In March, the Broadway premiere of Good Night, and Good Luck, co-written by and starring George Clooney, will debut at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. As Playbill explains, “a work of historical drama, Good Night, and Good Luck centers on a clash between famed journalist Edward R. Murrow and infamous U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, of anti-communist HUAC fame.”
“Edward R. Murrow operated from a kind of moral clarity that feels vanishingly rare in today’s media landscape,” director David Cromer said in a statement. “There was an immediacy in those early live television broadcasts that today can only be effectively captured on stage, in front of a live audience.”
FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT
At a New York press conference, Clooney added this: “It’s a subject matter that is very close to our hearts, which is what [the press] does. Telling the truth and holding truth to power. It’s a play we’re very excited to do.”
Clooney’s idea that the media are truth-tellers focused on “speaking truth to power” is laughable. Both CNN and ABC have recently had to pay out to settle libel lawsuits. The liberal media hasn’t come close to shaking off the scandal of the Russiagate hoax, and not many of them seem to have been implicated in the fraud in USAID — while refusing to cover the story of the billions of dollars stolen. The press is interested in many things other than, as Clooney puts it in the trailer for his new play, “honesty, facts, integrity, accuracy and truth.”
If Clooney really wants to do something socially relevant, he could produce a movie or play about the corruption of the media, not to mention the socialist bureaucrats and leftists who have been telling the public lies and looting the American treasury.
In 2020, a brilliant novel was published that would make both a great film and a great play. Kirkus Reviews called it “a remarkable first novel that reads like the work of a seasoned pro.”
It’s called The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures. The novel, by Jennifer Hofmann, tells the story of Bernd Zeiger, a member of the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police during the Cold War. Zeiger lifted his early career in the 1960s by writing The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures, a manual on how to crush people straying from the communist party line. “The self is a vessel that when turned upside down will empty itself of meaning,” Zeiger thinks. “It will grasp, cling to itself, turn in on itself, witness itself, go insane in that way.” This is a cold foreshadowing of the canceling and struggle sessions the Left would inflict on Americans after the Cold War.
Standardization is set in 1989, when there were hints that the Berlin Wall might be coming down, and Bernd was 60 and in bad health. He is assigned to minor surveillance duties or interrogations. He is also infatuated with Lara, a young waitress at his favorite cafe who recently vanished. He is also haunted by a physicist named Johannes Held, who was turned by Stasi operatives years earlier after he returned from a fellowship to Arizona. One reviewer noted that author Hofmann “conjures up dark comedy in an understated, quirky satire of the Stasi’s bureaucracy and cruelty and the paranoia that permeated East Germany.” The ending is profound and shocking.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
One of the themes of Hofmann’s novel is the manipulation of the truth for personal and ideological ends. The Stasi depicts Hitler as a product of the West, the enemy of East Germany. This practice of declaring anything to the left of Marx as fascist was, of course, has been adopted by the American Left. President Donald Trump, who wants to pave over Gaza, jackhammer bureaucracy, and revive free speech, somehow is Hitler.
The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures is a great story for George Clooney to tell — much more relevant in 2025 than Good Night, and Good Luck. Clooney is frequently dismissed as a liberal, but he has been in films that offer subtlety and compelling storytelling about adult subjects: Michael Clayton, Solaris, The Descendants. He starred in Hail, Caesar!, the Coen brothers project that spoofed the gullibility of 1950s communists. Clooney, 63, is also the perfect age to play Bern Zeiger, who in 1989 is near retirement and the end of his Stasi career.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.