Tag: New York Times

How should the media cover (and not cover) mass shootings and white nationalist terror?

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Amid the carnage in El Paso and Dayton, a smaller story played out this week. It’s worth recounting because it has much to tell us about where we are at as a nation — and about the challenges facing journalism as we try to figure out how to cover this awful moment in our history.

The story is about Cesar Sayoc, a Florida man who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sending pipe bombs to a number of well-known Democrats and media organizations. Fortunately, the bombs did not detonate. In a pre-sentencing letter to the judge, his lawyers wrote that Sayoc was motivated in part by his devotion to President Trump.

“He truly believed wild conspiracy theories he read on the internet, many of which vilified Democrats and spread rumors that Trump supporters were in danger because of them,” according to the letter. “He heard it from the President of the United States. A man with whom he felt he had a deep personal connection.”

Sayoc, needless to say, is responsible for his own actions. But the particular direction in which his demons took him is worth pondering. For many years now, long before he began running for president, Donald Trump has been inflaming the passions of racial hatred, from the Central Park Five to the four congresswomen known as “the Squad.”

Sayoc’s case is important because it bears directly on the massacre in El Paso, where a shooter killed 22 people in the name of a warped, racist ideology that sounded very much like what we hear from Trump on a daily basis — anti-immigrant and anti-“invasion,” with allusions to the so-called replacement theory popular on the far right that elites want to supplant white people with people of color. (No motive has been established in the Dayton shootings, which claimed nine lives.)

In the midst of all this, our leading news organizations remain perplexed at what to do. The New York Times, which on Monday published a valuable, eye-opening front-page story by Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear documenting the parallels between the shooter’s language and Trump’s, lapsed into normalizing this most abnormal of presidents just a few hours later.

Here’s how the lead headline for the next day’s print edition summarized Trump’s remarks, in which he denounced the very white supremacist forces he has fueled: “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.” It was tone-deaf and offensive, and it was soon changed to “Assailing Hate but Not Guns.” But considerable damage had already been done, as the first headline set off a firestorm in media circles and on Twitter.

Jon Allsop, who writes the Columbia Journalism Review’s daily newsletter, called the original headline “particularly egregious” and quoted a tweet from the freelance journalist Yashar Ali: “I have never received more texts from furious NYT reporters/writers than I have tonight. They feel like their hard work is being sullied by a horrible headline. And they’re all blaming [executive editor] Dean Baquet.” As I’ve written previously, even though the Times’ reporting is unmatched, its tone in covering Trump is sometimes weirdly timid and deferential, as if it were covering a speech by Dwight Eisenhower in 1957.

The shootings also pose a dilemma because they weave together several different threads, each of which arguably ought to be covered in different ways. There is the publicity-seeking-gunman angle, which suggests that the media should minimize coverage to the extent possible so as not to inspire copycats. There is the white nationalist angle, which suggests just the opposite — that we need to know as much as we can about home-grown terrorism inspired by racism and hate. And, of course, there is the ever-present gun-control angle.

The story of how white nationalism has emerged as our leading terrorist threat appears to be breaking through. This Axios round-up shows how extensive the coverage has been in recent days. Never mind that white supremacists have always been more of a danger in the United States than Muslim extremists. What matters is that the media and public officials are finally talking about it, and the message appears to be resonating.

Gun control is another matter. We’ve been covering the story of government’s refusal to do anything significant about gun violence for many years now. If the public doesn’t understand that the main obstacles are the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party, then it just hasn’t been paying attention. Still, we can always do better.

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wonders if the time has come for journalists to take on more of an advocacy role. “Can the news media really go on a righteous crusade about gun laws — or about identifying white supremacy — while maintaining their roles as truth-tellers?” she asks. Her answer: “Maybe we in the news media don’t really expect to help achieve different results. But if journalism is to be true to its public-service role, we must.”

Sullivan’s view is ultimately an optimistic one, so perhaps I should end this right there. But we all know that the hopeful approach isn’t always the right approach. And so I’ll leave you with this essay in The Atlantic by John Temple, who was editor of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News in Denver at the time of Columbine shootings in 1999 — the incident that, along with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, set off the modern era of mass killings.

