The Post

WASHINGTON (Opinion) — Meryl Streep received her 21st Oscar nomination last week for her portrayal of Katharine Graham in Steven Spielberg’s thriller, The Post. The film depicts the iconic newspaper publisher and her storied editor, Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks), staring down a ruthless Nixon administration and cautious shareholders to print the secret government study that put paid to the official lies undergirding the Vietnam War, in an act of heroism that saved the Fourth Estate if not American democracy itself.
Talk about fake news.

Noted journalist and filmmaker John Pilger’s collection of work has been archived by the British Library, but deep-rooted problems of Western media create an increasingly difficult landscape for ethical journalism, as Pilger explained in an interview with Dennis Bernstein and…Read more →

Imagine a film about a backer of an American war in the Third World who, as a State Department official, decides to visit and observe that war firsthand. After many months he learns that most of what our leaders have been telling the public about the war was wrong.  In reality, our side was not winning, and most of the claims made for the effort were false. For example, patrols reported to protect certain areas did not even exist. The written reports describing these patrols were simply made up.

The new movie “The Post” tells the story of the Pentagon Papers from a curious perspective that ignores much of the drama of the real history, as James DiEugenio explains. By James DiEugenio Imagine a film about a backer of…Read more →