In 1976, the movie “All the President’s Men” came out, detailing Bernstein and Woodward’s account of exposing the Watergate scandal. Much of the journalistic firepower was accredited to the Washington Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee. Katharine Graham, the president of The Post at the time and a major component of its journalistic success, was all but left out of the story. Until now.
Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” puts Graham at the center of the plotline. With Meryl Streep playing Graham, the movie is set to premiere in January of 2018. Spielberg says that this project chose him, in a sense, because he just couldn’t get the story out of his head.
“By becoming the first female publisher of a major newspaper, Graham set a new bar for women everywhere, and she was the first of her generation to show people that in the face of enormous pressure, being a bystander was not an option—and it still isn’t.”
This movie is a feat for women, both in Hollywood and journalism– two fields that many still consider to be male-dominated. With Hollywood storylines lacking in strong female leads, a story such as this catapults a nonfiction female success story to a new level of fame. In both publishing the leaked Pentagon Papers and leading the march in the Watergate scandal, Graham showed people everywhere that women can make the tough calls. And by telling this story from the correct lens of the woman in charge, Spielberg has effectively unearthed Graham’s story from its burial in time and shined new light on one of the first major journalistic successes accredited to a woman.
Graham’s decisions all those years ago set the tone for future journalists. As Spielberg said, “What Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee did all those years ago still reverberates today and in so many ways defined modern investigative journalism.” Graham was faced with personal threats and intimidation, from extremely powerful people nonetheless, and yet she persisted. And because of her, truth was revealed in the Nixon administration. Because of her, transparency has become a pillar of journalism, a much-needed ideal in the age of the Trump administration’s lies and attempts to discredit and discourage journalism at every turn.
“The Post” comes out in select theaters December 22, and in theaters everywhere January 12, 2018.