Temple tell us that “despite our dedication to the work, despite the countless investigations, projects, and special reports, it feels like nothing has changed. Columbine, if anything, opened a door that we can’t close. Copycats saw what happened and learned their own lessons.” He concludes: “Journalists feel the need to bear witness. But to the same horror, again and again? I can’t say anymore that I believe we learn from terrible things. I can say that I’ve seen the limits of journalism — and of hope. And I’m struggling with what to do about it.”

So here’s my short list of what we ought to do: Stop normalizing Trump and his hateful rhetoric. Tell the story of white nationalist terrorism. Push for gun-control laws, guided by experts who understand what works and what doesn’t.

And be humble enough to realize, as Temple does, that journalism can only accomplish so much.

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The New York Times undermines its own story mocking Trump’s Mexico deal

It looks like this front-page New York Times story that has drawn so much attention is almost a complete botch. Headlined “Mexico Agreed to Take Border Actions Months Before Trump Announced Tariff Deal,” the premise is that President Trump got nothing out of his tariff standoff and subsequent agreement with Mexico to increase border security. Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman write:

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

The story goes into considerable detail in an attempt to show that there’s nothing new about the U.S.-Mexico agreement, and that Trump is boasting about it solely as  face-saving gesture.

But wait! Inside the paper, under the headline “Mexico Sets Domestic Priorities Aside to Meet Terms of U.S. Trade Deal,” Azam Ahmed reports that Mexico is going to considerable lengths to meet the terms of Trump’s demands in an effort to head off those tariffs. Ahmed writes:

Under an agreement hammered out in marathon negotiations with American officials over the last few days, Mexico agreed to send up to 6,000 National Guard troops to its southern border with Guatemala. It also agreed to allow more asylum applicants to wait in Mexico while their cases are pending in the United States.

Further down in the story, there’s this:

But as Mr. Trump’s hectoring of Mexico on migration has increased, so, too, has the willingness of the López Obrador administration to take measures to calm its northern neighbor.

After initially saying the Remain in Mexico program was a pilot, Mexican officials quickly expanded it to new cities. Now, as part of the deal on Friday, they have agreed to expand it across the entire border.

Hat tip to Daniel Radosh of “The Daily Show,” who tweeted this out on Saturday:

And yes, indeed, one of them has to be incorrect. Given the level of detail in the second story, I’d say it’s the front-page splash that needs correcting.

If nothing else, this ought to quiet those on the left who’ve been accusing Haberman of being in the tank for Trump.

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How Murdoch family politics shape the Fox News dystopia

WGBH News graphic by Emily Judem.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The New York Times Magazine’s massive 20,000-word takeout on the Murdoch media empire is what you might call a conceptual scoop. There is little in the way of new information, although the sheer accumulation of insider details and tantalizing tidbits is fascinating in its own way. But the real accomplishment of “Planet Fox” is that it helps us understand the Murdoch project as a coherent whole in all of its cynical, transnational, intrafamilial awfulness.

What does that coherent whole look like? Essentially this: For decades, Rupert Murdoch has built his media conglomerate in order to enhance his political power for the sole benefit of himself and his children. His method is based on synergy — that is, his control of more and more media entities wouldn’t be possible unless government officials bestowed deregulatory favors upon him, and those favors become easier for him to extract as his ever-growing control of the media makes those officials fear the consequences of saying no. His support for political figures who’ll give him what he wants has helped fuel the rise of right-wing xenophobic populism in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, all of which are suffering the consequences of the chaos that Murdoch unleashed.

There must be something in the air, as this is the third major Murdoch investigation to be published in recent weeks. Last month The New Yorker gave us Jane Mayer’s examination of the Fox-Trump mind meld, which I wrote about in an earlier column. More recently, The Intercept’s Peter Maass weighed in with a profile of Lachlan Murdoch, the heir apparent, and how he devolved from an idealistic Princeton student into one of the world’s most influential white nationalists. The Times’ contribution is to make an attempt at tying it all together.

