Norbert Haupt

In the mid-1960ies, the “Pentagon Papers” were thousands of pages of highly classified documents that proved that four presidential administrations knew that the Vietnam War could not be won, yet they continuously and repeatedly lied to the American public.

Thousands of young American men died in Vietnam for this war that was based on a lie.

When the New York Times got a hold of the papers and started publishing them, the Nixon Administration shut them down.

The Washington Post, at that time, was a struggling family business that tried to break out of the stigma of being a local paper. Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) was  the “owner” of the paper. She had inherited it from her late husband. Being one of very few women in executive positions in the business, she was not always taken seriously. The paper’s editor, Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks), pushed hard to get the Pentagon Papers published in order to establish a name for the Post and to uphold the freedom of the press as well as its responsibility to the public.

The stress of making the final decision at midnight before going to print was enormous. Katharine Graham bet the company, her livelihood, and that of everyone who worked there and had shares in the company, all in the name of journalistic responsibility and duty to the country.

Ironically, after I saw The Post, just a few hours later, as I was browsing Reddit, I came across this cigarette lighter, presumably from the Vietnam era. While I have no way to attest that it is authentic, and while there is an entire tourist trap industry of such “interesting” trinkets in Vietnam, the message stands.

 

In our current days, more than 50 years after those thousands of American boys died in Vietnam for a lie, and for the callousness of the presidents that sent them there, we are still facing the same old reality.

We still have presidents in the White House who think it’s ok to send American boys (and now girls) to strange countries across the ocean to do our dirty deeds and our dying, while the rest of us sit at home, watch MSNBC or Fox on TV, and pretend it’s all about our safety and our freedom.

The Post is about journalistic freedom, responsibility for integrity, honesty and truth. We now have a president who systematically undermines “the press” in front of the public, calls it dishonest, crooked, bought, biased and treasonous. “The press” are dozens, hundreds of newspapers, thousands of TV stations, thousands of radio stations, thousands of websites, and our president wants us to believe that all of a sudden, during the summer of 2016, when the election went into full swing, they all suddenly went rogue, and dishonest, just so they could all discredit him, all except a few far-right media channels?

I am not buying it.

The Post is about this responsibility and integrity of the press. It is a movie that could not be playing at a better time in history. Watch The Post, and then tell me who you trust: The media? Or Donald Trump?