Time To Update Our Timeline Presenting Movies About Real Journalists Covering Real Public Issues and Events (To Include “Shock and Awe” and “Risk”)

Actors playing real journalists in real events are above, but our chronological list of films about real events in journalism also includes documentaries.

Back in January, National Notice reviewed and considered Steven Spielberg’s “The Post,” which was still in the theaters and campaigning for a number of Academy Awards.  Given that “The Post” ends with a scene denoting it as a prequel to the renowned “All The President’s Men” (1976), it inspired us to also create a timeline of films that have been made about real journalists covering real events.  (See: Sunday, A Timeline of Reporting Dramas: Movies About Journalistic Coverage of Real Public Issues and Events, January 7, 2018.)

Now, with the release of the Rob Reiner directed  “Shock and Awe” in theaters on Friday, it is time to update the chronology of media events the films collectively afford.  We are also grabbing the opportunity to add to the chronology the documentary “Risk,” another documentary about Julian Assange and Wikileaks the first version of the chronology overlooked.  “Shock and Awe” is about how in the run up to the Iraq War journalists working for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain figured out and reported that the George W. Bush administration was lying and using other similarly unsavory and illicit tactics to propel the United States into an ill advised and ultimately very costly war; and they did this while virtually every other mainstream media outlet reporting was bamboozled by the Bush administration, publishing seriously inaccurate and misleading information as a result.

Our previous posting of the first version of the film chronology explained the criteria for including films in the list and discussed films about journalism and journalism issues that were left out because they were not about real journalists covering on the actual conflicts of our changing times.  The chronology of the films in the list is based on the dates of the events they are about, not the years in which the films were made or released.

The inclusion of films in this list as a resource does not vouchsafe that any of the particular films have gotten it exactly right in terms of the facts.  How valid any film's perspectives is, can bear more discussion.

Here then is a list that presents a chronology in which you can see an evolution of what we have believed has been the role of journalists.

    •    “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005).  Set in 1953, during the early days of television broadcast journalism. Edward R. Murrow along with his CBS news team take a stand and take on the anti-communist fear mongering of  Senator Joseph McCarthy.

    •    “All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone” (2016).  This film covers the legacy of investigative journalist I.F. Stone who died at 81 in 1989, who writing in his I.F. Stone Weekly (1953–71), reported about and during the eras of Joe McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson all the way to Ronald Reagan.  I. F. Stone's life and work, just a portion of the film, is the launching point to review many more recent government lies and their uncovering by journalists since.

    •    “The Post” (2017) and “The Pentagon Papers” (2003).  Both are dramas about the publication of the Pentagon Paper released by Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on the study.  The papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times starting Sunday, June 13th, 1971.  The Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles based upon the Pentagon Papers on June 18, 1971.

    •    “All The President’s Men” (1976).  About the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal.  The Watergate scandal began with the incident with which “The Post” ends: On June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills at the Watergate complex finds a door's bolt taped over so that it will not lock.

    •    “Frost/Nixon” (2008). Based on the David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon recorded and broadcast on television in four programs in 1977 in which Nixon climatically admitted his wrongdoing.

    •    “Kill The Messenger” (2014).   Based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb, the film takes place in the mid-1990s. Webb uncovered the CIA's role in importing cocaine into the U.S. to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels through the manufacture and sale of drugs in the U.S.  Pressure to drop pursuit of his story Webb published his evidence in the series "Dark Alliance."  He then experienced a vicious smear campaign fueled by the CIA, during which he found himself defending his integrity, his career, his family, ending in his unfortunate death.  (This film somewhat oddly does not show up as readily when googling these subjects as the others do.)

