Thoughts about Truth

This film was a gripping newsroom drama. During the film I was reminded of All the President's Men which is a great film about the Watergate scandal. It also stars Robert Redford. Truth is about the military record of George W. Bush. Before the film I had wondered what happened to Dan Rather? I remember he stepped down from his anchor chair after the scandal. Truth fills in all the blanks and reveals how hard it is to be a journalist in the era of blogs and tweets.

The films best technique was when it showed Mary Mapes on the phone to Rather. Mapes was in Texas and Rather in New York. I really liked how it cut back and forth between the two places. Otherwise the film is not that great technically. The story is what drives the film. The wanting to know if the sources were solid. Wanting to know what would happen to Mary, Dan, and the rest of the crew really drew me into the film.

And I loved the characters who went on liberal rants. Especially Topher Grace. When he goes of on the TV executive about Viacom's control of the media market I felt like he was voicing a lot of the frustration that I and many others felt about the media in those days. The film is set in the days before facebook, twitter, and all the rest. Yet I think it speaks more to the point of doing journalism and searching for the truth when so much of the media is controlled by conglomerates who are concerned more with profit and market share than promoting a free media.

In the US there is freedom of speech. Yet as this film makes clear some of the freedoms lead to excess and hate speech. I really felt the Mapes character shows not only how a journalist works, but also as a female working in a male dominated industry. When she is chastised for bringing politics to journalism I wondered how fair that was. Doesn't Fox News bring in politics all the time? Isn't what they report on half truths and vituperative rhetoric? This was the era of George W. Bush. A time when journalists didn't have access to government. I remember Don Rumsfeld's treatment of the media. His famous statement about "unknown unknowns." When I watched that I wondered what was he talking about?

The film was great and I think Cate Blanchett should win some awards this year for her performance. Everybody was good; Redford as Dan Rather, Topher Grace as the struggling journalist, and Dennis Quad as the soldier in the trenches.