“News is only the first rough draft of history.” — Alan Barth, New Republic, 1943

Film is a final copy. For biopics tracing methodologies of journalists in crisis, filmmakers do quite a bit of information-seeking themselves. Journalists have long held the interest of the film industry, almost since the silver screen’s conception, and film has captured the profession’s rocky relationship with the public. In an era now that subscribers to cable news may be inclined to describe as post-truth, journalists seeking the truth are more important than ever.

Future films (already announced are Spielberg’s The Post, as well as Thunder Road’s unnamed biopic on heroic war reporter Marie Colvin) could recount heroic journalists that scrutinized government officials - such as the slew of sexual misconduct accusations reported from national newspapers - or other exposés, on par with or exceeding heroic journalist dramas of pivotal moments in our history. Though there were various films from which to choose, I will be examining Allen J. Pakula’s classic on the Washington Post’s exposition of a presidential cover-up, All the President’s Men (1976), as well as two of my favorites: Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015), covering the Boston Globe’s revelation of a forty-year sexual abuse scandal by the Catholic Church; and Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007), following the San Francisco Chronicle’s decade-long reporting of a yet-to-be-solved serial killer. As exemplified in these films, the press plays not only an important role in holding government officials accountable, but is also paramount to a successful democracy.

All of these films recount reporters and their hunt for the truth. Pakula’s film follows Washington Post superstars Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) in their reporting on anonymous, destructive whistleblowing, and thwarting of a scandalous cover-up. The film followed their leads and dead-ends, and eventually ended with the headline “Nixon Resigns.” The film premiered in the Capitol, and was instantly renowned - though, not everyone had such optimistic praise: a Washington Post reporter, interviewed after the premiere, criticized the film’s exclusion of key players in the Watergate adjudication. “The real hero,” said Timothy Robinson, as quoted in the Boston Globe, “was the guy who kept pushing and pushing that story” (Eaton, 1976, p. A12).

More forgiving is Tom McCarthy’s dive into the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation team in the aptly named Academy Award recipient film, Spotlight. The film chronicles the newspaper’s two-year-long effort to uncover a forty-year-old sexual abuse scandal perpetrated by the Catholic Church. The investigative team’s supervisor at the time, Ben Bradlee (Liev Schreiber), pushed his reporters Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and the rest of the investigative team to find, verify, and publish this critical story. Though the initial reporting caused uproar, the film inspired hundreds of victims of the Church’s abuse to seek action, and there are likely many more yet to come forward (Crimaldi, 2017).

Finally, though not the exposition of abuse of power, Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac recounts the efforts of San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), cartoonist-turned-author Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), and San Francisco Police detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo - again) to catch the notorious and still-elusive Zodiac killer. The particularity of the killer and myriad of dead-ends drove all three investigators to obsession - or obscurity. Graysmith lost his job at the paper and turned to privately investigating the case on his own - eventually writing the book from which the 2007 film was adapted. Dave Toschi was the lone investigator on the case for almost a decade (Associated Press, 1976; 1978), and ended because his main suspect died. Avery, however, continued in his profession, eventually covering the controversial kidnapping case of Patricia Hearst. He worked at multiple newspapers throughout his career, and even in his retirement, Avery could not stray far from newspaper production (Taylor, 2000). All journalists - like detectives, zealots, and academes - have an innate need to search for the truth until it is found.

The dedication to uncovering the truth is ubiquitous to the profession. News (at its best) intends to inform the public, with the expectation that the public decides for themselves the best course of action. However, news has often been used to advance political agendas, commit libel and slander, and cause confusion through falsehoods. In the craft’s early history, they did not enjoy protections of the constitution - and were subject to harsh censorship. In fact, the first (colonial) American “newssheet,” Boston’s Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick was so critical of the crown that British forces shut the paper down a mere four days after its founding in 1690. Conflicting and inflammatory public newspapers helped to fuel resentment and unrest in the colonies, eventually leading to the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, our founding fathers protected modern news under the First Amendment, believing in the ideal of upholding an “intrinsic responsibility” to print the truth and inform the public (“A brief history of journalism”).

