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Tag: media scandals
‘Truth’ Is Plodding Retelling Of Downfall Of CBS News’ Dan Rather

‘Truth’ Is Plodding Retelling Of Downfall Of CBS News’ Dan Rather

By Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — Is “swift-boating” still part of the common lexicon? The political and cultural climate has moved far and fast since the skirmishes of the 2004 presidential election, a time the movie Truth looks to re-examine.

Adapted by screenwriter James Vanderbilt in his directing debut, the film is based on the book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power, by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who after the success of reports on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal attempted to untangle the convoluted history of then-President George W. Bush’s military service in the Air National Guard in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The 60 Minutes II report that aired in September 2004 was based in part on documents whose authenticity were immediately called into question, creating a furor that led to Mapes being fired and paved the way for the resignation of Dan Rather from CBS News.

Truth is a movie curiously in conflict with itself. There is a constant shift between granular detail and big-picture sweep that the movie never fully resolves, as serious discussions of type fonts and spacing between lines and letters on the military documents fit awkwardly with musings on what-it-all-means.

Mapes’ book and Vanderbilt’s screenplay present the incident as a harbinger of the deeply divided and contentious climate in which the news is now delivered each day, and a demarcation point regarding the importance of journalism along with the intersection of the Internet and media ownership.

Which all might be a bit dry were it not for the sparkling performances by Cate Blanchett as Mapes and Robert Redford as Rather, who provide two distinct approaches on movie-star dynamics. Blanchett attacks her role while Redford lets it come to him. There are also fine supporting performances from Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Topher Grace, Stacy Keach and Bruce Greenwood. Noni Hazlehurst delivers a devastating monologue as the wife of the man who first delivers suspect documents to Mapes.

Vanderbilt is best known as the screenwriter of David Fincher’s Zodiac, another film dense with historical and factual information. Fincher as a director was better able to handle the sheer volume of data in that story, letting its weight provide momentum, with a nimble grace that Vanderbilt is unable to bring to Truth. It is not hard to wonder if Truth the screenplay might have rang its bell a bit more clearly in the hands of another director, another set of eyes and hands to distill the material.

The film plays best as a forensic procedural leading up to and receding from the fulcrum point of the September 2004 broadcast of that now infamous story on Bush’s National Guard service, an examination of how the story came together and how quickly it came apart. (A subsequent internal investigation by CBS found that the disputed documents could be neither verified fully nor discounted completely.) For anyone who knows what is to come after the broadcast, a number of early scenes on the reporting of the story feel like moments just before a car crash, where in retrospect the accident could have been avoided, but in the moment it is coldly inevitable.

The post-broadcast investigation builds to a magnificent series of scenes in which Blanchett as Mapes spars with a panel made up of the privileged and elite, delivering a feisty declaration of principles that is uncynically the stuff of awards-season clip packages. Blanchett has become such an otherworldly screen persona — having played Cinderella’s stepmother, a queen, an elf, a delusional socialite, Katharine Hepburn and Bob Dylan — that seeing her play an ostensibly regular person now feels unusual. Blanchett still brings a regal bearing to her earthy depiction of realness, her tousled hair flicked precisely as to always be perfectly imperfect.

Redford is an unusual choice at first in the role of Rather and the actor doesn’t change his hair color or seemingly make much effort to look like the real television newsman. But eventually Redford’s own presence and understated charm take hold and the actor doesn’t so much inhabit the role as simply make it his own, bending it toward his own gravitational pull. It’s a trick of hiding in plain sight — at some point the actor stops reading onscreen like Robert Redford as Robert Redford and suddenly is Robert Redford as Dan Rather.

The film ends with Rather’s final broadcast and there’s a slow-motion glamour shot of Redford that is jarring for the way in which it seems to enshrine both the actor and the character as some sort of new Mount Rushmore of rustic Americana. The moment is odd for a number of reasons, feeling outside the tone of the rest of the movie, but most of all for how it shoves Mapes to the side of her own story.

Even as the film clearly conveys both the how and why of the mistakes made in reporting and airing the Bush National Guard story — mistakes that also shed no real light on the veracity of the story’s core claims — there are no ultimate conclusions to be drawn from “Truth.” There is no smoking gun, deathbed confession or definitive answer; rather there is a web of shifting perspectives and conflicting motives. And for a movie about contentious recent history and the contemporary media environment within which that history is being written, that air of conflict and uncertainty may remain the most genuinely honest result one can expect.
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Mark Olsen: mark.olsen@latimes.com
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‘TRUTH’
Rated: R, for language and a brief nude photo
Running Time: 2 hours and 1 minute
Playing: In limited release
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(c)2015 Los Angeles Times
Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Why Clinton-Bashing Articles Are A Golden Goose For Her Detractors

Why Clinton-Bashing Articles Are A Golden Goose For Her Detractors

We’re beyond corrections now.

