Rich Miller
Think about what Babe Ruth did for baseball: a star who is larger than life can change a profession. Do you think that Woodward & Bernstein did that for journalism?
Chris Hanson
I do think that the film ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN inspired many young people to go into journalism. It presents a myth -- two dogged, independent journalists who will keep going until they drop to prevent the government from concealing its corruption. But while no one doubts that Babe Ruth broke the home run record, there is some dispute as to whether or not Woodward & Bernstein brought down Richard Nixon.
What Woodward & Bernstein actually did was keep the story alive until it drew the interest of serious people in government intent of pushing the official investigation -- people like Judge John Sirica and Senator Sam Ervin. They really drove what eventually happened to Nixon.
The final scenes of the film, however, seem to imply that “Woodstein” single handedly brought down the President. Well, they did play a part, but they had help from of a lot of courageous whistle-blowers inside the government. It was a joint venture between two reporters, some gutsy civil servants, and Sirica and the Senators.
Rich Miller
From the point of view of the film, I thought the climax was when [WASHINGTON POST editor] Ben Bradley decided to stand behind his troops and print the story despite threats from the White House.
Chris Hanson
Absolutely. I show this film to my classes, and every time I see it I still get goose bumps when Jason Robards (as Bradley) gives his final speech, even though I know that what the real Ben Bradley would have said to them was probably: “Don’t fuck up again.” No speech.
While I can’t say that ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
was the main cause of my going into journalism, I was very taken with the film when I saw it, and also with the book (published prior to the film). And
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN definitely led to other films with the same message like THE
CHINA SYNDROME and THE INSIDER.
In THE INSIDER, the reporter has to go around his own corporation in order to get his story out. So it tells us something about what has happened to the news business since Watergate. A news organization is swallowed up by some company which has been swallowed up by another company. Before you know it, the news division is just part of a conglomerate, and the news values get lost.
Rich Miller
Chris, you teach journalistic ethics: was that reporter “ethical” – going around his editors, going outside his organization?
Chris Hanson
There’s no easy answer. In THE INSIDER, the reporter has a conflict between compelling values. On the one hand, he has obligations to his colleagues and his organization. On the other hand, he has obligations to his source and to the story itself. So it’s a difficult decision. I admire what the real Lowell Bergman did, but his 60 MINUTES bosses at CBS did not.
Rich Miller
I used to be the UCH Director of Internal Audit. Internal auditors have a code of ethics, an absolute duty: You cannot sit on stuff. Is there a similar sort of journalistic duty to the public that says, “I am not allowed to sit on a story!”? If a reporter knows something that the public ought to know, but it’s being suppressed, does the reporter have a duty to the public?
Chris Hanson
Certainly. Of course, journalists sit on stories all the time. Sometimes they just do it to get maximum impact for the story. For example, you wait until Sunday so you will get more readers. Sometimes television news organizations will sit on stories in order to wait until sweeps. If the story involves public safety or something else the audience needs to know quickly, delaying very long can be pretty despicable, unless more reporting needs to be done.
I also liked THE INSIDER
as a drama because it deals with the way journalists sometimes have to push potential whistle-blowers in order to get information.
Rich Miller
Let’s talk about sources in the context of ABSENCE OF MALICE. When you’re a beat reporter, you have to use the same source over and over again, so you develop a relationship, right? But if you know that you’re only going to use the source once, then there is no relationship. What’s the difference between the way a journalist cultivates a news source and the way a police department develops an informant, or even more extreme, how the CIA recruits spies?
Chris Hanson
There are similarities and differences. If you are on a beat, you need to maintain relationships with your sources, and that can really constrain the reporting and make the reporter the tool of the police chief or whoever. But other problems surface if you only plan to deal with the source once. In
ABSENCE OF MALICE, the way the reporter treats one source (“Theresa”) is despicable.
One of the things that you need to do as a reporter is gage the level of naiveté and vulnerability of your source, and take that into account. If you don’t do that, if you don’t do something to help protect a vulnerable person from himself, you can end up doing pretty awful things. So you have to balance the importance of the information with alternative ways to disclose it (not revealing the person’s name or whatever). It’s messy.
ABSENCE OF MALICE shows an example of a reporter really blowing it.
Parallels to other professions? That’s a very complicated question. I once talked to this guy in British Intelligence, and he thought the jobs were very similar, despite all of the glamour attached to movie spies and so on. There’s a lot of drudgery to the routine, going back to sources over and over and piecing information together. But one thing that intelligence agencies tend to do far more than journalists is corrupt people and then blackmail them. First the agent gets a person to cooperate for some idealistic reason, next he induces him to take money. Then he’s got him by the balls.
Of course, there’s a little edging toward blackmail in
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. One married source doesn’t want anyone to know that he met a woman in her apartment. Woodward hints he might disclose this unless the source cooperates.
Jan Huttner
Drudgery! In ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN
Woodward & Bernstein have to go through boxes and boxes of cards at the Library of Congress. There are several comparable scenes in
VERONICA GUERIN.
Rich Miller
According to the film, Veronica Guerin began her career as a business reporter, so the film shows her doing a lot of ticking & tracing. It all looked very familiar!
Chris Hanson
Guerin certainly knew how to trace the money trail. A lot of investigative reporters have comparable skills. It’s similar to auditing in that you have to be very systematic. Rich, you have a CPA, but in journalism you don’t have to have any specific credentials. So you get some loose cannons, journalists who don’t really know what they’re doing.
From what I’ve read, the real Guerin was one of them. According to Emily O’Reilly’s book, she reported in the first person, & treated the news as a personal crusade with herself as the hero. Like
Geraldo. If that weren’t troubling enough, she let criminals manipulate her, believing and printing lies that evidently resulted in a mob bloodbath, as the film points out. Guerin was supremely talented and brave but she needed a strong editor with serious news values to guide her very carefully. However, it seems her paper wanted
sensationalism