The Times has gone all out to signal that “Planet Fox” is A Major Event. The reporters, Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, are said to have interviewed 150 people on three continents. The story takes up most of the print magazine and has been tricked out with a vibrant digital presentation, a 14-minute video, and a “6 Takeaways” sidebar.

Will it matter? Eight years ago, it actually looked for one brief moment as if Murdoch’s world might come crashing down. The phone-hacking scandal perpetrated by his tabloids threatened his U.K. holdings and seemed like it might make the leap to the U.S. In the end, though, it fizzled, as Guardian reporter Nick Davies wrote in his book “Hack Attack.” The actual effect of “Planet Fox” is likely to be even more modest. You can be sure that Fox News’ marquee hosts, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham, will simply dismiss the whole thing as “fake news” — that is, if they mention it at all.

There is, by the way, a delightful anecdote about Hannity buried in the Times article. It seems that Hannity is too much of a toady even for President Trump’s tastes. Mahler and Rutenberg write: “Trump was also spending a lot of time on the phone with Hannity, who regularly called the president after his show. Trump had often found him to be too much of a supplicant for his purposes: He preferred his more combative interviews with Bill O’Reilly, which he felt better showcased his pugnaciousness, according to a former White House official. But Trump appreciated Hannity’s loyalty.” You can just imagine Hannity wincing as he reads those words.

The story of how Murdoch initially spurned Trump and then embraced him when it became clear that Trump was going to win the Republican presidential nomination is fascinating. That episode also traces the arc of Fox News’ transformation from a combative, conservative network at least occasionally tethered to the facts, as conceived by the late Republican operative Roger Ailes, into what it is today: a propaganda arm of the Trump administration that spews lies and conspiracy theories without regard for the public good.

Writing in The Conversation, Michael Socolow of the University of Maine argues that Murdoch’s influence has been exaggerated. Fox News’ 2.4 million prime-time viewers, Socolow observes, “means that 99.3 percent of Americans weren’t watching Fox News on any given night.” But surely the Fox effect is at least partly responsible for Trump’s enduring popularity with Republican base voters. And even if the Murdoch-controlled media are not quite as influential as they are often portrayed, it is well worth exploring the nexus of racism, corruption, and political machinations that define how the “rotten old bastard,” as the media critic Jack Shafer semi-affectionally calls Murdoch, does business.

One especially chilling detail in “Planet Fox” involves Murdoch’s seemingly endless quest to acquire Britain’s Sky network. It turns out that several of Fox’s rare acts of decency — getting rid of Bill O’Reilly over sexual-harassment accusations and ordering Hannity to stop peddling wild conspiracy theories over the death of former Democratic operative Seth Rich — were rooted solely in Murdoch’s need to impress British regulatory officials that he was sufficiently ethical to run Sky.

It gets worse. We learn that Murdoch may have used his influence to pass Brexit because, as he allegedly told one interviewer, “When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice.” The Sun, a Murdoch-owned tabloid, was instrumental in the Brexit victory and all the tumult that has resulted. Regulatory actions taken by the Trump administration all went Murdoch’s way, as Jane Mayer reported in her New Yorker piece. We learn, too, that Murdoch’s son Lachlan took the family’s Australian cable station in a Fox-like right-wing direction, and that its relentless anti-Muslim rants may have been a factor in the recent massacre of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand. Two high-profile Muslim employees, one in Australia and one in the U.S., quit — one of them in 2017, although he’s speaking out now.

“Planet Fox” is not perfect. There’s a minor error involving Murdoch’s ownership of the Boston Herald. I’d have liked to hear at least a theory as to why Murdoch has maintained The Wall Street Journal as one of our great newspapers. Mahler and Rutenberg also note without comment the rise of right-wing populism in Murdoch-free zones such as Hungary, Austria, and the Philippines. In fact, many observers believe Facebook, not Fox, is the force that’s driving much of the world toward intolerance and authoritarianism — yet the Zuckerborg receives not a mention. Still, the Times has produced a comprehensive and convincing account of the carnage wrought by Murdoch and his family.

