In the 21st Century Films About Journalism & Politics Not Only Have A Liberal Bias But They Usually Get Their History Wrong

 

As a cinematic thriller All The President's Men is a masterpiece. As the story of what brought down Richard Nixon, it absolutely buries the lead.

Don't get me wrong this film is everything they say it and its one of the great masterpieces in 1970s cinema. But if you knew nothing else about Watergate, you could leave the movie with the assumption that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with support from Jason Robards) single handedly forced Richard Nixon to resign. When the movies ends and we see a series of teletypes relating the fall of Nixon over the next eighteen months it’s a rational conclusion. It's not just the truth. As Woodward and Bernstein themselves knew all too well, there were a lot of other factors which involved both Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and frankly a lot of Richard Nixon's own actions himself. In a sense the movie ends just when we're getting to the important part.

I'm relatively certain that countless people got into journalism in the 1970s on not so much because of what happened in Watergate but because they saw the movie. The film, for all its incredible quality, does leave you with the impression that two lone journalists can bring down the President. There was a lot more to the story but I don't want to think how many otherwise smart people never made the connection: journalism only reports the news, but on its own it can't change things, much less world events.

One of the legacies of President's I want to discuss is how Hollywood chose to read the story, particularly in the 21^st century. Real life reporters essentially became heroes in the eyes of the film and TV industry in a way they never had been before, particularly when it came to certain films. And when it came to movies about politics and journalism – and in one case television, over and over these stories no matter how well told, frequently began to make the journalists capable of changing American politics, usually against the dual evils of corporations and always against evil Republican lawmakers. This became particularly true in the years after 9-11 and again and again, most of the artists rarely let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The earliest and most famous example of this is George Clooney's Good Night & Good Luck (2005). I have seen this film quite a few times and I acknowledge what a masterpiece it is. Clooney makes an incredible second film as a writer-director, David Strathairn is extraordinary as Edward R. Murrow and he is perfectly supported by an incredible cast from Clooney to Frank Langella on down. As a work of art and an ode to TV journalism it is a masterpiece and Clooney deserves all the credit in the world for making a movie about  McCarthyism a subject by and large film and TV had left untouched to this point.

My problem with it is one that may only come away in hindsight. I realize that Clooney both in the movie and in the theater adaptation wanted to make a film about the power of journalism particularly in a time where the media was accused of taking the knee in the aftermath of 9/11. I admire the nobility of his goals but it doesn't change the fact you come away thinking that Murrow's broadcasts alone were responsible for McCarthy's fall. That wasn't the case; just as with Woodward and Bernstein it was far more about politics than anything.

What is usually left out about any discussion about McCarthy is timing. In the aftermath of the 1948 elections, when Truman managed what was one of the biggest upsets in political history, the GOP in Congress were understandably angry, particularly because in Truman's campaign he had gone out of his way to lambaste them and call Republicans little short of evil incarnate. Senators like Bob Taft were understandably angry and they vowed to make Truman's second term a hell. One of the ways they did was through HUAC which had been founded under Truman.

McCarthy and his acolytes in Congress (Richard Nixon the most famous) were allowed to cut a swath through so many people because the GOP leaders considered a campaign tactic. McCarthy himself would briefly be considered for the Vice Presidency as a result. When Eisenhower had a landslide victory and the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress McCarthy's approach had been considered a large part of it. Eisenhower might have privately disapproved of him but he had no intention of touching him.

The Army-McCarthy hearings did end up showing McCarthy extending himself but even then the Senate leadership waiting until after the 1954 midterms to do anything about it. Then he was censured and became a political non-entity. HUAC continued in some from until the 1970s but from that point on it was no longer in the public eye in the same way.

