Print Culture and Technophilia in The Post

I swear you guys, I've never been so happy in all my life. The thrill of discovery; the clacking of keys; the smell of fresh ink; the warmth of a newly printed newspaper. I think I finally found my calling.

— Lois Lane, Smallville (2007)

Before she becomes "Lois Lane, lead reporter for the Daily Planet," a younger version of the character stars in the CW television show Smallville as a plucky, if rudderless, college dropout. When Lois (Erica Durance) discovers investigative journalism, she knows right away she has "found her calling." The way Lois communicates her newfound passion is worth noting: she pairs the excitement of sleuthing with technophilia, commending a specific, dated account of print culture. But Lois's sense of the job is less about finding truth and safeguarding democracy than one might expect. Her "calling" takes form in the minute details of newspaper production, the material practices associated with "breaking" the news. The romance on offer focuses on information infrastructure, the operations underlying consensus culture. What is more reassuring, after all, than waking to a cup of coffee and a delivered paper, a planet reaffirmed daily?

I mean to examine a newspaper mythos at the core of how we conceive of journalism and its cultural work: in the end, facts will come to light and they will be recognized as such and accorded their due authority in determining matters social and political.1 This mythos constitutes a theory of communication that has long buoyed the appeal of the newsroom drama and has ensured its relatively consistent popularity in mainstream film and television. It's a comforting idea committed to the status quo. But why is this mythos often coupled with an interest in the mechanics of newspaper production?

The 'post-truth' moment inspires an urgent and understandable desire to imagine for data an unassailable positivist dimension, where information is rooted in verifiability and doesn't require interpretation. The truth just is. In such an estimation, media and "the media" are often treated interchangeably; both are understood as neutral instruments that circulate, rather than produce, meaning. An accompanying emphasis on physical media suggests that the truth is as concrete as the materials that transcribe it. The journalistic document is treated as an objective-correlative to that which it records, the artifact communicating its social significance as a form of direct testimony, a first draft of History.

Steven Spielberg's The Post (2017) is a prime example of a newspaper myth preoccupied with technological media, one that is all the more pressing because it invites direct comparisons between our present historical moment and political crises in the 1970s. It pines for the unlikely return of an older print culture, and by peddling this nostalgic information fantasy, one that is, without a doubt, also a political one, The Post misses the infrastructural role mass media have played in authoring our present 'post-truth' moment. Put simply, The Post lionizes the objectivity of a past media regime without recognizing Trumpism as a media phenomenon.

The film tells the story of a rag-tag team of committed, likable journalists who race against the New York Times to publish the controversial Pentagon Papers, risking the survival of the then-financially vulnerable Washington Post when the paper is pressured not to publish its findings. Led by the clear-minded Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and shepherded along by Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), the team stays the course and their endeavor prevails; the painful truth about the nature of America's protracted conflict in Vietnam comes to light. The Post's characterization of journalism must be addressed as an information fantasy, chiefly because it is so conventional as a prestige historical drama: its narrative is an affirmational account of how truth is discovered and disseminated for the purpose of informing the public and shaping political discourse.

Not incidentally, the film is obsessed with the physical production and delivery of newspapers. Close-up after close-up focuses on various stages of production: type being set; the whirling gears of the presses; columns of newspapers moved down assembly lines; energetic young men parceling newspapers and warehousing them for subsequent delivery. The film reiterates, maybe even subconsciously, the presumed thinginess of the truth; in other words, it would disclose the empirical bedrock of American political life. In so doing, The Post's treatment of physical media draws on, but significantly revises, an earlier film about media and politics in the 1970s, Alan Pakula's All the President's Men (1976).2 One of the most concerning aspects of Spielberg's project is the way it mystifies the former film's complex treatment of media to peddle the kinds of hard-boiled investigative thriller tropes associated with Watergate.

The Post compares President Nixon to President Trump, treating the latter as the second coming of Tricky Dick. This has become a common move. Watergate—thought of as a genre as much as a historical event—has come to frame how pundits emplot the ongoing investigation into Russian election interference. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have each made their rounds on network talk shows. The significance of Bob Woodward's Fear: Trump in the White House (2018) has retroactively validated television pundits who have, for months, contemplated the equivalence between Trump's actions and Nixon's as comparable examples in political scandal and cover-up. The President himself, amid a full-throated, Twitter-enabled, and often bizarre misinformation campaign, has taken to weaponizing Watergate as a template for the epiphanic disclosure of conspiracy. The (fictitious) F.B.I. spy in his campaign would "be worse than Watergate!" he has declared in more than one tweet. Wielded as a rhetorical device, the Watergate scandal serves to imagine a political context in which emergent details might suddenly unify fractured public sentiment in outrage and spur decisive action.

It is from this place, where media reveals the truth and inspires action, that The Post draws upon and reinforces what "The Washington Post" has meant straight from All the President's Men: a politically-moderate publication known for scrupulous investigations and bombshell findings.3 The Post is about The Washington Post as an idea, keen to cite, and contribute to, the publication's cinematic lore. The film's title suggests an affectionate, familiar portrait of the paper,4 which is why the production plays like a less paranoid prequel to All the President's Men. Like its predecessor, The Post reissues with confidence an idea that Pakula's film treats with circumspection: that a finite cancer can be surgically removed from an otherwise healthy, functioning political system. Once the facts come to light, the self-evidence of the truth will command a more-or-less uniform public response toward such an end.