Is there hope? Murdoch is 88, so it’s hardly ghoulish to observe that he will probably not live forever. Indeed, “Planet Fox” opens and closes with a description of how he nearly departed this vale of tears in early 2018. Unfortunately, it seems that Lachlan, the more insular and right-wing of his two sons, has gained ascendancy while James, more liberal and cosmopolitan, has been pushed out. As befits a patriarchal monarchy, Murdoch’s two daughters, Prudence and Elisabeth, don’t factor into any of this.

As the story ends, we see Rupert and Lachlan riding herd over a smaller company, shorn of its entertainment assets following the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney, waging endless war on three continents. Nothing lasts forever, of course. But it appears that we still have a few chapters to slog through before the end of the Murdoch story at long last comes into view.

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Book review: Jill Abramson paints a cloudy picture for journalism and democracy

Jill Abramson. Photo (cc) 2015 via Wikimedia Commons.

Previously published by The Boston Globe.

It’s easy to imagine how Jill Abramson’s new book might have turned out differently. In “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” the veteran journalist follows the fortunes of four media organizations. BuzzFeed and Vice are young, energetic, willing to break rules and try new things. The New York Times and The Washington Post are stodgy, sclerotic giants trying to grope their way toward a digital future. We all know how that’s going to turn out. Right?

Well, something unexpected happened on the way to the old-media boneyard. Within the past couple of years BuzzFeed and Vice, which had made strides toward becoming major players, fell short of revenue projections and had to cut back on their ambitions. This was owing partly to hubris, partly because Google and Facebook were hoovering up every digital advertising dollar in sight.

Meanwhile the Times and the Post — the latter supercharged by its mega-wealthy owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — moved toward economic viability by rethinking coverage and convincing a generation of readers brought up on free online content that quality news was worth paying for, particularly in the age of Trump.

Abramson, a former executive editor of the Times who now teaches at Harvard, has written a big, ambitious chronicle of the past decade. Her method involves a series of revolving chapters that examine the ups and downs of each organization in turn, as well as a chapter on Facebook. (Disclosure: In her bibliography Abramson cites two of my books and an academic paper I wrote.)

Some have criticized Abramson for favoring the legacy newspapers over the digital start-ups. There may be something to that. She goes into great detail about BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti’s research-driven pursuit of clicks and viral content and about Vice’s culture of alcohol, drugs, and sexual harassment. Vice founder Shane Smith comes off as a shambling egomaniac, although later in the book he is depicted as trying to clean up his act.

But those sections strike me as warranted and fair. After all, BuzzFeed was built on a foundation of cat videos and listicles, and Vice’s chaotic, testosterone-fueled internal culture is surely relevant. Besides, Abramson is generous in acknowledging the importance of their best journalism, including Craig Silverman’s groundbreaking work for BuzzFeed on fake news and Elle Reeve’s mini-documentary for Vice about the deadly neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, Va.

The chapters on the Times and the Post cover ground that will be familiar to many media observers. Abramson traces the Post’s decline during the last few years of Graham family stewardship and its revival under Bezos. The Times’s journey was more harrowing — bailed out by the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, forced to sell its gleaming new headquarters, and casting off its non-Times properties, including The Boston Globe. Abramson criticizes both newspapers for smudging the line that had traditionally separated news from business operations, a line that she observes doesn’t even exist at BuzzFeed or Vice. Mostly, though, she praises the Times’s and the Post’s reinvention efforts.

In the most awkward section of the book, Abramson deals with her 2014 firing as executive editor of the Times. She uses the occasion to do some score-settling against the then-publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and her successor, Dean Baquet. But her account strikes me as fundamentally honest and reflective, as she blames her demise on a combination of sexism and her own shortcomings as a manager.

“Merchants of Truth’’ spawned controversy even before the book was published.

