THR's Caitlin Huston reports. Huston spoke with Jesse Ignjatovic, co-founder of Den of Thieves, the production company that is helming the live telecast. Ignjatovic said "it was very critical for George that we capture this as a theater experience," which means showing the stage and sometimes the audience.
The company is using 20 total cameras, "with 14 camera operators positioned in the aisles and around the live audience."
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A record-smashing performance |
Tonight is the penultimate performance of the play on Broadway. (There is buzz about a possible London production in the future.) All spring long, "Good Night, and Good Luck" broke its own record for highest weekly gross for a Broadway play. Last week it made $4.24 million. Before Clooney and co. came along, the weekly record was under $3 million. So: For everyone who wouldn't or couldn't pay $1,000-plus for a ticket to the show, tune in tonight!
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IN OTHER NEWS THIS WEEKEND... |
Journalism vs. Sovereignty in the Belmont |
"Horse racing is getting a Kentucky Derby rematch in the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga Race Course on Saturday to close out the Triple Crown," The AP reports. "Derby winner Sovereignty and runner-up Journalism, who won the Preakness two weeks later, headline the field of eight in the Belmont." The post time is 7:04 p.m. ET and the race is on Fox.
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The NYT's Michael Paulson lists some of what to expect: "Singing robots. Undead frenemies. A dead train robber, and a dying cave explorer. A fumbling group of spies, and a bumbling group of pirates. Also: 'Hamilton.'" The awards telecast, hosted by Cynthia Erivo, starts at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS and Paramount+.
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Appeals court rules against AP |
A setback for The Associated Press and for independent media last night: "A federal appeals court will allow the White House to exclude the AP from access to the Oval Office, Mar-a-Lago and Air Force One if it chooses, according to a new court order." Here's our full story.
>> The court's decision is a further blow to the AP's attempts to preserve long-standing norms governing press access and the free flow of info from the White House. The AP says it is reviewing its options.
>> In a post on Truth Social, Trump signaled that, for him, the entire AP case was/is about his power to rename a body of water. He wrote that the AP "refused to state the facts or the Truth on the GULF OF AMERICA."
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>> Elon Musk has deleted several of his harshest X posts about Trump. His criticism of Trump's domestic policy bill remains online. (CNBC)
>> Trump told NBC's Kristen Welker that Musk would "pay the consequences" if he chooses to fund Democratic candidates to challenge Republicans who vote for the bill. If money is speech, isn't Trump threatening Musk's free speech rights here? (NBC)
>> For the second time, Hunter Biden has "dropped a lawsuit against Fox News that accused the conservative network of unlawfully airing sexually explicit images of him." (CNN)
>> "Jay Hoag, who has served on Netflix's board since 1999, failed to get reelected at the company's annual shareholder meeting this week — and now the board must decide whether to keep him or let him go." (Variety)
>> Well, that's unusual: "Amazon's Prime Video has canceled 'Étoile' after a single season — even though the streamer had initially asked for two." (THR)
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