The Fourth Estate in Film
Newspapers saved democracy in the 1970s
A lifetime ago, I worked at a small-town newspaper setting type, pasting up pages, covering city council and school board meetings, writing features and a column. It was great training for meeting deadlines and working with others in a common pursuit, but it was never exciting or dangerous as depicted in movies like “His Girl Friday” or “Spotlight.”
Even so, many of my favorite movies are about reporting and ethical dilemmas and two of them focus on The Washington Post. “The Post” tells the story of Katherine Graham, the newspaper’s publisher, who took a financial and legal risk to expose the truth about the US government’s long and dirty role in Vietnam.
The movie starts when Daniel Ellsburg, a political analyst, leaked the Pentagon’s decades-long study of America’s involvement in Vietnam to the New York Times. After publishing several articles, The Times was served with an injunction to cease writing further stories.
The Washington Post was late to the game, but when they received their own copy of the Pentagon Papers, Graham and editor Ben Bradlee made the decision to print their own articles.
The Post had just gone public on the American Stock Exchange to boost revenue. Choosing to publish the Pentagon Papers wasn’t just journalistic courage, it was also a huge financial gamble, one that could have destroyed the paper.
Their courage caught fire, and in an “I Am Spartacus” stand of solidarity, other papers across the nation also printed the story about the Pentagon Papers. Ultimately the Supreme Court ruled in favor of The Washington Post and The New York Times’ right to continue publishing.
At the end of “The Post” Katherine Graham says, “I don’t think I could ever live through something like this again,” and students of history will smile at the irony of her statement.
A year later, the Post would be at the center of another political firestorm. “All the President’s Men” (based on the book by the same name) tells the complicated story of Nixon’s henchmen breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in 1972. Five men orchestrated the break-in to plant listening devices and to find dirt on Democratic opponents.
Two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, spent weeks chasing in circles trying to find the heart of the story until a shadowy figure, “Deep Throat,” (who later turned out to be FBI special agent Mark Felt) told Woodward to “follow the money.”
And so, they did. They found the bookkeeper who worked for The Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP pronounced “creep”), and she told Bernstein that vast sums of illegal funds poured into the Republican campaign headquarters.
“There was so much of it” she said, adding that she “didn’t know where to put it all.” In one two-day period, the campaign received $6 million, which some estimate to be equivalent to $46 million today.
Following the money revealed the rot at the heart of Nixon’s campaign to win re-election at any cost. Even though Nixon won a second term handily, reporting continued. The public learned that the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA were aware of the break-in at the Watergate.
These entities were also aware of the secret funds and were complicit in trying to cover it all up and to discredit The Post’s reporting. The Post stood alone for months in its determined coverage. As Congress made plans to impeach Nixon, he resigned on August 9, 1974.
Katherine Graham handed The Post to her son, Don, in 1979, who later sold it to Jeff Bezos in 2013. Bezos bought The Washington Post for a little bit less ($250 million) than Musk spent (between $277-290 million) on the re-president’s campaign. Despite saying he would not interfere with running the paper, Bezos refused to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
Recently, Jennifer Rubin, veteran opinion columnist resigned from The Post and started a Substack venture called The Contrarian because she and a “throng of veteran journalists [were] so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.”
Such is the state of a once-great newspaper. It’s probably a good thing Katherine Graham isn’t alive to see it. The staffs of many once-great papers have dwindled to skeletons, and it’s hard to do good reporting in reduced circumstances. Some papers, instead of taking a stand against corruption, would rather pull up a chair and clap for the charlatans.
So, if you’re trying to remember a time when people could trust the news, may I suggest these two movies. Yes, they’re just movies, but stories have the power to move us and call us to our better nature.
In both these stories, it took a brave publisher and a tough editor willing to do the right thing in a politically fraught time in American history. America was able to overcome a corrupt presidency because the Fourth Estate spoke truth to power.
Joan Zwagerman loves movies where people fight for justice.