As the country developed, so did the importance of keeping officials in check. At a time of free-reign capitalism and simultaneous industrialization, journalists reported on the underbelly of productive cities, such as Upton Sinclair in his exposé, The Jungle (1906). Corporate consolidation wrought inhumane working conditions, but rich families were watched closely: for instance, reporter Ida Tarbell meticulously investigated the Rockefeller family. Even Theodore Roosevelt was subject to scrutiny in a high-level scandal involving the incitation of the Panama Revolution, over which the then-sitting president sued Joseph Pulitzer and his newspaper, the New York World, for libel. (Thankfully, the case was dismissed, but not before Roosevelt could coin the term ‘muckracker’ - an in-your-face obnoxious reporter.) After this near-miss, the profession grew and took on new ventures. War correspondence at the turn of the century in the Spanish-American, Greco-Turkish, and Boer wars brought reporters into the rapidly globalizing world, cementing its place even further in the public sphere. Higher literacy and advancing print technology brought near-instant popularity to newspapers, and their circulation boomed (Attig & Esparza, 2003). This intense growth in popularity and consumption led to unsurprising repercussions for the public and free market.

Journalism as a practice is vital to the sustainability of democracy. The journalistic standard in news is to keep the public informed, but while the public acts as the electorate. So really, the news keeps voters informed, enhances “citizen autonomy” and protects officials from taking advantage of the public (“A brief history of journalism;” Jackson, 2009). Our founders knew this, and so the press has enjoyed guaranteed freedoms from restriction since the ratification of the Constitution. Though there have been multiple amendments attempting to silence the free press, the profession has survived. Multiple litigations, including the 1971 controversy over the Panama Papers published by the Washington Post, about which Spielberg focuses his new film, The Post (2017), were thrown out by the Supreme Court. William Allen White, an outspoken progressive editor of Kansas’ Emporia Gazette, said in 1922:

“You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor free entertainment of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people - and alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive”

(Attig & Esparza, 2003).

Mr. White believed the resounding voice in this country would be reasonable and self-policing, but he could not have predicted the complete upheaval of truth and reporting in our country. Though journalism was birthed from the “spirit of righteousness, the indignant moralism, the effort to maintain the purity of values, [and] the call for spiritual and ethical renewal” (Houston, 2010, p. 45), simultaneous industrialization helped divide those journalists determined to present the news and those determined to earn a profit. This divide has aided in the decline of healthy democracy and discourse in the United States’ public.

The news industry holds two responsibilities: to the public - and to the owner. Subjected to the free market, news organizations have to be profitable to survive. At first, newspapers gave space for free to companies to advertise, while circulation and sales comprised most of their revenues. When owners realized they could make a lot of money from selling ad space, the practice quickly spread. By the mid-1800s, ads comprised half of newspaper revenue, and as recently as 2007, newspapers made 82% of their revenue from selling advertisements (Morton, 2013).

As the Internet gained widespread use, newspapers plunged themselves into the digital world. However, “information on the Internet wants to be free, so most newspapers followed along, to their regret” (Morton, 2009, p. 48). To boot, online ad space earns a fraction of paper ad space. According to the Pew Research Center and the Newspaper Association of America, from 2004 to 2014, Internet ads earned $2 billion, but print advertisements lost $30.3 billion, losing fifteen times more than they earned (Oliver, 2016). Compounding the issue, “even the best informed, most interested individuals have no incentive to pay extra subscription fees” (Entman, 2010), further restricting news organizations’ income flow.

In this failing economic cloud surrounding the profession, news organizations have become desperate to turn a profit. Twitter has completely annihilated exclusive publishing as breaking news can now be spread in seconds. This has changed how newspapers operate, and the editors of the online Morning News have alluded, “getting something ‘on the record’ is not a justification for writing boring stories that no one reads” (Rosenawald, 2017, p. 40). A push in the 1990s for higher margins led to cost-cutting, and tens of thousands of jobs in news production have been lost from staffing and budget reductions (Entman, 2010; Houston, 2010).

Specifically, “investigative reporting is... being shoved aside in newsrooms,” as it tends to be “the most expensive work” (Houston, 2010, p. 46). In fact, the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation of the Catholic Church cost one million and more dollars, requiring eight months of reporting and litigation before a single word of the first article was published (Houston, 2010). Fiscally, this is an easy target to gut. This has led to a reduction of information on every level and lets the government run amuck with nearly no oversight. This profit-driven ideology has been ubiquitous in the news industry, and combined with falling revenues, has changed the very perception of what news itself is.

