In these days of the 24/7 news cycle, world leaders who tweet their thoughts on the spur of the moment and instant notifications of breaking news on your smart device, it may seem strange to set a movie in a past when there were large newsrooms staffed with all manner of reporters, newspapers that were printed using typesetters, printed on huge printing presses, and news organisations controlled by media moguls.
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Access to news and the modes of delivery have changed significantly, although we still have media moguls, powerful media organisations that can influence elections and government policies, as well as governments and politicians that use media to twist and influence public impressions.
The Post is set in the early 1970s in New York and details the decision by the New York Times and The Washington Post to publish top secret papers documenting the United States’ policies regarding the Vietnam War.
It is relevant to contemporary society and questions surrounding freedom of the press versus the ability of governments to safeguard state secrets, supposedly to protect the rights of its citizens.
The events chronicled in The Post occur immediately before the revelation of the break-in at the Watergate hotel.
The significance of the decisions taken by The New York Times and The Washington Post goes down to the fundamentals of news media outlets’ unfettered ability to report all the news that’s fit to print.
In the case of the Vietnam War, it meant the US government sending soldiers to fight and die in Vietnam despite top secret documents spanning decades, going back to Eisenhower’s time as president, stating the war was a lost cause.
This was exacerbated by Secretary of State McNamara’s private view that the US was achieving little progress in Vietnam, while publicly declaring that America was achieving significant progress.
The decision by the editors of both newspapers to defy the injunction of the US Supreme Court to desist in publishing the secret Vietnam papers cannot be underestimated.
The Post’s editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) and publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep) potentially faced charges of treason and imprisonment if they published. Bradlee believed absolutely in his newspaper’s constitutional right to publish.
Graham is unsure about her position in an industry dominated by assertive males who treated capable women such as Graham as invisible.
The Post could easily be seen as a nostalgic journey into the recent past of newspaper publishing. But the truth of the film’s themes lies in the modern context, where whistleblowers and organisations such a WikiLeaks continue to defy governments by releasing documents that reveal the private thinking behind the public pronouncements of their actions.