So in a way Murrow's broadcasts didn't really change anything. And the argument of Bill Paley choosing to bench McCarthy's broadcasts not long after (I'm not sure of the accuracy of that) is seen as a punishment for going after him. In truth Murrow's was only allowed to do be such an active force in journalistic crusades as long  as he provided ratings for the network. Clooney makes this clear when Murrow has to interview Liberace and he's told he has to interview 'Judy and her daughter Liza." This is show as beneath Murrow's dignity but it belies the point that without these increased ratings Murrow likely wouldn't have been allowed to carry on with his pioneer broadcasting. CBS was a business first and Murrow was only allowed to do what he did as long as he could make money. That's always been a truth about television – something that Clooney himself was long aware of.

But say what you will about the inaccuracies at least Good Night is a great story and a riveting watch. The same can't be said for Truth, a film which tries desperately to redeem Mary Mapes's career for her and turn her horrible blunders into a saga of corporations and politicians (led of course by evil Republicans) into a saga of journalistic integrity.

Honestly I find that Mapes spent so much of her time and energy trying to turn whether or not George W. Bush served into the military when he was a teenage the ultimate consequence of post-Watergate investigative journalism. This could only have been considered an important story in the era where Joe Biden's 1988 run for the Presidency had been destroyed when he was accused of plagiarism. This is the definition of trivia if had come out in 2000 and the fact that she was trying to get it on the air in 2004 – when the election was a referendum on the war in Iraq – is a demonstration of how skewed her priorities were.

The only reason I suspect this film was greenlit in the first place was because it was a story about 60 Minutes and corporations fighting journalistic integrity, the same formula that had led to Oscar nominations for The Insider. But the difference is that even if you took award the shenanigans that led to CBS gutting the story, The Insider would still be a great movie. The first two-thirds are riveting in their own right, as we watch Russell Crowe and Al Pacino dance around each other, how Pacino tries to find a way in order to get the story to happen and spends as much time setting up the circumstances for Crowe to testify. All of this is thrilling, all of it is powerful, and it all makes a great movie.

Truth by contrast is all about the journalists and spends almost no time dealing with the source and most of the runtime is about the consequences. The Insider at its core is about an important issue: big tobacco, how its been lying to us for decades and Jeffrey Wigand is the focus of the film as much as Lowell Bergman, if not more so. By contrast whether or not people lied to cover up whether W served in the military was only going to have less of a draw.

And yet James Vanderbilt spends the entire film doing everything in his power to make Mapes clear blunder and everything she did wrong excusable because she was the victim of corporate pressure in the aftermath of many mistakes. Perhaps because she played by Cate Blanchett, we're supposed to see her as a bastion of integrity. Instead what we have our endless speeches of so many people arguing how journalism is a public service and that the corporations are in thrall to the evil Republicans. Watching it, the only conclusion I could draw was: Dan Rather's career was destroyed for this?

I refuse to buy the argument that a story even on 60 Minutes in September about W's military service would have changed a single vote for Bush. By that time the Fox News era was fully upon us and the fact that Mapes thought a story from Bush's college years would change one swing vote is delusional. We were past that era then, and honestly I'm not convinced this is entirely bad.

It's impossible not to think of this style of political journalist movies of this era and not think of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom in which Will MacAvoy and his loyal group of researchers fight a battle for journalistic integrity against the evils of corporations and of course Republicans. That Will spends the entire series saying that he is a registered Republican and argues at the end of Season 2 why he's one it does nothing to change the fact that the first season and most of the second is nevertheless a fully toned attack on the midterm of 2010, the Koch Brothers and Citizens United and ends with Will calling the Tea Party 'the American Taliban' as its 'triumph'. That this is done under the banner of journalistic integrity is a bad joke, funnier in fact that much of the dialogue on the show.

And it spends the entire series trying to argue very strongly that journalism should be free to operate without fear of corporate censorship which is laughable. Indeed in the third episode this is spelled out in a conversation between Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) and the head of the corporate Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) when she tells him that 'ACN was responsible for four percent of my company's revenue. Stop pretending this is a meeting between equals!"