The New York Times issued a lengthy editors’ note Tuesday regarding the paper’s tangled, bungled coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails, which, they conceded, “may have left readers with a confused picture.”

That’s a rather gentle gloss on the media tempest that made landfall Thursday night, after an article that purported to break news of a criminal investigation into Clinton, was published on the Times site and front page Friday morning, and was the subject of an email blast.

But then the Times silently amended the story, whittling the headline, and the story’s claims, down from “Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email” to “Criminal Inquiry Is Sought in Clinton Email Account,” and then finally, “Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email,” where it stands as of this writing.

Of course by then, it had been copied, repeated, and aggregated all over the Web.

Per Reuters:

The New York Times originally reported that two government inspectors general had asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s use of her private email account

It altered its report on its website overnight without explanation to suggest she personally was not the focus of a criminal referral.

Then, the Justice Department said the inspectors general had requested a criminal investigation into the emails, before backtracking and saying that there was a request for a probe but not a criminal one.

When the crux of the original story — that Clinton was under criminal investigation — was tweaked to indicate that the investigation was not criminal in nature, nor was Clinton the target, the Times editors quietly corrected it on the online edition of the paper, after it had been online for a few hours, with none of the fanfare that attended the original story’s publication: no email blast; no correction.

Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, published a long note outlining exactly how and why Times reporters fouled it up. She concluded that, in the Times’ haste to publish an earth-shattering exposé on the Democratic frontrunner, the paper of record had rushed to print an overly sensationalistic story that relied on dubious sources. She also lamented editors’ decision to discreetly revise the story without first issuing a proper correction. Her prescription: “Less speed. More transparency.”

National Memo editor Joe Conason argued Monday that:

Sullivan lets the Times editors and reporters off a bit too easily, allowing them to blame their anonymous sources and even to claim that the errors “may have been unavoidable.” What she fails to do, as usual, is to examine the deeper bias infecting Times coverage of Hillary and Bill Clinton — a problem that in various manifestations dates back well over two decades.

It seems clear that the Times article was written in accordance with the “Clinton rules” of journalism — which, as articulated by Jonathan Allen, state that “the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire” is the primary goal for journalists. Clinton rules endorse the use of tabloid-worthy headlines (“Criminal!”) and dubious sources, presume guilt, and operate under the assumption of a massive Clintonian conspiracy of widespread collusion and ill intent.

The Times finally ran two belated, garrulous corrections — the first on Saturday, the second on Sunday — which together read:

An article and a headline in some editions on Friday about a request to the Justice Department for an investigation regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email account while she was secretary of state misstated the nature of the request, using information from senior government officials. It addressed the potential compromise of classified information in connection with that email account. It did not specifically request an investigation into Mrs. Clinton.

An article in some editions on Friday about a request to the Justice Department for an investigation regarding Hillary Clinton’s personal email account while she was secretary of state referred incorrectly, using information from senior government officials, to the request. It was a “security referral,” pertaining to possible mishandling of classified information, officials said, not a “criminal referral.”

These are not corrections on the order of “Mr. McDougal’s name is actually MacDougal,” and it’s baffling that they would be treated as such, quietly airbrushed onto the site like fixing a typo. Which, of course, became the next phase of the story.

It didn’t help that the Times reporter who wrote the piece conceded that the corrections were “a response to complaints we received from the Clinton camp that we thought were reasonable.” This is how a Clinton-bashing story evolves from one of sloppy journalism to the way Hillary Clinton muscled a media titan into reporting what she wanted them to report.

Of course this episode is already becoming subsumed into the vast Clinton conspiracy, as when S.E. Cupp accused the Times of altering its headline “because Hillary asked them to.” A Breitbart headline similarly proclaimed: “New York Times Stealth-Edits Clinton Email Story At Her Command.”

As Sullivan said, “you can’t put stories like this back in the bottle – they ripple through the entire news system.”

Clinton-bashing articles are the gifts that keep on giving, a veritable golden goose of insinuation, innuendo, and dishonesty: Even once the initial specious recriminations have crumbled, the storm of media attention and confusion that follows creates a feedback loop that reinforces Clinton’s detractors’ view of her as a media-manipulating mastermind. And for voters — even those who support Clinton — it’s a reminder that this kind of thing is just going to happen again and again.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign event in West Columbia, South Carolina on July 23, 2015. REUTERS/Chris Keane