Review of The Post (2017) by Shpostal — 16 Jan 2018

This true story of the battle between the 1st Amendment and a paranoid Nixon administration and the cover up of papers that admitted in classified documents that the Vietnam War was a losing battle that could never be won, but kept dragging on because every President from Kennedy to Nixon did not want to be the one holding the bag for a lost war, the first one protesters and many Americans had already decided was a pointless genocide of innocent lives of civilians and American soldiers alike.

While the New York Times was the first paper to break the story after a "source" had managed to make copies of the multitude of pages of the criminal extension of the war and gave them to the NYT.

A court injunction swiftly followed, and the Nixon regime was hell bent on denying the American press the freedom to publish articles that he felt were incriminating to him. Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep play the editor and publisher/owner of the Washington Post, which thanks to a fluke of timing, had escaped the dragnet Nixon imposed on the NYT because the Times scooped the Post.

The Post eventually got copies of the documents, printed part of them and found themselves in court, too. The fight leading up to releasing these documents is the primary focus of the movie, with both sides having good arguments for running the story and not, with freedom of the press at stake if they didn't, and the possible total failure of the Post, which had just begun publicly trading shares on the American Stock Exchange.

It was widely known that Nixon and his henchmen were very dirty players, willing to do anything to protect the President. Streep is always in fine form, playing Katherine Graham, who must make the final decision to run the first series of articles, and Tom Hanks as the editor Ben Bradlee, who is for publishing the article in the name of press freedom and the right to exercise press' obligations to expose wrongdoing and informing the nation or city where a smaller paper may be to its readers.

The acting is top notch, the tensions palpable, and for Spielberg, a somewhat modest screenplay but effective nonetheless. What is disturbing is the fact that this type of journalism that took guts to even practice is sadly gone today.

Rather than big corporations being subject to being covered in the major papers if they did bad things, now major market media is totally operated by big corporations who decree every last detail what will be allowed to print in any paper or most internet sites, how it's slanted, or what is covered up.

When we live in a time when the New York Times won't even call Donald Trump a racist we know the fix is in. Some maverick remnants of real journalism exist online, but now that internet neutrality is dead, it is a matter of very little time that providers will be pressured or paid to make access to web content the corporations that own them harder or impossible.

The only way to preserve our 1st Amendment is to practice it, and see "The Post" to see what real journalism used to be like.