First, Howard Kurtz of Fox News reported that Abramson had criticized the Times for liberal bias. And yes, Abramson writes, “Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative.” But it’s not quite that simple. For instance, she lauds both the Times’s and the Post’s tough coverage of the Trump administration, reserving especially fulsome praise for her former employer: “The depth and intensity of the coverage was masterful. On most days it outshone the Post’s. The news report as a whole had never been stronger.” By leaving out that context, Kurtz created a misleading impression.

More problematic were revelations of errors in the uncorrected galleys. Vice reporter Arielle Duhaime-Ross complained that Abramson had made multiple mistakes about her, including her gender identity. Danny Gold of the “PBS NewsHour” tweeted that Abramson’s description of his past reporting for Vice about Ebola in Liberia included “a straight up lie.” Errors in galleys are common, but they generally involve typos and spelling mistakes. And not all of the problems were addressed in the final version of the book.

Inaccuracies notwithstanding, “Merchants of Truth” is a valuable and insightful survey. It ends on an optimistic note, with one caveat: Abramson acknowledges that the relative good fortune of the four media organizations she profiles stands in contrast to the implosion of journalism at the local level. The media scene Abramson describes remains in turmoil. Witness the deep cuts at BuzzFeed that took place late last month. Whether journalism will outlive the wobbling vessels in which it is carried remains a fundamental question for the future of democracy.

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Misdiagnosing what’s wrong with The New York Times

Joe Pompeo has a new piece in Vanity Fair about all the unhappy people inside The New York Times. It’s deeply reported and interesting, but it also strikes me as a diversion from the main problem with the Times these days.

Pompeo’s thesis is that the Times is riven by factionalism that can largely (though not exclusively) be defined as younger “woke” staff members who would like to see the paper pursue a more explicitly liberal and anti-Trump path versus older, more traditional journalists who value balance and neutrality. The money quote is from Times manager editor Joe Kahn:

We do not see ourselves, and we do not wish to be seen, as partisan media. That means that the news and opinion divide, and things like social-media guidelines and some of our traditional restrictions on political activity by employees, may feel cumbersome to some people at this point in our evolution.

Pompeo did the reporting and I didn’t. So he may well be right about what people talk about inside the Times. Outside, though, the Times’ loyal and largely liberal readership is talking about other issues — such as the paper’s equally negative coverage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign in the face of mountainous evidence that their transgressions were not remotely equal; the Times’ harsh but ultimately normalizing coverage of the Trump presidency (in contrast to The Washington Post, which has been relentless); and its weirdly gentle treatment of people on the far right, such as the notorious profile of the Nazi next door.

I wrote about these issues for WGBH News in January. I don’t think things have gotten better at the Times since then.

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How to battle media addiction in the Age of Trump

Philadelphia newsboy  Michael McNelis, 8, was photographed by Lewis Hines in 1910.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The news cycle on Tuesday began in the frenetic manner we’ve become accustomed to in the Age of Trump. No sooner had I finished my snowbound perusal of newspaper websites than the president took to Twitter and announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was out. My phone began buzzing with breaking-news alerts. Twitter filled up with quick hits, some serious and some snarky, as to what it all meant. And, at least for a little while, our collective attention was diverted from Stormy Daniels, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and the rest of the Trumpian mishegas that has preoccupied us for the past 14 months.

Many of us sense that we’ve become overwhelmed by the rush of news and that we don’t know what to do about it. The quantity if not the quality of news has been growing exponentially in the decades since we relied mainly on the morning newspapers and the evening newscasts. But we seem to have reached a tipping point with the endless obsession over Trump, especially on cable news and social media.

Which is why, I think, New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo struck such a chord last week. Manjoo wrote that he had conducted an experiment: for almost two months, he had relied almost entirely on print for his news, unplugging from cable and from the constant stream of electronic updates that come our way. He put it this way:

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

As Dan Mitchell found in the Columbia Journalism Review, Manjoo’s Twitter stream during his alleged digital exile remained as prolific as those of all but the most addicted (who, me?) users. So yes, there was a bit of Henry David Thoreau’s bringing his laundry to his mother’s house in Manjoo’s manifesto. But imperfect though Manjoo’s experiment may have been, it spoke deeply to the need to filter out all the flotsam and jetsam of our continuous news cycle so that we can concentrate on what’s really important. What better way to do that than to rely on a few trustworthy sources of information while trying to ignore everything else?

