Murrow, McCarthy, Moran … and Clooney

Television and Truth-Telling in Tempestuous Times

I hope many members saw the live telecast of the Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck” which was broadcast on CNN on June 7th. Of course, the title gives away the play’s topic: the revered CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s takedown on his program, “See It Now,” of Sen. Joe McCarthy and his red scare tactics and witch hunts. George Clooney played Murrow, was the show’s director, and also was responsible for the nationwide telecast of the live performance – apparently a TV first.

Just to summarize for the uninitiated: Murrow, a heralded WW II CBS reporter, was determined to show McCarthy to be a danger and a demagogue, unnecessarily causing havoc in the country by tarring innocent citizens as Communists. CBS’ founder, principal owner, and top executive William Paley was worried about taking on the powerful senator, mainly for fear of losing the show’s sponsor, Alcoa. Though at first somewhat grudgingly, he did ultimately give Murrow support and a green light.  

(One aside: many, many years ago, I had to go through the negotiating memos of a deal whereby the Times purchased Paley’s one-third share of the International Herald Tribune. The Times deal memos were written by Punch Sulzberger’s right-hand man and former foreign correspondent Sydney Gruson, a bon vivant and man about town. Paley chose to meet with Gruson just down 52nd St. from his Black Rock offices, at the 21 Club, an eatery whose style and taste Grison felt was way below their station. So in Gruson’s memos, amidst the negotiating points, I found sentences like this sprinkled in: “Then we were served an unappetizing looking bowl of split pea soup, which was decidedly bland and tasteless.”)

Clooney’s acting is spot-on (his nemesis, McCarthy, is portrayed not by an actor, but by archival tapes of his appearances). But his more heroic work was in getting the play to be shown on basic cable for the whole country. Aside from the fact that it played a limited run, box office prices were in the $300 range, and tickets in the secondary market came close to $1,000. (I had the idea of taking the MLRC staff to the play as our annual Christmas outing – after all, it seemed pretty relevant to our work – but it was a no-go once I saw how those prices hardly fit into our non-profit’s budget.)

Given what’s going on in the media world today, giving access to the play to viewers around the country was a great step, and it did receive relatively strong ratings. Indeed, the historical parallels are startling:  the dangers and abuse of political power, corporate greed and lameness, and—the good news—journalistic courage. It’s worth pointing out that the play was performed just a few blocks away from CBS News’ old headquarters in the Black Rock building on New York’s 52nd Street – and that while the play was about CBS’ (barely) allowing Murrow to go ahead with his attack on power, today CBS News is facing similar pressure, but there may be no heroic ending. It seems likely to give in to similar political and financial pressure and, as reflected by a 60 Minutes executive producer who recently resigned, perhaps temper its coverage of the powerful and settle for millions a meritless claim by Trump regarding its editing of a Kamala Harris interview to ensure safe passage of a huge corporate merger.

So two main questions are raised by the play today. First, has journalism and the media changed since the 1950’s, and, if so, why? Second, are some of the capitulations we see today, from the settlement of various of the President’s generally meritless libel related suits to the very recent termination of a veteran ABC correspondent who criticized the President and a top aide justified, or do they signal weakness and lack of backbone of the media and, worse, enable Trump’s campaign against the media?

Certainly, both journalism and the media have changed considerably, and more than by just the props highlighted in the play (cigarettes were omnipresent in Murrow’s newsroom and can’t be found there today; the differences in the phones, cameras and other technologies are obvious). But the way journalism is practiced and the values of the media have changed just as much as well.

First, the media as an institution has far less respect than in Murrow’s day, when his company, the other two major networks and the major newspapers were widely respected. After all, 10 years after Murrow, his symbolic successor Walter Cronkite was considered the most trusted man in America. But is that massive change due to the actions of reporters and editors or outside events swirling around the media? I would maintain it’s the latter, that all major institutions, from the Supreme Court to big business have fallen precipitously in the public eye. The Vietnam War and Watergate – which, true, the media covered – are generally thought to be the greatest culprits. After all, it was the government’s malfeasance and lying in both instances which drove the scandals; the media just reported on them. Was Lester Holt all that different from Walter? I think not, but the fall in his institution’s credibility harmed his relative standing.

Unfortunately, since he came down that golden escalator exactly 10 years ago, Trump’s pathetic but strategic insults aimed at undermining the press shouldn’t be underestimated either. During that time he has written 3,500 posts on social media that have attacked, belittled and diminished the media, an average of about one a day over those 10 years. And he has used the term “fake news” or described specific reporting as “fake” nearly 1,500 times. (Stats thanks to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.) This does have consequences: for example,  Pew Research found that from 2016 to 2024 Republicans’ trust of national news organizations fell from 70% to 40%.