As with Pakula's entire "paranoid trilogy," Klute (1971) in particular, All the President's Men treats the production of knowledge with trepidation. The film begins with a jarring close-up of a type-writer drum slamming into paper.

Smudged and violently hewn to the rough, fibrous surface of the page, the letters hardly allege finality or connote a hallowed, definite record. Rather, the text's embellished granularity indicates only a tenuous permanence, the material as well as social precarity of data. Anticipating Freidrich Kittler's analogy between firing a gun and "shooting" footage, the typewriter's drumming on the paper is sonically amplified in the film's soundtrack, gunfire replacing the sounds of the typewriter. The cinematography's anxious focus on the materiality of media is at pains to show that truth is made as much as is found. This is not, however, to say that truth is endlessly relative. Far from implying that history has no objective basis, Pakula's camera implores us to see that the power of media is irreducible to its content. The film questions simplistic views of communication and expresses, from a place of uncertainty, the concrete, material density of media processes in a given environment.

In an especially striking sequence set in the Library of Congress, Woodward and Bernstein rifle through extensive lists of records indicating what materials the White House requested in the months preceding the Watergate burglary. At first, the camera is tightly focused on a large box of bundled cards placed atop a table. Through an elaborate crane shot, the downward facing camera moves slowly upward from the table toward the library's high ceiling, gradually revealing the archive's cavernous size and maze-like configuration. As the subdued score eerily builds, the sound of shuffling papers dominates the scene, appearing to fill all the expansive library.

The specific search at hand is set against a broader context, information at a different scale, data conceived through its organization; the architecture of "the record" becomes its own type of message, an environment whose meaning eclipses the perspective of an individual researcher. While the journalists search for clues by poring over the available record, the camera builds suspense by intimating an atmospheric media inscrutability.

The Post also focuses on the construction of truth in media, but it is far more assured in its depiction of what media are and do. That is, Pakula's cinematography uses the materiality of media to highlight the contingency of truth; Spielberg's film references the materiality of media to displace the question of truth, which it assumes, and then moves to shore up the class divide by extolling the working class as those who engage the machine of print culture at the level of manufacturing, thus contributing to the ideology of a whole, classless America, united in the pursuit of truth. Though its conspiracy-thriller style draws heavily on All The President's Men—its final scene taking us to the Watergate burglary in progress, where the narrative positions itself as an unofficial prequel to the earlier film—Spielberg's story actually entertains different thematic concerns. Chiefly, it offers a newspaper myth; The Post visualizes physical media to depict journalism, and by extension news media, as a pillar of civic engagement and public history.

One could read this defense of newspapers as a direct response to Donald Trump and his anti-media sentiment. Where the president has repeatedly called the press "[an] enemy of the people," Spielberg's portrait of the editorial staff underscores the principled patriotism guiding the paper's actions. The upshot for contemporary journalism could not be clearer. The Post moreover enfolds an outdated economic imaginary within its investigative plot to make its point about the news and its inherent patriotism. Journalism as a national activity and democratic safeguard, signified here by the small, pre-Amazon "family company" that was the Washington Post, unifies different social classes in an abstracted pursuit of justice. Toward this end, the narrative goes out of its way to glorify blue-collar workers and establish "the news" as a populist endeavor. One of the film's goals is to valorize a specific version of the news media as a preferred platform for reporting stories in which 'all' Americans are purportedly invested with equal measure.

The narrative's preoccupation with the physical production of the news works toward two rhetorical ends. First, as I have been describing, it contributes to the film's veneration of 1970s print culture, fetishizing as it does the mechanisms by which news is produced and distributed. In this arrangement, the objective stature of the news story is enhanced by reference to the conditions of its physical manufacture and its status as public record. When the preliminary story about the Pentagon Papers breaks, the film catalogues workers setting typeface and the conveyor belt distribution of individual papers, commemorating the moment when History was concretized as fact. Second, the association of news media with manufacturing taps into valent political symbolism. The film's interest in newspaper production oversees a rather lyrical endorsement of Fordist-style manufacturing. Where Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988) deployed the term "manufacture"—with its ominous associations of a streamlined, monopolistic control—to elucidate a "propaganda model," Spielberg's movie uses factory tropes to very different effect. Readers may recall that the documentary based on Chomsky and Herman's book, also called Manufacturing Consent (1992), mobilizes industry metaphors and factory-based sound effects to emphasize the material production of truth. In line with the book's central thesis, that media serve elite interests and implicitly regulate discursive norms, the documentary relies on tropes of mass mechanization to convey the threat of corporations controlling knowledge.