I’m not saying that we should seek to emulate Erik Hagerman, “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” who was the subject of a long profile in the Times over the weekend. As described by reporter Sam Dolnick, Hagerman, who lives in rural Ohio, has aggressively ignored the news — all news — since the 2016 election, to the point where he listens to white noise through headphones at his local coffee shop to make sure that no dispatches from the outside world penetrate his increasingly empty head.

Instead, to put it in New Age terms, we should seek to be conscious and mindful about our news-consumption habits. Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, reacting to Manjoo, stressed the importance of looking at the headlines of a newspaper’s front page, turning off breaking-news alerts at least occasionally, and taking hours-long breaks from social media. Most important, she wrote, “find two or three sources of serious news — a well-curated newsletter, an evening news broadcast, a top-of-the-hour briefing on public radio, or the news app of a respected newspaper — and make it a daily habit, preferably consumed at a regular time and then set aside.” She added: “The alternative is downright dangerous to your mental and emotional well-being.”

My own education in how to be a better news consumer began a couple of years ago when I read Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book “The Shallows.” Carr argues that digital technology has changed not just the way that we interact with text but that it has rewired our brains, favoring the rapid perusal of disjointed tidbits over long, sustained concentration. (And consider that Carr was writing before Facebook and Twitter were as ubiquitous as they are now.) In an essay for Nieman Reports, Carr issued a challenge to news organizations:

If serious journalism is going to survive as something more than a product for a small and shrinking elite, news organizations will need to do more than simply adapt to the Net. They’re going to have to be a counterweight to the Net. They’re going to have to find creative ways to encourage and reward readers for slowing down and engaging in deep, undistracted modes of reading and thinking. They’re going to have to teach people to pay attention again.

I’m not going back to print. It’s too expensive, and my miserable eyesight is better suited to reading on a screen with its own illumination than to dealing with tiny type under less than optimum lighting conditions. But ever since reading Carr, I try to remind myself to slow down, to engage with my preferred digital news sources as I would a print newspaper, scanning their home pages not just for news I’m looking for but for news I’m not looking for as well. Still, skimming and tweeting are behaviors that quickly become ingrained, and I have as hard a time breaking away as anyone.

Thus Farhad Manjoo’s column is a good reminder of what it means to be a responsible news consumer. He cites the food writer Michael Pollan’s famous advice— “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” — and repurposes it for our jittery relationship with digital media: “Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.”

And if you can get someone else to do your laundry for you, so much the better.

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Dr. Vox explains how Trump has exposed the right as a collection of grievances

Important thread by David Roberts of Vox on how President Trump has exposed the right for what we knew in our hearts it was all along: an inchoate collection of grievances uninterested in policy or ideas. He’s also got some smart things to say about what’s wrong with The New York Times’ conservative columnists, who are monolithically anti-Trump. Start here:

Roberts’ views are somewhat related to my recent WGBH News column on the irrelevance of the anti-Trump right, although I hold them in higher regard than he does.

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In ‘The Post,’ Spielberg offers a hopeful message for our Trumpian times

Spielberg’s Nixon is the proto-Trump. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Movies about historical events are often meant to tell us more about the present than the past, especially in the hands of an overly earnest director like Steven Spielberg. His 2012 film “Lincoln,” for instance, depicted a president who didn’t let his high principles get in the way of some down-and-dirty dealmaking with recalcitrant members of Congress. You know, just like Obama should have been doing.

Spielberg’s latest, “The Post,” is more deft and subtle than “Lincoln.” Still, it serves as much as a commentary on current-day events as it does as a drama about the press and the Pentagon Papers. Then as now, The New York Times and The Washington Post were competing to expose high-level government wrongdoing. Then as now, their nemesis was a vindictive president who hated the press. The message, at least for the anti-Trump audience that is most likely to be enthralled by “The Post,” is that journalism will save us. Help is on the way.

