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Three Movies<\/p>\nThree Movies<\/p>\n
This weekend we took an afternoon and caught a movie. \u00a0Politics are never far from our lives, so we watched the newest Rob Reiner film, Shock and Awe.\u00a0 <\/em>Starring Woody Harrelson and James Marsden as well as Reiner, the movie follows two reporters of the Knight-Ridder News Agency, as they tried to unlock the secrets leading the United States to invade Iraq in 2002.\u00a0 Their dramatic discovery:\u00a0 the \u201cofficial\u201d reason for invading Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, was not only untrue, but a falsehood created by the leadership of the US government.<\/p>\n It is a story of investigative journalism, and of the Executive Branch manipulating the media to get what they wanted.\u00a0 While Knight-Ridder got the story right, the \u201cbig\u201d media; the New York Times and the Washington Post and NBC, ABC and CBS all fell for the story told by Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush.\u00a0 After the invasion when US troops were mired in Iraq and no weapons of mass destruction found, the New York Times apologized on their front page.\u00a0 They had been fooled.<\/p>\n The Bush Administration refused to respond to the Knight-Ridder stories, letting them \u201cswing in the wind\u201d while the rest of the media marched along to war.\u00a0 It is a story with consequences today.\u00a0 Not only does it tell us not to blindly trust the Executive Branch, but it also reminds us not to blindly trust the media as well.\u00a0And finally, it tells us to listen to some of the \u201cvoices in the wilderness;\u201d sometimes they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n The second movie was a few weeks ago: Stephen Spielberg\u2019s The Post. <\/em>\u00a0Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep star in the story of a powerful woman, Katherine Graham (Streep), taking charge of the Washington Post and making it a national force.\u00a0 The editor, Ben Bradlee (Hanks), published the Pentagon Papers, classified documents outlining the Pentagon foundation for America\u2019s continued involvement in the Vietnam War.\u00a0 The Post, and the New York Times, risked legal catastrophe to tell Americans that their government was lying about Vietnam.\u00a0 It was the beginning of the end of the war, and of American\u2019s trust in their leadership.<\/p>\n Leading us to last night\u2019s movie, one of my favorites:\u00a0 All the President\u2019s Men.\u00a0 <\/em>It is the well-known story of two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) who lead the Washington Post to break the Watergate scandal of President Nixon.\u00a0 I remember first seeing this movie in the theatre while I was living in Washington, only three years after Nixon\u2019s resignation. \u00a0It made my nervous walking in parking garages.<\/p>\n While we all now know what Nixon did, how he conspired to commit crimes, break-ins and buggings, then spent two years of his Presidency personally orchestrating the cover-up: \u00a0when Woodward and Bernstein began their work his actions were a close kept secret.\u00a0 Their dogged reporting, and the willingness of the honest among the \u201cPresident\u2019s men and women\u201d to tell the truth, is the story of my generation\u2019s biggest political crisis.\u00a0 The Nixon White House did everything they could to attack the Washington Post (and the New York Times, just as involved in the story) and drive them out of business.<\/p>\n The rhetoric of the Nixon Administration sounds eerily familiar today; attacking the media as biased, claiming some great \u201csilent majority\u201d of support, demanding that only their facts were the \u201creal news.\u201d\u00a0 The difference today:\u00a0 we may be so horribly divided, that even evidence as convincing as the Nixon tapes might not be enough to unify us in a conclusion.\u00a0 Or perhaps even worse, as Rudy Giuliani would have us believe:\u00a0 that crimes are really not crimes, just \u201cregular business.\u201d<\/p>\n