by Peter Callaghan

In 2006, Dan Rather, the son of a ditch digger from Wharton, Texas who was the first journalist to report that John F. Kennedy had been shot and went on to become one of the youngest White House correspondents and anchorman of “the first news program to ever make money”, left CBS after 43 years of service. Two years earlier, Mary Mapes, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic father who went on to win a Peabody Award for breaking the story about how American servicemen abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, was fired from her post as producer of 60 Minutes by the same network. The reason being that, as Mary confided to a hostile internal affairs review panel, “the truth gets lost in the scrum”.

The “truth” being that George Walker Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, received preferential treatment to join the Texas Air National Guard to avoid serving his country during the Vietnam War, that he refused a routine physical examination, went AWOL for over a year and was granted an early discharge to study at Harvard Business School without fulfilling his military service contract. The “scrum” being a media frenzy led by rival broadcasters and social media bloggers about “fonts and forgery and conspiracy theories” relating to the authenticity of the so-called Killian documents (dubbed Memogate and Rathergate at the time) which overshadowed the serious charges behind the 60 Minutes investigation and led to the downfall of both Rather and Mapes. The latter, upon whose memoir Truth and Duty: The Press, the President and the Privilege of Power this film is based, hasn’t worked in television news since.

Hot on the heels of the Oscar-winning crime drama Spotlight about a team of investigative journalists from The Boston Globe newspaper who uncover a series of historical and widespread child sex abuse cases within the Catholic Church, writer and first-time director James Vanderbilt’s screenplay begs comparison but falls sadly short. Blanchett and Redford excel in the lead roles, as does Stacy Keach as the retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett. But the script is wordy; the exposition, particularly in the first half, feels clunky and imposed rather than being laced into the dialogue; there are one too many close-ups of Mapes crying her eyes out or on the verge of doing so; and the “crack team” of journalists which includes Topher Grace as Mike Smith and Elisabeth Moss as Lucy Scott lack the motivation and roundedness of Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton’s characters in Spotlight.

That said, there is much to like, particularly towards the end of the film when the stakes are raised and the tension cranks up a notch. And given the decline in newspapers and the rise of social media which can whip up a storm based on hearsay and opinion rather than fact and corroboration, what the world needs now is not love, sweet love but what Mary Mapes calls for in her impassioned defence to the internal affairs review panel: a free press who will stand up to big business and hold to account those who occupy or are on the verge of occupying positions of power such as the Wall-bating, Muslim-hating Donald Trump. Or as Dan Rather more bluntly puts it: “The day we stop asking questions is the day the American people lose. It may sound hokey, but I really believe that.”

[imdb id=”tt3859076″]

Peter Callaghan
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