Could Murrow Have Taken Down Trump?

-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on August 12, 2025

As many journalists probably did, I watched the CNN/HBO broadcast back in June of George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck play live from Broadway. Touted as a historic telecast, it was a no-brainer for me to tune in, having enjoyed Clooney’s film 20 years ago and being interested in how I would perceive the revived work in today’s political climate. I’ll leave a complete review for the professionals, but I enjoyed the skill with which the television team translated the flat nature of a stage production to something that would work for viewers in their living rooms. Clooney’s passion for Edward R. Murrow and his work clearly shown through, with the rest of the cast seeming to pick up that same passion. Still, I couldn’t help but feel there was one character who never appeared on stage yet dominated the production: Donald Trump.

Let me back up a bit to give that idea some context. The original version of Good Night and Good Luck was a 2005 film directed by Clooney and starring David Strathairn as Murrow (with Clooney playing Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly). The film, in stark black and white, chronicled Murrow’s attempt to shine a light on the dubious tactics of the anti-communism campaign of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. Murrow spends the course of the film digging into McCarthy’s activities, rallying his newsroom to see the mission through and fighting with higher-ups at CBS for the right to air the team’s findings. Watching it in 2005, it was a nostalgic, journalist-as-hero story that informed more than a few audience members about how well TV journalism worked under Murrow’s guidance—even in the medium’s infancy. It also introduced a fair number of people to McCarthy and showed his outrageous tactics to a new generation who had no idea such a figure ever existed.

Flash forward 20 years and the live stage version of the story plays with an entirely new context. Rather than teaching a history lesson about a long-ago journalist hero and his nemesis, we see it now as a rallying point to help us believe journalists can still make a difference taking on those who abuse their power. The play doesn’t departs from its setting in 1954 until a final video montage (ending in Elon Musk’s Nazi salute), but the specter of Donald Trump permeates every scene. Sometimes, the script’s Eisenhower-era references strike us as surprisingly familiar, as when Murrow’s reporters are discussing whether they should all move to Europe (a line which brought nervous, knowing laughter from audience members who have clearly contemplated the same question in our current timeline). Other times it feels deadly serious in the most modern sense as Murrow and his team face cancellation of their program, firing or even possible arrest. Our minds can never go back to their 2005 state to see this only has a historical drama. Seeing it now, it can only be about the real threats to their existence that journalism—and democracy—are facing today.

If we can all agree the 2025 version of Good Night and Good Luck is aimed squarely at Donald Trump and not Joseph McCarthy, then the question must be: could Murrow, if he were here today, bring down Trump? First, to be clear, Murrow did not singlehandedly bring down McCarthy. The famous See It Now exposé on McCarthy aired in March 1954 and did tremendous damage to McCarthy’s popularity and effectiveness in Congress. But political forces had him in their sights, too, including his Senate colleagues who voted in favor of a form of censure in late 1954—a vote that had all the Democrats and half of McCarthy’s Republican colleagues voting in favor. After that, McCarthy’s power and influence were all but gone and he spent the last two and a half years of his life, still in the Senate, ignored and forgotten. He died of complications of alcoholism in May 1957 at the age of 48.

Murrow and his team at See It Now were most effective in their coverage of McCarthy because they used his own words against him. The See It Now broadcast consisted mainly of film clips highlighting outrageous statements from the senator. Murrow summed up the dangers of McCarthy and his beliefs in a stirring final comment. The program was the result of detailed reporting, painstaking research, impeccable editing and courage to broadcast it all. But we must also attribute some of its success to the power of CBS News and its tremendous reach into American households. See It Now averaged around what we would now call a 15 rating. Compare that to its modern grandchild, 60 Minutes, which in 2025 averages about a 2 rating. Therein lies the first of the hurdles in a Murrow takedown of Trump. We no longer have mass media in the way we did 70 years ago. Thanks to a universe of information and entertainment options, it’s almost impossible to gather a large enough audience to effectively reach “everyone.”

