First Past The Post: Newspapers in the Movies

At the time of the Watergate Scandal, Ben Bradlee, then editor of The Washington Post, wrote: “As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.” Or more succinctly: “You never monkey with the truth.” In an age of ‘fake news’, infowars and alternate facts, these words gleam like some shining Arthurian motto embossed on the hilt of Excalibur from the depths of a very, very deep lake.

This sense of impossible nostalgia imbues Steven Spielberg’s The Post. The film is essentially a prequel to All the President’s Men, but whereas Alan J Pakula’s political thriller was a ripped-from-the-headlines drama, Spielberg has made a period civics lesson that is as much in love with the clatter of typewriters, the slickness of haircuts and the heaviness of telephones as it is with the innocence of a time when the President lying was a career-ending shocker, rather than a thrice-daily occurrence.

Tom Hanks grumps it up for his portrait of Bradlee, but despite putting his feet on the desk, he never manages the acerbic foul-mouthed genius of Jason Robards’ Oscar-winning portrayal in Pakula’s earlier film. It doesn’t help that so much time is spent with Meryl Streep as the paper’s owner Katherine Graham, dithering in night attire about how publishing the story might affect the paper's shares.

Newspapers and journalists are a popular staple of Hollywood, perhaps because they reflect a central ambivalence Hollywood sees in itself: a murky, morally suspect, frequently despised activity which in the end defends free speech and exposes wrongdoing. The journalist might be a sleazebag, but they’re also on a mission: a cop without a gun, a private eye working for the public good, a knight whose weapons are quick-fire words.

Take Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday – the second (but not the last) film adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page. Cary Grant is the tough-talking, amoral editor Walter Burns, who will do anything to keep his ace reporter – and ex-wife – Hildy from getting married. So he ropes her into writing a story about a man who is to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit, exposing the corrupt mayor in the process. Newspaper people are unconventional, offensive, rapier-sharp and hilarious. They also save a man’s life. Or as Hildy puts it: “Walter, you're wonderful, in a loathsome sort of way.”

A year later Orson Welles sets his debut Citizen Kane in the world of newspaper publishing, but taking the proprietor Charles Foster Kane as his subject rather than the reporters. In Welle’s jaded fictionalisation of the career of William Randolph Hearst, truth becomes hostage to the interests of commerce and propaganda: “You provide the prose poetry, I’ll provide the war.” It is also about the corruption of an ideal, as the investigative reporting and social crusading of Kane’s early years mulches into narcissism, personal ambition and paranoid retreat. The deadly irony is that the spider is caught in his own web with a newsreel journalist pointlessly pursuing the key to the man, despite the fact that as Sarah Huckabee Sanders might say: “There is no there there.”

Billy Wilder would remake The Front Page with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in 1974, but prior to that his Ace in the Hole (1951) features a chisel-faced Kirk Douglas as the scummiest of tabloid reporters, Chuck Tatum. Exploiting a local tragedy-in-progress – a man is trapped down a hole – Chuck hampers relief efforts in order to profit from the man’s ordeal. On its release, Wilder was criticised for creating a grotesque in Douglas’ heel reporter, and seen as a slap in the face for the free press. Obviously, this was before the News of the World would unhappily prove that there was a kind of journalist who would go to any lengths to get their story.

In 1976 All the President’s Men provided the iconic portrait of journalists as understated heroes. Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) are working stiffs. They have very little personality beyond what they do. When Woodward admits to being a Republican, we’re only momentarily surprised. They work the phones, hit the pavement and bang away on noisy typewriters while a television plays news reports in the background like a Greek chorus. Pakula’s film inspired thousands of people to become journalists and became a template for aspirational treatments of the profession, even as the emphasis shifted towards television – see The China Syndrome or Aaron Sorkin’s TV show The Newsroom.

More recent heirs to the 'journos on screen' mantle have included David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007), which sees a newspaper cartoonist played by Jake Gyllenhaal pursue the eponymous serial killer, and Tom McCarthy’s Oscar-winning Spotlight (2015). The latter pitches a team of investigative reporters of The Boston Globe against the power of the Catholic Church and the Boston establishment. Despite being about a specific case from the recent past – published in early 2002 – the film feels weirdly prescient today.

Far from being a thing of the past, the press has seen its role revivified in the first year of the Trump presidency. Not only has the most revealing reporting on the White House come from traditional print media sources – The Washington Post and New York Times among them – but they have also been in the forefront of the uncovering of the Weinstein case and a continuing run of sexual harassment stories. Who knows, maybe that lake isn’t so deep after all and Bradlee’s words can be spied in the shallows: “Never monkey with the truth”.

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The Post is released 19 Jan by EntertainmentOne