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Business News/ Opinion / Power to the press
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Power to the press

Movies that revolve around the fourth estate

All The President’s Men is about the Watergate scandalPremium
All The President’s Men is about the Watergate scandal

Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate, a movie about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and the ouster of The Hindu editor Siddharth Varadarajan by the company’s family-run board have nothing in common, except, perhaps, the future of print journalism.

Assange, played as a man of intrigue and impatience by British alt pin-up Benedict Cumberbatch, has a hacker’s lip-curling contempt for the gatekeeping processes of print. As he negotiates the publication of former American soldier Bradley Manning’s leaks of classified information about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and diplomatic cables in publications such as The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, Cumberbatch’s Assange displays a publish-and-be-damned attitude that makes a mockery of every journalist who bothers to cross-check a fact or get the implicated party’s perspective. Cumberbatch’s Assange would have no patience for Alan J. Pakula’s All The President’s Men, one of the best ever movies about journalism and the perfect nostalgic Saturday-night viewing for those of us who continue to believe in the beauty and power of print.

Part of Alan J. Pakula’s conspiracy trilogy (the other films are Klute and The Parallax View), All The President’s Men recreates the Watergate scandal, which started innocuously as a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, DC, in June 1972, and snowballed into a greater crime being committed against American democracy. One of the best characters in Pakula’s movie, based on the book by The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is Jason Robards’ Post editor Ben Bradlee, the kind of veteran who puts up his legs on his desk and demands, over and over again, that his reporters verify their facts and get as many voices on record as possible. One of the themes of the movie is that an investigation is only as good as the forensic rigour that goes into it—the checking and cross-checking of facts, the turning over of false and correct leads, the need for on-the-record statements.

All The President’s Men replicates the rigour that marked the Post’s reportage of the scandal, which pales in comparison to the National Security Agency’s spying on everybody between Angela Merkel and the Pope. Pakula dispenses with easy moralizing and distracting sub-plots, yet creates an urgency and stylish realism that has been imitated by several journalism-themed films. Like a good journalist, the film-maker focuses on putting out compelling, detailed, and honest reportage for the greater common good.

The Fifth Estate makes a passing reference to Woodward and Bernstein, but it’s far more exciting to see two journalists banging away history-making copy on their Olympia typewriters than watch a bunch of wide-eyed hackers upload sensational content on backlit screens. How did Assange become the new Woodward/Bernstein? Is that a good thing, or the only way to go in our morally compromised times? Unfortunately, The Fifth Estate doesn’t explore these questions adequately.

Assange actually has something in common with Woodward’s mysterious source Deep Throat, who declares from the depth of the parking lot shadows in which he has chosen to hide his identity that “I don’t like newspapers. I don’t care for inexactitude and shallowness." How did it get that way? Dare we suggest that interference from publishers has something to do with the lack of credibility in mainstream journalism?

The Hindu and its sister publication The Hindu Business Line compete with Hindustan Times and Mint, both published by HT Media Ltd, in some markets.

This fortnightly column tries to make sense of news, one movie at a time.

Also Read | Nandini’s previous columns

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Published: 08 Nov 2013, 05:56 PM IST
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