By Meredith O’Brien
I didn’t want a selfie. I didn’t want to grab George Clooney’s hand. I just wanted to tell him something.
I stood on 7th Avenue in Manhattan at the end of a long line by the Winter Garden Theater’s stage door after having seen “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Clutching the play poster I’d purchased while I waited for its star and playwright, I wasn’t there to fangirl but to deliver a message: “I teach journalism and I very much appreciate this show and how you’re standing up for the importance of journalism.”
With a black “Good Night, and Good Luck” baseball cap tucked low on his dyed-black hair and oversized, tinted aviator glasses covering a substantial portion of his face, Clooney, the son of a journalist, signed my poster and responded to my message saying, “Well I appreciate anyone who teaches journalism.”
For years I’ve had a framed poster of the 2005 Oscar-nominated film of the same name on the wall in my home office. It occupied nearly the entirety of the background when I taught university journalism Zoom classes during the COVID.
The poster’s looming presence prompted questions from my students, affording me a natural opening to explain how the film depicted the heroic and ultimately career-sabotaging decision in 1954 by CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow to challenge the undemocratic crusade by a Wisconsin senator who’d been spearheading the persecution of people based on phantom allegations of unAmerican associations or thoughts in order to instill fear and elicit compliant silence among the populace.
I saw the 2025 Broadway play a week after a well-respected CBS “60 Minutes” producer resigned “citing encroachments on his journalistic independence,” the New York Times reported, adding that the investigative journalism program “faced mounting pressure in recent months” from President Trump and its corporate owners due to its content on the same network for which Murrow worked.
A former newspaper reporter and investigative journalist who now writes books and teaches journalism and writing, it was hard for me to sit through the play which depicted Murrow spotlighting on “See It Now” Senator Joseph McCarthy’s disingenuousness, lies and lack of empathy and ignore the parallels to our current American moment.
The characters’ discussions about the panic about the consequences of speaking out against injustices and the terror of truth telling called to mind recent events. Like the Turkish graduate student who was snatched off a Massachusetts street for the “crime” of co-writing a piece in her school newspaper which offered opinions unpopular with Trump administration officials. Or the fear in my foreign students’ voices when they asked me if they should return home lest they suffer the same fate.
The play’s final scene featured Clooney-as-Murrow four years after he lost his Tuesday evening primetime slot as a result of taking on McCarthy. Murrow delivered a blistering speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association about the state of television journalism.
However, Clooney paused the speech as a giant TV screen behind him displayed a visual American history lesson from the 1950s through today. It included images of the 1991 Rodney King beating, the 9/11 attack and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A cacophony of cable news talking heads crowded the screen, including former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson who suggested that Jan. 6 was an inside job while other TV broadcasters uttered provable untruths, not unlike what led to Fox News in 2023 to settle a defamation lawsuit for $787 million that the Associated Press said “would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.”
Near the conclusion of the “Good Night” montage: Elon Musk, standing behind a podium bearing the presidential seal on Inauguration Day 2025 throwing his stiffened right arm up in the air in front of a roaring crowd.
As I exited the New York’s Winter Garden Theater, lines from the end Murrow’s speech about the impact of television echoed in my head:
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”
Sadly, Clooney’s-as-Murrow’s words amid the smoky, jazz-infused “Good Night” scenes weren’t historic artifacts. They were bleating alarms to a country in peril. Right. Now. Professional, truth-based journalism delivered via the “wires and lights” in our phones, laptops and flat-screen TVs can shine light in dark places, bring injustice out of the shadows and shake us out of complacency if only we pay attention and only if folks are willing to create it.
Journalist Margaret Sullivan recently wrote in The Guardian about the growing attacks on American news gatherers – specifically at “60 Minutes,” a modern-day “See It Now” aired on the same TV network, which is in the president’s crosshairs.
“… [T]he problem involves Donald Trump’s overweening desire to control the media,” Sullivan said. “… Those who could stand up to Trump’s bullying are instead doing what scholars of authoritarianism say must be avoided, if democracy is to be salvaged.”
As “Good Night, and Good Luck” heads for a live broadcast on CNN on June 7 and Murrow’s network just lost the head of its news department, it’s my sincerest hope that the wires and lights inside whatever device people use to watch it will spark the embers of courage and inspire journalists to report the truth regardless of the consequences.
In his 1958 speech, Murrow encouraged broadcasters to air content which brings “reality” into American homes, asking, “… [W]hat have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”
Meredith O’Brien is a Boston area writer who teaches journalism at Northeastern University and creative nonfiction at Bay Path University. Her latest book, ‘Louie on the Rocks‘, is a dark comedy about the impact of Trump era politics on an estranged father-daughter duo. Visit her website to see more of her work, and follow her on Threads and Instagram.
