ANOTHER HOLLYWOOD STAR TURN FOR JOURNALISM
In his bravura, take-no-prisoners star turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, President Obama eviscerated a wide variety of targets. The press was hardly off limits. With performers from the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight in the house, Obama said: “As you know, Spotlight is a film about investigative journalists with the resources, the autonomy, to chase down the truth and hold the powerful accountable. Best fantasy film since Star Wars.”
Great line, of course, given the news media’s abundant challenges and stumbles in recent years. But the film was right on target and a powerful inspiration to investigative reporters and would-be investigative reporters across the globe.
Now it turns out Hollywood is setting its sights on another brave, but tragically unheeded, episode of journalism excellence.
Politico’s Mike Allen reveals that director Rob Reiner is planning a movie about the reporting by Knight Ridder during the runup to the Iraq War, raising questions about the Bush administration’s assertions Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was a key rationale for the invasion of Iraq. But he didn’t.
The Knight Ridder reporting was a particularly significant achievement, and one that cannot be celebrated enough.
It is the context that makes the reporting particularly special. This was in the wake of 9/11, and the Bush administration was determined to go after Saddam. Emotions were raw, and skepticism about the endeavor could be equated with a lack of patriotism. Much of the journalism was largely unquestioning. The New
York Times later published a From the Editors note admitting the paper’s shortcomings. To many, it was a low point for contemporary journalism.
In contrast to the uncritical reporting that was so pervasive, Knight Ridder ran stories with headlines like “Lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials” and “Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq.”
The journalism was first class, squarely in the tradition of “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But, sadly, it had little impact. Knight Ridder didn’t own any papers in media capitals such as New York and Washington, D.C. Its work didn’t change the conversation or the news agenda. The country plunged into an unnecessary and endlessly damaging war, one whose consequences continue to haunt us.
And in a sad postscript, Knight Ridder is no more. In 2006, the company was sold to McClatchy. While the key players in the WMD coverage — reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay and bureau chief John Walcott — have left the company, McClatchy’s Washington bureau continued the tradition of skeptical, independent journalism.
I contacted Strobel, who is now with Reuters along with Landay and Walcott, to get more details about the movie but learned Cas- tle Rock Entertainment wants to hold off on further publicity at this time. The script isn’t finished, and the actors haven’t been lined up. But clearly a movie is in the works. Castle Rock told me to call back in a week.
Allen reported the movie’s working title is Shock and Awe. He wrote that “on a recent Sunday Strobel and his former colleagues met for about 7 hours at the Four Seasons in Georgetown to go over the script ‘page by page’ with Reiner, his wife Michelle, financier Johnson Chan, and scriptwriter Joey Hartstone.”
Strobel told Allen “about 2 years ago, Rob Reiner actually called us and told us he’s been wanting to do this movie for awhile and we’ve been working with him and a script writer for the last two years and things have really accelerated in the last few months.”
And it’s clear Strobel has high hopes for the movie, both in terms of its message and impact.
“This has been cast often in the public sphere as an intelligence failure, but I’m hoping the movie will make clear that it really wasn’t an intelligence failure,” Strobel said. “That these people wanted to go to war long before the intelligence was clear one way or the other.
“We also hope that it serves as maybe what Spotlight did to motivate young journalists and show what investigative journalism is like and how important it is.”
There were a lot of important lessons from the WMD episode. Paramount is the need to report skeptically regardless of circumstance and risk. But another is the value of cultivating sources in the bureaucracy and not just relying on high-level pronouncements. This was an instance — hardly the only one — where not being an insider was a big plus.
“Knight Ridder is not, in some people’s eyes, seen as playing in the same ball field as The New
York Times and some major networks,” Strobel told American
Journalism Review in 2004. “People at the Times were mainly talking to senior administration officials, who were mostly pushing the administration line. We were mostly talking to the lowerlevel people or dissidents, who didn’t necessarily repeat the party line.”
Trouble is, you develop those sources when you are on a fulltime beat. And the sharp cutback in the number of outlets covering Washington departments and agencies full time isn’t exactly a cause for optimism.
But Hollywood’s interest in good journalism is. Despite the field’s financial constraints and sometimes disappointing coverage decisions, journalism plays a key role in our democracy. A pop culture shot in the arm can help.