I've just watched Spotlight and Truth back to back and both of them were intense and realistic and Sixty Minutes, no television news show had ever been profitable--and in Spotlight, the shadow of the internet hangs over the newspaper office -- literally. I used to be a reporter, starting off as a magazine writer and then becoming a freelance cityside reporter for an L.A. weekly paper, then freelancing for a a syndicated news service. I rarely wrote hard news but I took my job seriously and i did it with pride. My Great-Aunt Marie had worked for a Chicago paper during WWII and when she came home from the night shift, she noticed that one of her neighbors was always up and talking to someone who wasn't there. She did some investigating and then had a chat with the FBI, who arrested the guy. He was a member of the German-American Bund and he was broadcasting on a radio. Yes, my newspaperwoman great-aunt caught a Germany spy!!!well-done. Both of them are about the financial realities of news organizations--before
I grew up in a house where we read two papers every day, the Washington Post in the morning and the Evening Star at night. I don't even know if the Evening Star is still being published--afternoon papers were starting to die even when I was in high school. On Sundays, my father would drive down to the bus station and pick up copies of the out of town papers. So newsprint is in my blood and even though I've long since left the newsgatherine world behind, I'm still a news junkie. And I love movies about journalists. I have a pretty short list of favorite movies in that genre and oddly, Robert Redford is in two of them and Michael Keaton is in the other two.
All the President's Men is a still my favorite of the four movies. It's beautifully acted, beautifully cast, written by the great William Goldman and directed by Alan J. Pakula. the movie came out 40 years
