It is not too often that a good and meaningful movie gets to our cinemas. Local film syndication services often choose extremely commercial titles. Indeed, I am surprised a movie like The Post is even showing here.
The movie is very timely for us. We have a President who doesn’t seem to believe we need a free press as a watchdog in our democratic society. Journalists are being demonized. Restrictions are being imposed on their ability to do what our Constitution tasked a free press to do.
The movie tells the story of how the publisher and editor of the Washington Post fought the mighty powers of the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers. The Post was picking up the ball from The New York Times which was restrained by a court order from continuing its publication of the supposedly highly confidential document.
The Pentagon Papers is a 4,000 page academic study commissioned by former defense secretary Robert McNamara to trace and document how the US government made decisions on Vietnam through several administrations.
The study concluded that former presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson knew they could not win the war, but expanded the war anyway and sacrificed close to 60,000 young American lives.
They consciously lied to the public, keeping them in the dark by classifying documents as military top secret because America could not lose a war. But one academic involved in the study was bothered by it.
Daniel Ellsberg, a Harvard academic, leaked copies of the top secret study first to The New York Times and later on to The Washington Post. Ellsberg thought it was time the different administrations are held accountable for lying about their wrong and deadly decisions.
By that time, it was the Nixon administration on the saddle in Washington. It didn’t have a heavy culpability with the war just yet. But it felt compelled to protect “the national interest” as several administrations defined it.
Mr. Nixon also enjoyed exercising power. He hated journalists, specially from the Times and the Post. Mr. Nixon banned a Post reporter from covering his daughter’s wedding, and eventually banned all Post reporters from covering the White House. President Duterte wasn’t the first to ban reporters.
The beauty of the American system is its independent judiciary. One judge agreed with Mr. Nixon and issued an injunction. But the series of court cases that eventually led to the Supreme Court upheld the right of the newspapers to publish.
The publisher and editor of the Post agonized over the decision to go against the most powerful government in the world. Their lawyers and finance people advised against publication because of potential risks to their initial public offering and the threat of imprisonment.
For Katherine Graham, publisher, and Ben Bradlee, editor, going against friends, living and dead, was another complication. Mrs. Graham was a close friend of McNamara and Bradlee was close to the late president John Kennedy. “It’s a biting reminder,” a Vox review of the movie observed, “of the trouble with cozying up to subjects or sources…”
But Graham and Bradlee decided the public interest is paramount. “The way they lied,” Bradlee says, “those days have to be over. We have to be the check on their power. If we don’t hold them accountable — my god, who will?”
Mr. Bradlee continues: “The day the government can tell us what to print and what not to print is the day we cease to exist… The only way to assert the right to publish is to publish… that’s what newspapers do: they learn, they verify, they write and they publish… The president is not the state.”
In the end, the US Supreme Court ruled for the journalists. An independent judiciary is America’s big advantage. If that happened here today, our Supreme Court can be expected to vote 10-5 in favor of the administration.
Former justice Hugo Black pointed out in the majority decision that press freedom is sacrosanct… no ifs, no buts.
“The founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.
“The government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”
Former Justice Black debunked government claims of danger to national security. “The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security…
“An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the founders hoped and trusted they would do.”
Josh Singer, one of the scriptwriters of The Post, told Vox: “A democracy, and certainly a presidential democracy, without a strong, free, and active press is problematic. We need the press to hold our leaders accountable.”
Steven Spielberg told Vox he decided to direct the movie because of its level of urgency. Spielberg said he felt offended when documented, provable events are being branded fake news. “I deeply resented the hashtag ‘alternative facts’, because I’m a believer in only one truth, which is the objective truth.”
Spielberg recognized the task of the press is even more difficult today because “the sheer number of breaking stories and the speed of the news cycle, which is less than 24 hours. Sometimes it’s 24 minutes. The intensity is tenfold what it used to be.”
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco