WHEN DANIEL ELLSBERG (MATTHEW RHYS) exits the RAND Corporation with the initial batch of the Pentagon Papers concealed in his briefcase in Steven Spielberg’s The Post, his first stop is a hippie-supervised printing shop specializing in movie posters. It’s an entirely fitting gloss on the journalistic parable to follow: the critical gatekeepers in the saga of the Fourth Estate’s exposure of official American chicanery and global mass murder are, like Spielberg himself, middle-class rebels affiliated with the business of movie-making.
Never content to let a didactic moment rest unbelabored on screen, Spielberg has Ellsberg enter the print shop as we see a poster for the career-making Robert Redford vehicle Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—which, sadly, is but the first of the movie’s leaden callouts to its far superior predecessor in cinematic Post hagiography, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 adaptation of All the President’s Men. (Redford starred in that one as Postreporter Bob Woodward.) And for good measure, as Ellsberg takes out his vital document trove for clandestine Xeroxing, he’s standing in front of a movie poster for The Blob—a Cold War-era sci-fi allegory about the insidious reach of the Communist enemy, now hauntingly repurposed as a symbol of the rudderless American war machine itself. If it can’t be frozen and shot into the Arctic circle, as the original Blob was, well, the mundane machinery of American newspapering will have to do in a pinch.
Spielberg’s movie was reportedly rushed into release, since the director grasped the urgency of The Post’s message at a moment when the American media is under near-perpetual siege from the more-than-figurative Blob known as Donald Trump. The general idea was to buck up flagging press morale with a stirring cinematic reminder of the first principles of journalistic enterprise in our democracy—vindicating the public’s right to know the conduct of the people’s business even as a sinister, conniving occupant of the Oval Office (Nixon in The Post’s dramaturgy; Trump in ours) is determined to smite the public’s duly appointed messengers into oblivion.
This is indeed a worthy moral to drive home amid all the metastasizing chaos of Trumpism. But since Spielberg is the one doing the driving, it never goes beneath the surface of the media’s fraught relationship with power—or much beyond the reassuring, crowd-pleasing style of a movie poster.
The story of The Post is principally the story of how Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) learns to tell truth to power, under the patient tutelage of the paper’s freewheeling Brahmin executive editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks). Graham, who became the publisher of the Washington Post after her husband Phil’s suicide in 1963, is facing her own professional crucible as the story opens: she’s about to launch the Washington Post Company on its first public stock offering, so as to better capitalize the paper and put it more firmly on the national map. We first see her jolting awake in bed, surrounded by various financial documents supporting the IPO, and her gradual involvement in the high-stakes decision to publish the Pentagon Papers is intercut with the corporate drama of getting the deal to stick among nervous investors amid rising rancor—and legal jeopardy—from the Nixon White House. [...]
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For now, the Bezos regime has operated in fairly benevolent fashion, and permitted the stellar reporting of David Fahrenthold, Greg Sargent, and other battle-tested Trump antagonists to flourish. This is not to say, however, that it is a remotely reliable news outlet on urgent questions of political economy, or non-establishment opinion-making.
In other words, a benevolent monarch is still a monarch. Just as it’s far from a sign of democratic health to have Oprah Winfrey as an unofficial avatar of “the resistance,” so is it troubling to have the defenders of press freedom in D.C. —toiling under the sententious slogan “democracy dies in darkness”—serving exclusively at the pleasure of a mega-billionaire who’s responsible for some of the retail sector’s absolute worst labor practices. Even as The Post is poised to net a predictable bushel full of Oscar nods, Bezos himself has gleefully set off a shit-eating bidding war among revenue-starved American municipalities to serve as the alternate corporate headquarters of Amazon’s labor-soaking, low-cost cyber-empire.
It’s a gruesome irony that would not have been lost on Ben Bagdikian, the former Post reporter who sleuthed out the source of the Pentagon Paper leaks and promised Ellsberg that the Postwould publish the Papers in defiance of the Nixon administration’s injunction against the New York Times. Bagdikian devoted the balance of his distinguished career to documenting the unique perils that the economics of media concentration pose for American democracy, in landmark books like The Media Monopoly.
Bagidikian, by the way, led a far-from-uncinematic life himself, having emigrated to the United States as a refugee from the Armenian genocide, and reported on the shameful conditions in Pennsylvania’s Huntington State Correctional Institution while posing as a convicted murderer. Bagdikian was also the actual source of the most compelling argument that Hanks’s Bradlee makes in his bid to ensure that Graham signs off on the publication of the leaked Ellsberg documents: “the way to assert the right to publish is to publish.”
But what am I saying? Bagdikian abruptly left the Post in 1972, after his tour as the paper’s second ombudsman put him at loggerheads with Bradlee. There were likely no Georgetown parties to commemorate his tenure, and the man clearly couldn’t recite an investor’s prospectus or corporate bylaw to save his life. What on Earth, in other words, could Steven Spielberg do with a hero like that?