Charged with finding new revenue streams, the clash of market and journalistic motives has turned the “mainstream media” into groveling superficial scandal chasers - paparazzi. In his commencement at the 2013 White House correspondent’s dinner, Conan O’Brien critiqued the media’s pandering:

“I see the Huffington Post has a table, which has me wondering if you’re here, who’s covering Miley Cyrus’ latest nip slip? Who’s assembling today’s top 25 yogurt-related Tweets? ‘Seven mistakes you’re making with bacon.’ That’s a real one and you should be ashamed of yourself”

(O’Brien, 2013).

This flaky reporting - if you can call it reporting - insults the meaning of democracy itself. But Americans have shown that we do not want to pay for content on the Internet (Houston, 2010; Morton, 2009; Starr, 2009), and news organizations are struggling to stay afloat. This is a conundrum for news organizations: how to draw people in with so many other options available? And so, I believe poorly, news media chose to promote “viral news for short-term gains (clicks) while ignoring the long-term consequences (survival)” (Rosenwald, 2017, p. 39).

These ‘feel-good’ pieces are not necessary to the advancement of our democracy and further dilute and invalidate other important stories. Political talk host Bill Maher has been a long-time vocal opponent of sensationalist news. “This is a national disease,” he says in a segment in his namesake HBO show. “An unholy alliance of easily distracted voters and a shameful, pandering media” (c.Maher, 2014). But this is how the market operates: entertaining news is easy to produce, sells for the highest return, and reaches the largest audience. Often, owners prefer “easy, cheap, and convenient” news coverage (Jackson, 2009). Sensationalist stories may sell, but there are critical issues that market-driven owners may be overlooking. As the owner of the Orlando Sentinel, Sam Zell, addressed his reporters:

“My attitude of journalism is very simple: I want to make enough money so I can afford you... You need to, in effect, help me by being a journalist that focuses on what our readers want, and therefore generates more revenue... Hopefully, we can get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq. Fuck you”

(Oliver, 2016).

However, clicks are not always indicative of public interest: headlines often can provide all the information necessary to ‘get the gist,’ not warranting a click, and quality news often has lower click rates but longer reading times. News is now consumed in a new Internet-age style. It’s described as “checking, monitoring, scanning, and snacking” (Rosenwald, 2017, p. 40), in which consumers get a broad idea of the goings-on of the world, and read thoroughly the things in which they are interested. There is still a “healthy market for quality journalism,” (Entman, 2010, p. 106), but news organizations cannot figure out how to afford quality journalism. The abandonment of journalistic integrity, as well as hyper-partisanship perceived by the public in news media (especially in television), has led to a distrust of news, and, according to an early-2017 Fox News poll, people tended to trust Donald Trump more than news media (Blanton, 2017).

People have long distrusted the media before Donald Trump. Even in film, reporters still are portrayed as “money-grubbing, selfish, arrogant scoundrel[s]” who choose “self-interest over the interest of [their] subject” (Carr, 2005, p. C1L). Ensuring quality news gave way to making a profit, and the public can see that. Confronting inherently adversarial and populist issues (Houston, 2010), what we see in heroic journalist films is no longer the norm. Instead, national political newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as online publications with a high tendency towards (liberal) bias, like the Huffington Post and Vox News, have alienated conservative Americans, who to turn to two of the only conservative outlets: Fox News - and Donald Trump. With the opportunity to draw attention and profit, highly inflammatory outlets boomed while offering completely false ‘news’.

Though, this is not the first time false stories have been passed off as truth. In 1835, the New York Sun published a hoax that alien life had been discovered on the moon, of which poet Edgar Allen Poe later recounted, “not one person in ten discredited it” (Uberti, 2016). There have been multiple historic and laughable instances, but now there is an entire tsunami of these dangerous, slanderous online publications, such as Breitbart News and the Daily Stormer, and there are hundreds more. They played an integral role in the 2016 election, but the corruption of our elections is not a partisan matter: to that point, the Kremlin was linked to producing 470 fake American political Facebook pages (Shane & Goel, 2017) and nearly 600 Twitter accounts - both human and bot controlled (Wakabayashi & Shane, 2017), manipulating both sides of the political spectrum. This causes complete confusion and further invalidates important (and real) news stories, and, if knowingly advanced by candidate, President-elect, or President Trump, is treasonous.