The Pentagon Papers were the government’s secret history of the Vietnam War. The documents showed that President Lyndon Johnson and other administration officials were aware that the war was going badly even as they publicly professed optimism — and thus allowed American soldiers to be killed for what they knew was a lost cause. This was especially galling to Richard Nixon, who was president in 1971, when the documents were leaked, and who was prosecuting the war with cruel gusto. The Times got and published the papers first, and Times partisans are grousing that Spielberg should have made a movie about that instead. For instance, Roy Harris wrote for Poynter that “the overall story of the Pentagon Papers as journalism seems somehow twisted by the Post-centric focus of the movie.”

Critics are missing the point. The Times gets its full due in “The Post” for breaking the story. But Post executive editor Ben Bradlee’s fierce attempt to play catch-up, and publisher Katharine Graham’s courageous decision to publish the documents against the advice of her lawyers and advisers, was a signal moment in American journalism, establishing the Post as the near-equal of the mighty Times.

The script for “The Post” reads like it was ripped from the pages of Graham’s autobiography, “Personal History,” and from David Halberstam’s magnum opus about The Washington Post and several other media institutions, “The Powers That Be.” The Post of 1971 was a financially marginal regional paper with more in common with The Boston Globe or The Philadelphia Inquirer than with the Times. Graham decided to raise much-needed cash by reorganizing the paper as a publicly traded company. The crisis over the Pentagon Papers blew up at exactly the same moment, putting the Post in real danger: if it published the documents and was found to have broken the law, its initial public offering could go down the tubes and the company could go out of business.

Graham made her decision after being called away from a social event, a sequence that is depicted faithfully in the movie. “Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish,’” Graham wrote in “Personal History.” And she quotes Bradlee as saying later:

That was a key moment in the life of this paper. It was just sort of the graduation of the Post into the highest ranks. One of our unspoken goals was to get the world to refer to the Post and The New York Times in the same breath, which they previously hadn’t done. After the Pentagon Papers, they did.

The U.S. Supreme Court ended up vindicating both the Times and the Post by ruling, 6-3, that the Nixon administration’s attempts to prevent publication were an unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment. As my WGBH News fellow contributor Harvey Silverglate wrote in The Boston Phoenix some years ago, that didn’t stop Nixon from attempting to prosecute the newspapers under the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I that is still with us. But Nixon’s efforts went nowhere.

“The Post” is not an eat-your-broccoli movie. It’s highly entertaining. Tom Hanks is terrific as Bradlee, and Meryl Streep turns in an accurate Graham, though it sometimes feels more like an elaborate impersonation than a fully realized role.

Streep’s Graham is the center of a subplot that, again, has as much to do with 2018 as it does with 1971. Although Graham had been leading the Post since 1963, when her husband, Phil Graham, shot himself in an apparent suicide, in “The Post” we see her grow and, finally, embrace her leadership role in a way that she hadn’t before. It’s a tale of female empowerment that is especially relevant right now. As my Northeastern colleague Meg Heckman wrote for USA Today:

In a refreshing departure from the shallow, oversexualized way Hollywood typically depicts women in journalism, Meryl Streep portrays Graham as a serious newspaperwoman navigating complex social and political challenges. Her role should be a blueprint for a new kind of popular culture, one that helps repair a climate where, as the #MeToo movement has revealed, media companies routinely get away with allowing sexual harassment and assault to fester.

One of my favorite characters in “The Post” is Nixon himself, whom we see back-to through a White House window, talking on the phone and threatening his enemies in the press. (We hear actual tapes of the Trickster.) And that brings me back to what “The Post” is really about.

In Donald Trump we have a president who hates the media and threatens his enemies like none since Nixon. Like Nixon, Trump is being investigated on multiple fronts — by House and Senate committees, by a special counsel, and by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Spielberg, in effect, is offering us a soothing message: Our institutions work. Look at what happened the last time.

But the past is not always prologue. The world of the 1970s was one without Fox, without alternative facts, and without a president who denounced press coverage he didn’t like as “fake news.” This time around, not only is it unclear whether the truth will be revealed — it’s even more unclear whether it will even matter.

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