YMMV / Good Night, and Good Luck.

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• Award Snub:
  • Some would argue George Clooney's role as Fred Friendly was better than his role in Syriana, for which he did win the Academy Award.
  "So I'm not gonna win Best Director?"
  • Paul Haggis stated in an interview he feels this film was better than his own film Crash and that it should have won Best Picture over his own film!
• Cult Classic: Like other films about McCarthyism and the black list of Hollywood, this film is very popular among leftists and politically active people in particular.
• Periphery Demographic: Although the film does not protect the Communists, but only criticizes the paranoid fears about them, it was very popular among the American left, as it was perceived as Take That! for "government persecution". This also makes it attractive to modern Russians, who interpret anti-Russian sanctions and accusations against "Russian hackers and trolls" as "a new McCarthyism of the 21st century."
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • The Roosevelt-Truman administrations did have Communist sympathizers in them. However, that doesn't change the fact that few of McCarthy's claims were substantiated in the hearings. So more like "strawman's political maneuvering happened to align with reality." In fact, McCarthy admitted that the "list" he waved around at one speech was a mundane to-do chores list.
  • The point is that only one of the people McCarthy accused, Mary Jane Keeney, was actually anything close to guilty. Even then, McCarthy accused her of being a Communist party member, which distracted from the fact that she was actually a GRU spy and suggests that any attempts to claim that McCarthy "was right" suffer from the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: a man shoots wildly into the side of a barn, draws a target around the bulletholes, and then says "look at my deadly aim!"
  • In-Universe, Bill Paley notes that even Murrow was worried about looking like a Communist sympathizer by remaining silent about Alger Hiss. Murrow has no response to this. Instead, his defense is that at some point, a line has to be drawn.
• Values Resonance:
  • Granted, the mainstream media was this way even in 2005, but Murrow's unyielding desire to keep the public fully and honestly informed, even when the public at large prefers banal entertainment to news, still holds very true in The New '20s.
  • Ditto for the way Murrow and his team are able to highlight and rebut Senator McCarthy's lies and whataboutisms, which helps turn the public opinion around on McCarthy. Those very same tactics are not only used in The New '20s, but have become astonishingly mainstream in the political arena; a sizable chunk of social media is devoted to pointing out these politicians' tactics, just as Murrow did to McCarthy.

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