    •    “The Insider” (1999).  About whistle-blower Jeffrey S. Wigand who became famous for his appearance in 1996 on the CBS news program 60 Minutes to reveal that the Brown & Williamson tobacco industry company had intentionally manipulated its tobacco blend with chemicals to increase the addictive effect of nicotine in cigarettes.  The film is about how CBS, with business motivations driving it, was suppressing the story while a smear campaign was conducted against Wigand, and about the ultimate involvement of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in getting the story out.  Afterwards, in real life, the producer of the Wigand segment, Lowell Bergman, portrayed in the film by Al Pacino, went on to work for the New York Times, including working on collaborations with “Frontline.”

    •    “Shattered Glass” (2003).  A film about the embarrassment of how for three years until 1998 many of the humorous and entertaining articles that Stephen Glass wrote for the liberal magazine “The New Republic” were cobbled together from his multiple inventive fictions.

    •    “Spotlight” (2015).   It is based on a series of stories by the "Spotlight" team about the Catholic Church's concealment of its priests' sexual abuse of children that earned The Boston Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. (With news stories appearing from January 6, 2002 to December 14, 2002).

     •    “Shock and Awe” (2018).  “Shock and Awe,” which starts with references to the events of 9/11 in 2001, takes place mostly during the 2003 run up to the Iraq War.  It focuses on journalists working for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, particularly Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, and then  Joe Galloway working under Washington bureau chief John Walcott, and how they were able to figure out that the George W. Bush administration was ginning up and manufacturing bogus reasons to go to war with Iraq.  Although they were able to see and accurately report with well founded documentation that the Bush administration was lying and cherry picking intelligence, together with the fact that going to war in Iraq would be extremely costly and counterproductive, the film is also about the way mainstream media works.  Which is to say that no other mainstream media picked up or reporting the news they published.  Instead, as the film makes the point, in the wake of 9/11 the New York Times, Washington Post and other mainstream media essentially acted as stenographers for the Bush administration’s propaganda.  In fact, one of the things the film sadly depicts is how the Philadelphia Inquirer, one newspaper in their chain, defected refusing to publish the accurately skeptical Knight Ridder stories about the administration and replaced them with the stories by Judith Miller for which the New York Times ultimately had to apologize because of the were false.

    •    “Truth” (2015).  This film is another about the CBS news program 60 Minutes.  It takes place in the months leading into the US 2004 presidential election (Bush v. Kerry) and tells the story about how CBS News anchor Dan Rather and others working for the CBS program were subject to criticism and lost their jobs for alleged liberal bias in reporting a basically true story about preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard (1968 to 1973 during which time Bush did not show up for a medical exam and stopped fulfilling his flying commitments) when it turned out that documents with which the newspeople had been supplied to support their story were likely faked in whole or in part by somebody.

    •    “The Fifth Estate” (2013), “Underground: The Julian Assange Story” (2012) “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks” (2013) “Mediastan” (2013) All of these films deal with Julian Asssange, the founding of Wikileaks (in 2006) and related events through 2010.  “Underground” covers the earliest period of Assange's life (the 1980s and 1990's pre-1997).

    •    “Page One: Inside the New York Times” (2011)  It deals with Times coverage of many things mostly during the time it was made, such as the 2008 bankruptcy of Tribune Media and The Afghan War documents leak, also called the Afghan War Diary, published by WikiLeaks in July 2010.

     •    “Risk” (2016).  The film, another documentary about Julian Asssange, by Laura Poitras, the release of which unfolded in more than one iteration involves events she filmed from 2006 to 2016 ending with the election of Donald Trump.  As such it includes events that overlap with Edward Snowden’s emergence blowing the whistle about illegal surveillance by the United States intelligence agencies.  There is a lot of back story about the connections that the film does not go into in any depth.

    •    “Citizenfour” (2014) and “Snowden” (2016). Respectively, first the film that won the Academy Award for best documentary (like "Risk," also directed by by Laura Poitras) and the subsequent Oliver Stone directed bio-pic that both cover Edward Snowden’s leaks to journalists of classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 concerning the extensive and illegal spying of the US government on U.S. citizens and on others around the world after the 9/11 attacks.