This is in addition to what has happened to the paradigm of truth in our society. The media must amend its alienation of half of the country - and Robert Mueller and Congress must sort out the Russian interference investigation - but the people must hold our President, Donald J. Trump, accountable for his spreading of inflammatory falsehoods, especially now as the leader of our nation. Professor of journalism at New York University, Jay Rosen, succinctly describes our President’s political style: it “attacks the very idea that we could have a common world of facts that we can disagree about” (Maza & Lowndes, 2017). But Trump has no sense of facts, and has repeatedly shown to only be versed in what “Fox and Friends” discusses every morning: most of the program praises the current administration and blames for everything Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

But even these fake news huxters are protected under the First Amendment. As seen in the case of two Florida reporters being fired for not willingly publishing known-to-be false information, it was found that it is (still) “not against the law to knowingly falsify or distort the news” (Jackson, 2009, p. 161). With the abundance of available outlets, people have turned to hyper-partisan news sites - some of which may not reflect honest journalism. The legendary reporter, Carl Bernstein, on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” observed that people “are looking for information to underscore and reinforce what they already believe, and they’re not open” to other or conflicting stories (Maher, 2017), from either political side.

The White House is no exception. The current administration is a “major purveyor of misinformation” (Maza & Lowndes, 2017) and overturned the idea of what White House press briefings are. Additionally, the stance on the press in the current administration is clear. “The FAKE NEWS media,” the President tweeted, calling out the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” (@realDonaldTrump, 2017), and this resonates with his base. Regardless, this is absolutely adversarial against the Constitution. Our founding fathers had the foresight on the importance of the press in a successful democracy, and in 1807, then-President Thomas Jefferson described the nation’s dependence on the press, saying:

“It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly [sic] deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood”

(Uberti, 2016).

This statement was about federally subsidized “competing partisan publications” (Uberti, 2016), but could still be applicable to the news today. While President Trump tries to further invalidate the press, the abundance of ‘fake news’ websites and superfluous articles muddy the waters with a multiplicity of inflammatory falsehoods and misstatements. This split down party lines in news media not only keeps citizens in their ‘bubbles,’ but it also directly “harms the public’s ability to self-govern” (Jackson, 2009, p. 156), of which the founding fathers were certainly aware. Not only have we not learned from the diviners of this great nation, but the entire paradigm of truth has also shifted to become nearly meaningless to the public - and that infringes on the ability of the press to hold officials accountable.

* * *

Is there anything to do about this crucial problem? Initially, the United States had “subsidized newspapers through postal rates” (Starr, 2009, p. 53; Uberti, 2016), but it is unlikely that this will happen again. Although transitioning into a non-profit entity could be useful in taking some financial influence out of the news, non-profit news outlets such as ProPublica, Mother Jones, and NPR relinquish some of their protections under the First Amendment, like endorsing political candidates (Jackson, 2009; Starr, 2009). Though, one thing is certain: we need to address this problem of news commodification and prevent the commandeering of discourse by outlets that pass off false information as truth.

Proponents of quality news have a lot of recommendations on what must be done to maintain in-depth journalism. However, according to the editor of the Washington Post (and editor of the Boston Globe at the time Spotlight takes place), “good journalism does not come cheap” (Houston, 2010). But “capitalism has no social consciousness” (Jackson, 2009, p. 147), and completely clashes with journalism’s responsibility to the public. So we arrive at where we are now: moral and market failure due to the clash of conflicting incentives. Rather than becoming “relentlessly interesting” as the Boston Globe has implemented, journalists must create “colorful, explanatory,” and engaging pieces (Rosenwald, 2017, p. 40).

Vox and Vice News are brilliant at covering and explaining current events (though Vox editor Ezra Klein’s op-eds are fairly liberal). These news organizations, though, are or part of a for-profit entity, but gone are the days of competing premiering coverage (for newspapers, anyway), and now quality news is based on the “ability to explain, interpret, or investigate” (Houston, 2010, p. 51) current events. These organizations instead value collaboration over competition, sharing resources and information to get the most complete picture.

