"The Post" Movie Review: A Parallel Story about Truth v Governments

Emerald Ip - SV De-Bug - January 13, 2018 - 5 minute read

Editor's Note:

Journalism is the business of writing the first rough draft of history writes a young journalist after watching the movie, "The Post." She calls on the youth of today to remember that only the public has the real power to make change.

“The Post” tells a different narrative about the Pentagon Papers than the one my media law professor offered up to me in school.

In this version of the story, Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep), the Washington Post’s publisher, anxiously listens to the telephone while different men pressure her to publish or not publish information that the New York Times got three months prior.

“The Post” doesn’t bother with the past’s argument of whether or not Daniel Ellsberg, the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers, is a patriot or a traitor. Instead he is simply a footnote, reduced the role of just Dan, that guy a Washington Post reporter knew from a previous job.

Far from being the heroes that broke the original story, The New York Times is instead framed as the intimidating national paper that the Washington Post has no chance of competing with.

None of these changes to mythologize history are accidental, of course. We live in the middle of history, as this movie reminds us, and so it is inevitable that our current media and political chaos becomes reflected in our stories about the past.

Every day, there’s a new headline, a new scandal, but in a post-Snowden world it becomes harder and harder to feel shocked by disclosures of government secrets.

Sure, it’s worth the few hours to see “The Post” and watch a movie about people learning the hard way why they can’t trust the government. It’s a good movie, after all.

However, our current presidential administration is busy running a reality TV show about why we shouldn’t trust the news, complete with real time updates on Twitter.

When “The Post” warns that the Nixon administration will bring down the full power of the presidential office to crush the Washington post, it’s hard to ignore the parallel to current presidential moments where 45 threatened a news broadcast station’s license for reporting on his administration and called libel laws a sham because the media tells the truth about things he doesn’t like.

President Nixon, in movieland voiceover, talks to his staffers telling him that every single Washington Post reporter is banned from the White House, from any White House event. This current presidential administration banned CNN, the New York Times, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times, and Buzzfeed from attending an informal press briefing.

The 45th President of the United States tweeted that various news media outlets were the enemy of the American People.

Many people wish to ignore the news because they wish to ignore the partisan yelling (arguing is too generous a description) and to ignore the impact that this Congress and this presidential administration will have. People, quite understandably, wish to ignore what is happening right in front of them because they feel depressed by what feels like a constant stream of negative information.

Ignoring the news will not change what the news actually is.

Journalism is the business of writing the first rough draft of history. Journalists are the ones keeping track of the over 2,000 lies that the 45th President of the United States has told us.

Now more than ever we should take note from the Washington Post and heed their warning. Democracy dies in darkness. Don’t let this presidential administration become the darkness that shuts out the light of truth.

As young people of the digital age, we need to remember that the reasons the Pentagon Papers were such a big deal is because of how the young people back then reacted. There were protests in the streets and people lobbied the government to stop the war, and because of the work of many different activists, the war eventually ended.

Instead I see a lot of people now disengaging from news media all together simply because we hear bad news, because they feel like they can do nothing about it.

No. We can do something about it.

We can protests in the streets. We can call our government representatives, with handy websites to give us scripts of what to say and what to call about. https://5calls.org/ Now there are even bots that will help us write faxes to their offices! https://resist.bot/ We can pressure corporations with all different kinds of tactics if we see how they're hurting the American public with their self interest. We can use social media to do our own citizen journalism if we feel the mainstream media isn't telling the kinds of stories that don't represent our communities.

The job of the media is to inform the public. The public is the one with the real power to make change.