OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: A kid could do it

I watched Steven Spielberg's The Post last night.

Most of you are probably already aware of this year's Oscar-seeking civics lesson about the publication of the Pentagon Papers from the great pop director with a lot of interesting actors playing dress-up and pretending to be historical figures. As it happens, I knew two of those historical figures depicted in the film.

I had a couple of meetings with Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee--played in the movie by Tom Hanks, who doesn't look much like Bradlee but manages to convey something of his patrician bonhomie--in the early 1980s and around the same time Howard Simons, the Post's managing editor, offered me a job. (Not at the Post; Simons was co-owner of the Homer News in Alaska. Sounded cold. Didn't pay much more than I was making.)

The comedian David Cross plays Simons in the movie, and while the character doesn't have many lines and might not even be identified by name in the film, I immediately knew he was supposed to be. Cross has Simons' grin and head nod down.

Anyway, aside from Oscar-qualifying runs in Los Angeles and New York, The Post won't open in theaters until January, and I'm going to hold off reviewing it until then. But it is the kind of movie that makes people in my trade nostalgic, with its shots of linotypes and massive presses with snaking stairways that shook the building when they began to run. (Presses are still like that, but ours isn't located in the same building as the newsroom, and I've never even seen it. But I still remember pulling literally hot copies of the newspaper off the line.)

As a business, newspapers have been dying ever since I got in the game more than 35 years ago. I don't know of anyone I started out with who hasn't worked for a publication that felt doomed. I know folks who've had three or four horses shot out from under them. It's funny how many of them got back up on another one; you'd think we'd learn.

I don't know what else a lot of us would be good for; maybe I'd make a fair golf pro or high school basketball coach who doubles as an English teacher. I can write songs and books maybe, but I don't know how to get people to buy anything. I can lift heavy things, drive pretty well and am not bad with math, but I'm probably better off staying put for as long as they let me.

Obviously one of the things Spielberg and Hanks and the others are doing with this movie is trying to remind people how important a free press is to the American experiment, but I hate it when the mandarins of my business start into lecturing people about how important they are. What's really important is that we have some sort of store of commonly agreed upon facts, some inarguable, empirical forms that we can at least posit as real and legitimate. What's really important is that we maintain our belief, however quaint, in the difference between what is and what isn't; that we remain practical about the limits of what we can know.

Our cyber-culture allows us the opportunity to ignore what is while empowering the lies and fantasies of the cynical and wishful. Human beings have always had an extraordinary ability to believe what they would like to, but it has never been easier for us to find validation for base impulses and ugly notions.

Americans are a funny people. I don't know why we tend to regard those we elect as elites rather than employees, or why with all the information that's available to us so many of us remain incurious, clinging to the totems and notions of some time before we were born when things were somehow better for our particular tribe. It's not hard to investigate and learn stuff these days, but it's never easy to process information that contravenes our own self-image. We're all heroes to ourselves; we're all beset by those who'd thwart us, who'd steal our birthrights.

I don't long for any time that has died. I know we weren't any better off when we had three networks and Walter Cronkite was "the most trusted man in America" (a facile and disingenuous--if not simply false--tag line that Uncle Walter himself would scoff at). But at least in those days, we suspected that the laying bare of truth might result in some sort of moral accord. We trusted that most of us would want to do right if the way of doing right was made clear to us.

I'm not sure I believe that anymore. I'm not sure I still believe that Americans are somehow less susceptible to the lures of tribalism and the rhetoric of strongmen than the rest of the world. I used to think we had some complicated mechanisms that might save us, that the Constitution and the Congress and the Courts could be a firewall and that ultimately the basic decency of my friends and neighbors would preclude fearful surrender to our dark notions.

But I don't have any faith in politics. And my faith in our basic decency is waning.

Journalism isn't an arcane art. It's the willingness to ask questions about basic assumptions. It's talking to people, looking at numbers, checking your work and being obstinate enough to insist that you've seen what you've seen and heard what you've heard. Reporting the news doesn't require an advanced degree. You don't even have to be very smart to do it. You don't have to be Ben Bradlee or Howard Simons.

Hell, a kid could do it. On the Internet.

And if anything does save us, maybe that's what it'll be. Because even if most newspapers don't make it, journalism will survive. Because some people are curious and cantankerous and don't like going along to get along. We've been through this before. In 1971, it felt like our country could not hold. And then it got worse.

But we made it through that time. Yet like the bankers say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 12/05/2017

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