News must again be regarded as a “contested commodity,” in which its for-profit status mustn’t interfere with its responsibility to the public, as it has a “dignity that goes beyond price” (Jackson, 2009, p. 148). To combat the market incentives overpowering the journalistic incentives, a shift in the financing of journalism must occur, though likely short of becoming federally subsidized. As of 2012, the New York Times earned 53% of its revenue from circulation, the first time ever having surpassed its ad revenue earnings (Morton, 2013). To promote the cultivation of the craft, organizations from across the nation offer grants for unfunded (usually freelance- or student-) journalists to travel and report on yet-to-be uncovered stories, often in lieu of retaining staff.

Other news organizations, as John Oliver likes to put it, “pray [they] get bought by a billionaire benefactor who can afford to swallow losses” (Oliver, 2016). In fact, in 2012, Warren Buffet bought 28 newspapers for $344 million (Rosenwald, 2017), CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos acquired the Washington Post in 2013, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal. This practice, however, leads to other conflicts of interest, such as framing bias and subjective censorship (Oliver, 2016).

As well, this is only a temporary solution: money runs out. There is another approach that benefactor Gerry Lenfest takes with his new acquisitions, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. Though he believes philanthropic donors are “elemental in newspaper survival” (Reider, 2016, p. 2b), he utilizes Philadelphia and other major university resources. On his non-profit journalism and new media board sit representatives from the University of Pennsylvania, Temple, and Drexel Universities, as well as Columbia University and the City University of New York, viewing higher education as the savior of the next generation of journalism. In fact, the Dean of Boston University’s college of communication, Tom Fielder, notes, “universities with journalism programs are ideally suited - and perhaps even obligated - to help replace the loss of investigative reporting” (Houston, 2010, p. 49). Journalism has a long history with universities: many journalistic institutes offering funds are hosted at universities (Houston, 2010), they swiftly offered it as a course of study, and even Joseph Pulitzer endowed the journalism graduate program at Columbia University in New York City (“A brief history of journalism”).

If backed by education, or if funded at all, journalists must be trained in how to “build a bridge” between what happens and how what happened affects the community. Giving a voice to the public through reporters who hold those in power accountable, and are transparent to the public, leads to better discourse and strengthens community relationships and interdependencies (Marinova, 2010). The news must shift from its market-driven paradigm to a paradigm in which journalistic success is regarded as the promotion of a “healthy democracy based on truth” (Marinova, 2010, p. 3). The informed electorate supersedes financial profit, as this is the foundation of democracy (Jackson, 2009). Journalism is not how it is in films like these three. “Follow the money,” Deep Throat advised Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. That’s what I did, and it revealed the path to the decline of respectable journalism.

So I would like to offer the news some advice: Stop following the money. In order for the Washington Post’s reporting on Watergate to help induce Nixon’s downfall, many puzzle pieces had to fit together: “Our institutions worked [at the time of Watergate]” recalled Carl Bernstein on Bill Maher’s show. “Not just the press; the judiciary, the Congress of the United States, the Supreme Court, [and] the Republican Party ... [were] heroic” (Maher, 2017). I am not implying that anything of this intensity and veracity needs to be done, even facing this administration. However, there are still ramifications for the news media as it is today.

Selling out, patronizing the public, and reaping benefits while the public stays uninformed and, on a large scale, distrusts the media, is not what the news was supposed to be: at first, “news wasn’t supposed to make money, it was something the corporations gave [to] us as a public service” (b.Maher, 2017). If the news can figure out how to get its integrity back, and win back the trust of the public, then democracy will be healthier. In a segment on CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, Daily Beast editor John Avlon addressed his colleagues: “We’ll look back at [the Trump administration] as the best time to be a journalist; not because it was easy but because it was hard and our mission was clear” (Colbert, 2017). News media, your mission is clear. It is time for change. Journalism at its best is exemplified in these films, but it will take creativity and dedication to get back to where they were. This is on the outlets, the lobbyists, the market, and us: we all must relinquish their control on news and allow for it to revert back to being a public service. However difficult or however costly, this will only benefit the nation, repenting for so many years of abuse.