The Media Research Center weirdly took offense that CNN aired a performance of the Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck”, starring George Clooney. Mark Finkelstein grumbled in a June 6 post:
Decades later, the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy remains a favorite liberal bogeyman. So who could possibly be worse? Why, Donald Trump, of course!
In a CNN This Morning segment promoting CNN’s broadcast of George Clooney’s Broadway play, Good Night and Good Luck, based on Edward R. Murrow’s media campaign against Sen. Joseph McCarthy, host Audie Cornish played a clip of CNN’s Anderson Cooper asking Clooney whether “it’s worse now than in McCarthy’s time.” Clooney replied: “It’s worse now.” Nobody asked what it was like to live under communism in the 1950s.
Finkelstein then insisted that Joe McCarthy was right to ruin people’s lives with accusations of being communist:
For her part, Cornish dismissed McCarthy’s efforts as:
“The Red Scare, that time when Americans were accused of being communist sympathizers or doing things they didn’t do, often without evidence.“
After the Soviet Union fell, this charge of “without evidence” fell apart, but the Left still ignores and avoids the evidence. Cornish claimed “we’re trying to have open debate in this country,” but they refuse to engage in a debate about this evidence. There was nobody on set to challenge their leftist hot takes.
Finkelstein offered no evidence that every single accusation McCarthy made was backed by documented evidence.
After the broadcast, Tim Graham spent a June 9 post bizarrely smearing Murrow as a “left-wing hack” and complaining the show was tied to something else:
It was biased enough for CNN to air a live Broadway performance of George Clooney’s Broadway play Good Night and Good Luck,which glorifies 1950s CBS left-wing hack Edward R. Murrow attacking anti-communist Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) as an anti-Trump #Resistance ploy. David Marcus at Fox News called it “breathtakingly sanctimonious.”
But that breathtaking sanctimony extended to the pre-play and post-play coverage. After it was over, in an hour they unsubtly titled “Truth and Power,” Anderson Cooper brought on 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley for a promotional interview about his anti-Trump commencement speech at Wake Forest. Cooper gently asked him if was nervous about doing it while “there’s a lawsuit by the President based on unfounded allegations.”
The MRC, of course, was heavily triggered by Pelley’s speech. Graham continued to whine:
Before the play, Brian Stelter talked to Pamela Brown outside the theater. “The parallels are downright eerie. We are talking about the exact same themes today that Murrow was experiencing in the 1950s. Journalistic courage in an age, in a climate of fear. Corporate leaders perhaps being timid, not sure how to handle government pressure, whether to stand up or back down.”
At a time when the networks offer coverage of the Trump administration that’s 92 percent negative, how are they selling that journalists are fearful of attacking Trump? Couldn’t Stelter take a page from Jake Tapper and see the parallels in how Biden’s decline was covered up because of timid corporate media leaders “not sure how to handle government pressure”?
As we’ve pointed out, the MRC’s finding of highly “negative” coverage of Trump is highly bogus — it focuses only on evening news, pretends there is no neutral coverage, refuses to examine whether that “negative” coverage is warranted, and completely omits any examination of Fox News.