When I went back to college after serving in the U.S. Air Force, I knew I wanted to get back to studying journalism. I was on the school newspaper when I was in high school and have always wanted to be a part of this profession.
I have also always had a passion for movies. As a portly teen who spent part of my high school days working at the local cinema, films were my closest friends.
So given both of those fun facts about me, it should come as no surprise that the first journalism course I signed up for at Valencia College was Journalism in Film with Professor Ken Carpenter. The premise of the course was pretty straight forward, the class would watch a movie that was about journalism, then we would discuss it and write a paper on each film.
We had a semester-long assignment we were given for that class, which was to read “All the President’s Men” by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two journalists at The Washington Post who investigated the 1972 Watergate scandal and whose reporting ultimately led to President Richard Nixon resigning. At the end of the semester, we watched the award-winning film of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively.
Prior to taking the class, I had seen the film but never read the book. I remember becoming obsessed with the book, movie and lives of all the players, moving on after the class to read several other books from both Woodward and Bernstein, as well as former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee’s biography. That turned me on to learn more about the history of The Post, which led me to research their involvement in the Pentagon Papers and ultimately helped me to realize that The Washington Post was one of the greatest — if not THE greatest — source of news in history. I even had movie posters from the films “All The President’s Men” and “The Post” on my wall.
The Washington Post’s slogan, which is credited to Woodward and was adopted in 2017, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has been my mantra over the past several years as social media and conspiracy theories have overtaken many people’s abilities to believe facts and listen to trusted news sources.
The Washington Post was the source I pointed to when anyone tried to tell me that all mainstream media was bad, which makes the last few months all the more painful. Back in 2013, the Graham family — who owned the paper for decades — sold The Washington Post to billionaire Jeff Bezos, who purchased it and other publications for $250 million and took The Post private. At the time the newspaper was struggling so having a billionaire sweep in and save it seemed like a good idea, especially as Bezos seemed legitimately concerned with keeping journalistic integrity a part of the paper’s work ethic. “The values of The Post do not need changing. The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners,” Bezos said at the time. That seems to have changed now.
In October, for the first time since 1980, The Washington Post’s Editorial Board did not endorse a candidate for U.S. president. The Post itself reported that the decision to not endorse came directly from Bezos. The move was seen by many, including members of The Post’s own editorial team, as cowardly and a show that Bezos was bending the knee to Donald Trump. Several reporters and editors left the paper because of it.
The Post’s decision in part led Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who has been with The Post since 2008, to draw a satirical cartoon of Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong (who also pulled his paper’s presidential endorsement) and Mickey Mouse all bowing to a statue of Trump as some of them presented bags of cash to it. The Post refused to publish the cartoon, leading Telnaes to resign from the paper and call their refusal “dangerous for a free press.”
While The Post’s opinion editor said the decision was not based on the cartoon’s subject but rather repetition of the topic, it seems suspicious that the decision was made as Bezos has been reported to be dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and announced a $1 million donation to his inauguration.
I can’t tell you the disappointment I felt seeing such a legendary newspaper fold so easily to injustice. As we move into Trump’s second term, it seems evident that independent journalism is going to be more important than ever. We will need to work harder at separating the facts from the noise, we will need to be more vigilant at holding truth to power and we will have to be even tougher in our fight for democracy, and we’ll have to do it without some of our heroes for it seems that democracy has died at The Post.