Second, technology changed the media. It begat cable, which begat a multitude of stations and channels, which, in turn, begat talk shows and a variety of news  programs, many of which featured opinionated commentary as an alternative to straight news. These changes gave rise to opinions over, or mixed with, facts, angry bloviating and other programming which filled ample airtime.  What it did not do was treat news as seriously as before; what it did do was compete for ratings and base its commentary on differing sets of facts, making reasoned debate well-nigh impossible. And the internet, offering an infinite amount of speakers a vehicle by which to be heard, has only exacerbated all the above.

Third is the change in media ownership from family-owned journalistic businesses to corporate conglomerates or to billionaires for whom the media entity is only a small part of their business holdings. When the Sulzbergers owned the Times, and the Grahams the Washington Post, the newspapers were their principal assets on their balance sheets and the main concern in their hearts and minds. And they handled those newspapers with a view of the long term and a loyalty to the principles and values of journalism. As Viktor Orban’s Hungary has demonstrated, when corporate conglomerates own news entities, or the mega-rich for whom a news division is only a minute fraction of all their financial holdings, their emphasis turns far more to the financial health of the entire enterprise than to worries about journalistic niceties and principles. So rather than being a check on power, these corporate owners are more concerned with the bottom line of their entire organizations and friendly relations with those in power. So not surprising then that while the family-controlled Times hasn’t settled (and has won) its Trump litigations, the companies with bigger corporate fish to fry have, without good legal justification, settled similar cases and in recent months announced more center/right policies.  

As timely as the play was given the current Scott Pelley and Kamala Harris situations at CBS, perhaps even more ironic was that during the very weekend the play was broadcast, ABC was terminating (or technically, not renewing) the contract of senior national correspondent Terry Moran. Moran was first suspended, then terminated, for a post on X which referred to Stephen Miller, the deputy White Hose chief of staff and mastermind of the administration’s crackdown on immigration as a “world-class hater,” and “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred.” In the same post he also referred to Trump as “a world-class hater,” although he tempered those words by saying his hatred is only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification.

ABC said it took this action because Moran, a 28 year veteran of ABC News, violated its internal rules standing for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and said it doesn’t condone subjective personal attacks on others. On the other hand, Moran was lauded in many circles for being frank about Miller, and arguing that what he alleged about Miller was true. And those Moran partisans criticized ABC for taking such actions punishing him for the exercise of free speech.

It would appear both sides are right. Reporters are supposed to obey their company’s guidelines and are not supposed to offer subjective slights about people or causes they might cover. So Moran overstepped his bounds. But many in Washington believe that Moran’s description was apt and valid, and let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that this is true. Why isn’t a reporter free to describe an administration higher-up accurately, and was ABC’s suppression of free speech a capitulation to Trump (as many argue the $15 million settlement of the George Stephanopoulos libel case was; I am in a minority who believe that case was not such an easy win for the network, given that the law does distinguish between rape and sexual assault).

The answer appears to be that even in our free speech regime, journalists are not supposed to utter their subjective opinions, even if valid. Though that is an impingement on free speech, it is the price a journalist pays. It doesn’t really make sense: readers know reporters have opinions, and it’s probably better to be transparent about them than to imagine biases don’t exist. I remember when Linda Greenhouse, the Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning Supreme Court reporter, was disciplined for a talk she gave to 50 Radcliffe classmates at a reunion that she was in favor of Roe v. Wade; did anyone think the “10^th Justice” didn’t have an opinion on the case or was perfectly neutral? The real reason for the rule is to avoid exactly what played out in the Moran case: the Vice President said it was an “absolutely vile smear,” and Trump, Miller and their henchmen used it as a way to attack the media for being leftist and biased.

It’s sad that we are punishing journalists for their freedom of speech – but that’s the political reality we are living in. My quasi-suggestion is a rule that derives from defamation law, and which I discussed last week while giving my 101 talk on libel. In libel you can convert a actionable fact into a protected opinion if you give the reader some support or examples for your conclusion. “Freeman is a terrible lecturer and a hater” is subjective and sounds like an opinion, but since you are giving the reader nothing by which to evaluate that conclusion, it might well be found to be a -false-  fact. But if the writer gives some examples – say, he doesn’t wear a tie to class and repeats himself a few times – then the reader can decide for himself whether the conclusion is valid, and that just might legally convert the allegation about me being terrible into a non-actionable opinion. Maybe if Moran had given some concrete examples of Miller’s hatred, the whole passage would have been more acceptable.

So over 70 years after Murrow and McCarthy, with a somewhat similar political environment, where are we? Unfortunately, it seems pretty clear that the media is in a weaker and more vulnerable place. If we are going to succeed as well as CBS and Murrow and bring down the powerful demagogues, we are going to have to be cleverer and more cohesive than we’ve been in the last five months.

George Freeman is executive director of MLRC. All views expressed are his own and not those of the organization. Feedback welcome at gfreeman@medialaw.org.