THE POST

(after a friendly fire near-miss) Soldier: "I'm very sorry, sir."

General Raglan (John Gielgud): "What for?"

"For trying to shoot you, sir."

"Well, we all do that..."--Charge of the Light Brigade

Ben Bradlee (urging a tight deadline on a journalist): "Well, can you write like a poet instead of like a novelist?"--The Post

Last night Malcolm, Debi and I saw a DVD of Tony Richardson's sardonic historical epic The Charge of the Light Brigade at the History Meetup. (Malcolm had burned three different versions for us to choose from!) It was all a bit overloaded and sluggish, compared to the same director's zippy Tom Jones.

This afternoon I saw Steven Spielberg's The Post with Ann at the Yonge & Dundas. (The place was full of kids so the popcorn lineup was too long for me.) It stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, playing publisher Katherine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post in 1971 when they risked prosecution to get the Pentagon Papers published.  It affected Graham's social relationships with Washington's power elite, and they have Bradlee saying that such coziness between the leaders and the press has to stop.

As intelligent as the movie was, it's hard to ignore what was happening just a decade or two after papers like The New York Times and the Post were taking on the Nixon administration.  Graham became a close friend of Nancy Reagan, and the neoliberal press proved reluctant to take on her husband. (This dovetails with what I was saying yesterday.  I promise not to make a habit of discussing the same subject in consecutive posts:  I dread becoming a bore!)

When I first heard of the Iran-Contra scandals I'd cynically predicted that Reagan would get away with it, and it gave me no pleasure to be proved right.  Of course it's easy to blame cowardly Democrats in Congress. Under James Wright's leadership they spared Reagan impeachment; gave Oliver North immunity from prosecution; and handed over the Iran part of the investigation to the Tower Commission, two of whose three members proved so loyal to the Reagan-Bush administration that two years later Bush Sr. gave them cabinet appointments!

But it's also important to look at the failings of the Washington press.  The Times and the Post had been scooped by a Middle Eastern paper at the start, of course. Then, in the spring of 1987, they suddenly decided that the inadequacies of the Democrats who wanted to succeed Reagan was a safer subject!  It wasn't even bias, just cowardice. What's notable is that the press talked about their general inadequacy more than the specific shortcomings of individual candidates; that it had little to say about what they should actually do differently, beyond platitudes about "vision"; and that the Republican presidential candidates did not experience the same pile-on, though I didn't notice any significant superiority on their part.

And this was the start of a slippery slope.  In the late '90s the Times  and the Post, out of sheer arrogance, launched a smear campaign against Gary Webb's reports showing the connection between the CIA, Washington's covert wars in Central America, and the drug trade. (Webb later killed himself.) Then came 9/11 and blanket deference to Washington--two newspaper columnists were fired for writing columns criticizing Bush Jr.'s performance!  I was also appalled by the hero treatment given to Adolf Bullyani Rudolph Giuliani. Then came war and embedding, and I'll have to stop before I get really exercised! (Hope this didn't bore you.)

The other day I wrote this Tweet: "The Clintonites sailed the Democratic coalition straight into a shipwreck.  Man the scapegoats lifeboats!"