In Spielberg's film, however, the streamlined manufacture of the news connotes healthy industry (in both senses of the word) as well as inter-class harmony. An obsession with machinery, the stuff of material production, organizes the film's symbolism, tying together Katharine Graham's aristocratic circle with the masculine world of blue-collar labor. Once Graham chooses to print the controversial story, the film lovingly discloses the production of the next day's newspaper, following the type-setting out through printing, packaging, and delivery—along the way, groups of working-class men contribute to the effort involved with "breaking the news." The would-be liberal reclamation of working-class patriotism is a little on the nose (even more flat-footed still is Graham being lionized in-camera as a sort of second-wave feminist idol before a crowd of adoring young women). The point I want to make is that the film's interest in the manufacture of consent is essentially centrist propaganda: journalists and laborers alike toil away to bring the truth to the American people. The Post makes a weird, incoherent feint toward social realism in its final act, a maneuver that seems meant to crystalize Graham's personal heroism by credentialing it with an expressly masculine iconography.

This is all the more surprising because the kind of history that The Post celebrates is one where a small number of responsible news vehicles play a significant role in legislating dominant interpretations of political topics and current events. The model of news journalism and print culture it glamorizes is, at is foundation, conservative and republican (little 'r'). From a closed-door meeting in the lavish confines of her elegant D.C. home, Graham issues the order for the story to break that next morning. In quick succession, her permission is converted via machines and a chain of male laborers into material fact.

It is a quintessentially hierarchical exchange. It is significant that the company is addressed as "a little paper" and presented as a gutsy, independent family business throughout the film; this is a newspaper company, not a news corporation. Graham (via Streep's star persona) hereby emerges as a paragon of civic virtue, a principled American aristocrat. She puts aside her friendship with longtime family friend Bob McNamara when she authorizes the story to be printed. Her investment to the truth, and to the country's well-being, supersedes her class-based allegiances and even the financial and legal security of the paper itself. She is willing to endanger the business and imperil her personal fortune to do the right thing. The Post goes to great lengths to show how the political classes nobly conceive of and act on behalf of an entire nation.

Since Donald Trump's election, a number of newspapers and news media outlets, The Washington Post in particular, have taken to defending journalism in a similar vein, touting an ethos of responsibility and verifiable, at-hand facticity. CNN has relished advertising itself as an embattled anti-FOX news, a bulwark of hard-hitting facts in an age of bluster, sensationalism, and noise. Never mind the station's relentless, over-the-top, professional wrestling-style coverage of all things Trump. The managing editor for The Washington Post, Martin 'Marty' Baron, who seems to be taking his heroic portrayal in Spotlight (2015) to heart, has also looked to counter Trumpism and make inroads against the President's "all-out assault on the free press" (2016).5 In accepting the Hitchen's Prize for displaying "a commitment to free expression, a depth of intellect, and an unwavering pursuit of the truth," Baron surmised to his audience:

If we fail to pursue the truth and to tell it unflinchingly—because we're fearful that we'll be unpopular, or because powerful interests (including the White House and the Congress) will assail us, or because we worry about financial repercussions to advertising or subscriptions—the public will not forgive us (2016).

One can understand why Baron might place the mantra, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," beneath the paper's title card these days. Like its portrayal in Spielberg's film, the newspaper has taken to heralding itself as a facts-based watchdog of democratic integrity, a would-be populist check on falsehood. This, as the paper openly considers cordoning all its online stores behind a pay-wall (the paper currently allows users 10 free articles a month). Democracy indeed—which only fuels Trump's unhinged "failing Washington Post" charges and the (unproven) assertion that Amazon is artificially subsidizing an unprofitable venture for the specific purpose of attacking the administration. One wonders if thinkers as different as Baron and Spielberg have misunderstood the structural basis of Trumpism.6 The faith Baron, Spielberg, and others place in truth, cleanly documented and clearly expressed, would suggest as much. The journalist as Herculean defender of democracy smacks of an outdated, impoverished lore. "The public" and culture of reading it envisions has no special purchase in the present mass media landscape.

I would like to close by returning to All the President's Men. The film does, of course, romanticize investigative journalism, marshalling the then-sexy star power of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman to glamorize these scruffy detectives and their can-do professionalism. But Pakula's film, like all his work, is saturated with misgiving. It does not assume media or "the media" are necessarily capable of communicating clear messages about what really is. Rather, it understands that technological media are always both the chance and the obstacle for communication.

I'm not convinced Trumpism can be countered with calls for more fact-based content, though diligent reporting may help and might, eventually, even do palpable political damage to the Trump administration. But the Twitter president, Donald Trump and his unthinking, sound-bite nativism, its cultural ramparts and technological conduits, are a reality that cannot be reported away. Spielberg's nostalgic love letter to journalism fails to address the problems facing the mass media today, issues deriving from the technical basis of our information economy (media democratization, information overload, for-profit news, clientelist news coverage and "information silos," fake news and "fake news," data mining and algorithm-enhanced manipulations of social media). The issue isn't just that the film misreads our present moment and offers up a cloying dose of centrist propaganda; The Post revises the kind of cinematic history espoused in All The President's Men, moving to replace a sophisticated account of media epistemology with bankrupt positivism. It would look to curtail "alternative facts" with ennobling information myths.

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Daniel Murphy received his PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame. His research covers American fiction, media theory, film and television, and the media industries. He teaches English and media studies at Bishop Ireton High School in Alexandria, VA.

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