Sorkin's usually a smarter writer than this and he could point out that at the end of the day Skinner has no real leverage with Leona or corporate. They have the authority to do whatever they want to him. Everyone at Newsnight is an employee. They are there to make money for the company and if the ratings start to drop – as indeed they already have and will continue to do throughout the series – all of the prizes and mentions from journalism don't balance out economic reality. Sorkin then spends the lion's share of the series ignoring this fact and sure enough at the end of Season 2 when a story unfolds that ends up hurting the network, Leona tells them not to resign with a kind of oblivion that's at complete odds with where her character was in Season 1. She's decided to stop being a CEO and fight the good fight because doggone, it's the right thing to do. That's more of a fantasy then anything that was happening in Westeros.

Journalism has always been controlled by the wealthy. The greatest movie ever made Citizen Kane tells the veiled story of William Randolph Hearst, who controlled a media empire and determined what stories were important and  what politicians to vote for. He was the Rupert Murdoch of his day and frankly smarter than Logan Roy ever was. His chief competitor was Joseph Pulitzer who engaged in the greatest series of newspaper wars in the 1880s and 1890s. At the end of his life he donated $2 million to Columbia to establish a school of journalistic ethics. Considering how the premiere prize in journalism is the Pulitzer Prize (which Woodward and Bernstein won) I'd say he's successfully greenwashed his name.

That said there is one movie during this era that probably tells the most realistic story of journalism and politics I've seen in the 21^st century. Critically it was filmed before the 2016 election but it didn't come out until 2017 and it serves as a mirror to ALL The President's Men yet tells a more balanced and realistic story: Steven Spielberg's The Post.

Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham are characters in both films but Tom Hanks's and Meryl Streep's portrayal are more nuanced then the versions that Jason Robards and Jane Alexander play in President's. Dealing more with the Pentagon Papers and the decision to publish them The Post is far more about the corporate part of reporting than the actual investigative reporting. It doesn't make the investigative work any less fascinating – Bob Odenkirk is magnificent as he tracks down Ellsberg and brings the papers to light – but critically Kushner's screenplay shows us something that Goldman's didn't do as much: show how the sausage was made.

This is clear in particular in a scene where Hanks and Streep discuss the publication. In this Bradlee delivers a monologue that comes as close in any film I've seen to acknowledge the apparent liberal bias that papers like the Post showed for JFK and LBJ. In the scene where he describes how Jackie came back from Dallas and he says: "I didn't think we were sources; I thought we were friends",  he comes as close to saying how much papers like the Post and the Times were manipulated by the Kennedys and their ilk. Odenkirk's character takes a similar approach when Ellsberg tells him that every President – not just the hated Nixon – was responsible for the mess that is Vietnam and that he's been lying to himself about who's responsible. When he and his colleagues go through the papers and see the truth they have no clear blinders.

There's a certain sense of humor as to how the attorneys for The Post (played brilliantly by Zach Woods and Jesse Plemons) are so fresh faced that they don't look old enough to have graduated law school. But for all their innocence Kushner and Spielberg make it very clear that they didn't fall off the turnip truck and that they have to think about more than just one story. When they are on the verge of publishing and the injunction is put in place Woods's character confronts Odenkirk's with the consequences. He tries to brush it off: "We could get executed at dawn." Woods keeps pushing and makes it clear that he's doing his job and by the end of the scene Odenkirk knows just how much trouble the paper could be in.

By making the story as much about Graham's decision to go forward even though she risks the paper being destroyed, this represents something I've rarely seen in a movie about political journalism: it makes the conflict about ownership as much as the reporting. Graham is as much a heroine of the story and when Bradlee comes into her office showing everyone else has followed her lead she says relieved: "At least, we're not alone anymore."

The Post's ending is clever too: with Graham saying to herself she hopes she doesn't have to do anything like that again while we hear Nixon planning the break-in to the Watergate. It adds a different context that President's Men never takes into account: thrillers may be fun for the audience but for the average person they don't like the pressure of having to make the kinds of decision we celebrate as bravery. It's an honest portrayal of any real-life historical character I've seen any movie: they may end up changing the world by their actions, but honestly they'd prefer as dull a life as possible. That may not make more as interesting a film but its far more realistic and it makes those actions of courage both more admirable when they happen – and understandable that they're as rare as they are.