Another issue is that, even if there were still news programs reaching large portions of the audience, that audience is so divided along political lines now Murrow’s show would most like be labeled as “liberal” and “biased.” Not liking the coverage it was getting in the media 45 years ago, the conservative establishment seized on a plan—not to change its ideology—but to destroy the messengers who were delivering honest, truthful stories about the right’s unpopular agenda. No one then could have imagined how well that plan would work. Polls show around 70 percent of the public had trust in the news media in 1980. That number hovers below 30 percent in polls today. My professional career pretty much coincided directly with that decline, so I’ve watched and experienced it first-hand. It would be naïve to assume that the Murrow from 1954 would have the same respect from the audiences of 2025. Using the same respected reporting techniques he employed to investigate McCarthy now would make him a target for public outrage and accusations of liberal bias. The medium of television news—and all ethical, proper journalism—has lost a tremendous amount of power to inform the audience. Countless important, well-researched and essential stories go ignored or worse, get condemned as false each year, leaving an American public that should be more informed than ever before ignorant to some very important facts and information. Despite his stellar career and reputation, Murrow would not be able to single-handedly overcome that handicap. Nor could he break through the information silos in which most Americans have willingly trapped themselves. The echo chamber and confirmation bias of partisan media blocks good reporting and the fresh information it carries. Ironically, those deepest in their respective silos are the ones most in need of this unbiased, competent journalism. Yet they will never encounter it or even know it exists.

This thought experiment cannot only focus on Murrow and the changes in journalism since his time. It must also consider the figures at the center of the reporting—Joseph McCarthy in 1954 and Donald Trump now. Despite many similarities between the two men, including a penchant for name calling, frequent lies and misstatements and the use of the “other” as an enemy around which to rally their supporters, McCarthy and Trump differ in some important ways. McCarthy certainly sought out the media and used the fledgling medium of television news to deliver dramatic diatribes against his perceived enemies—an approach that’s also in the Trump playbook. But McCarthy had to earn the coverage of television and the rest of the news media, while Trump was created by television. From early appearances in programs like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous to his role as a reality TV star hosting 14 seasons of The Apprentice on NBC, the American public knew Trump very well when he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Back then, news organizations couldn’t resist the appeal of following a top-rated reality TV star’s run for the White House, so Trump received an outsized amount of the campaign coverage. And whereas Murrow could put together a whole program of McCarthy’s on-camera statements to shock Americans with their outrageous nature, Trump’s own words—even more outrageous than McCarthy’s by any rational standard—just seem to endear him even more with a large portion of the TV audience and voting public. Trump’s cult leader status among his followers dwarfs any popularity McCarthy ever had with the public. While some American certainly agreed with McCarthy’s views, nowhere would you find people sporting McCarthy hats, trucks trailing McCarthy flags nor any of the other MAGA paraphernalia that litters the landscape now. Murrow’s success in taking down McCarthy may have been a David versus Goliath story. But Trump’s innate skill at using the media to his advantage would inflate Goliath to the size of a mountain for David to bring down with a mere sling.

There’s one last difference today that Murrow himself predicted. It was in his famous “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech given to what was then called the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA)—now known as the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA)—and depicted in both the film and stage version of Good Night and Good Luck. Murrow warns the assembled radio and TV news directors of the danger television offers to lull the audience into an inattentive state:

…if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”

Murrow himself was caught up in his television bosses’ desire to give the audience something to distract them from the news of the day, namely as host of Person to Person, a celebrity interview program with guests ranging from Liberace to Groucho Marx. Murrow despised that duty, but did it to secure funding and airtime for his news team’s work. We’re now in the time of the historians of whom Murrow spoke and those present-day historians need to look back no further than yesterday to find a TV landscape in which sports and reality TV programming dominates the ratings. Worse yet, a sports-obsessed and reality TV-addicted public has decided to devote nearly all its attention to those pursuits, leaving no critical skills left to pay attention to the news of the day. Not only would Murrow find it hard for his work to reach a broad audience today, but many of those audience members it could reach would turn their backs in favor of the latest edition of Love Island.

All of this is not to paint a pessimistic picture of the state of things as much as it is to serve as a warning that there’s not a savior out there coming to save us from ourselves. Look, I get it. Murrow is a figure to whom we all look up. I may never have been more professionally proud than when our KOMU-TV team won the Murrow Award for Overall Excellence among small stations in 1994—still the only television station primarily staffed by students to ever earn that honor. But Edward R. Murrow would have just as much difficulty working today as the rest of us. He made the most of a time when the new medium of television news had the undivided attention of an interested audience. We don’t have that luxury. We must work harder and smarter to get fewer results with our journalism. But I think Murrow would still find it worth the effort.