{"id":21770,"date":"2018-02-09T21:33:57","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T11:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=21770"},"modified":"2018-02-09T21:34:14","modified_gmt":"2018-02-09T11:34:14","slug":"the-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=21770","title":{"rendered":"The Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"thepostposter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Steven Spielberg
\nWriter:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Liz Hannag, Josh Singer
\nCast:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep<\/p>\nO<\/span>ne of my favourite passages in Roger Ebert\u2019s memoir Life, Itself<\/em> is when he describes his time as a journalist working a beat for the Chicago Sun Times in the Sixties and Seventies.\u00a0 These newspapermen were chain-smokers, heavy drinkers and they lived and breathed their jobs.<\/p>\n

During the day they\u2019d pound the pavement, sniffing out stories, searching for scoops and racing against their competitors at the Tribune for that all important exclusive.\u00a0 Once they filed their stories, it was off to the pub for an all night bender with their colleagues until the sun would rise at which point they\u2019d do it all again.<\/p>\n

I was fascinated by Ebert\u2019s description of these people, their work environment and the pride they took in delivering news to the public.<\/p>\n

Steven Spielberg\u2019s The Post<\/em> is a film set in that time (specifically during the Nixon administration), and although Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham aren\u2019t as whisky-soaked as Ebert was in his heyday, it still does a fantastic job giving us an insight into an era of print media that is virtually unrecognizable compared to what it is today.<\/p>\n

Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) has just taken over as the owner of the Washington Post after the deaths of both her father and her husband.\u00a0 Until very recently, she had lived the life of a socialite, brushing shoulders with many of the political elite in D.C, including Secretary of State Robert MacNamara.\u00a0 Her primary responsibility as the new head of the Post is to oversea the transition of the paper from being a family-owned operation to a publicly floated company.\u00a0 We\u2019re told this transition involves a cooling off period where Katharine can\u2019t be seen to do anything drastic that would destabilize the business.\u00a0 Anything construed as a breach of that clause would jeopardize the sale of the paper.<\/p>\n

As luck would have it, a civilian military contractor is shopping around classified documents with damning evidence that showed that three presidential administrations from Kennedy to LBJ knew that the Vietnam War was a doomed endeavor but pursued it anyway because (wait for it) it was a matter of pride<\/em>.\u00a0 Thousands of young lives lost because they didn\u2019t want to look bad<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This information is literally dropped into the laps of the Washington Post by an anonymous courier.\u00a0 Chief Editor Ben Bradlee (played by Hanks) wants to run the story and inform the public of this mass deception by the American government.\u00a0 Graham\u2019s associates who are facilitating the transition of the Post\u2019s IPO, are terrified of running something so inflammatory about the White House.\u00a0 Especially as the Nixon Administration has successfully had a court injunction issued against the New York Times for publishing similar material.\u00a0 This is Graham\u2019s dilemma.\u00a0 Does she run the story and risk the collapse of the newspaper which has been in the family for generations?\u00a0 If she doesn\u2019t, what purpose does the paper even serve if not to keep the public informed?<\/p>\n

Naturally, the audience knows what Graham decides to do.\u00a0 This is a film about appreciating the journey, because we know where the final destination is.\u00a0 It\u2019s about enjoying Streep\u2019s performance as she agonizes over her choice and the ramifications of that decision.\u00a0 It\u2019s about seeing the intricate details involved in putting together a major metropolitan newspaper when a story gets the green light.\u00a0 And there\u2019s plenty of fun to be had in absorbing the hairstyles, the technology and the language of D.C in the Seventies.<\/p>\n

Of course, its impossible to watch the film and not draw parallels with American news media today.\u00a0 There are the obvious connections to make with the attitudes of both Richard Nixon and the current occupant in the White House towards the national news media.<\/p>\n

Also, when Katharine Graham struggles with her conscience to hold her friend Robert MacNamara accountable as a politician, it also makes me think about journalists working at The Post today, and how they would cover stories about Jeff Bezos (the current owner of The Post) and Amazon.<\/p>\n

The Post<\/em> would make a fine companion piece to the excellent Spotlight<\/em> which came out a couple of years back and covered the newspaper men and women working at the Boston Globe<\/em>.\u00a0 By chance, the two are interconnected via their chief editor.\u00a0 Marty Baron who was the editor at the Globe when the Spotlight team published the articles about the Catholic church oversees The Post today.<\/p>\n

Although a relatively low-key affair, I liked The Post<\/em> and found it to be both a timely and thought provoking film.\u00a0 I continue to appreciate this stage of Spielberg\u2019s career as he produces small scale dramas such as this and Bridge of Spies<\/em>.\u00a0 They are superbly crafted and worth a watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A cover-up that spanned four U.S. Presidents pushed the country’s first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between the press and the government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":21777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2700,902,1746],"class_list":["post-21770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-meryl-streep","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-tom-hanks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21770"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21778,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21770\/revisions\/21778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}