Episode 9: All The President’s Men
Justin:
In this day and age, the term “essential worker” has taken on a new meaning as it differentiates who can work from home and who has to work with the public, or at the very least, just not at home. In this COVID19-affected world, we are of course eternally grateful for their time and effort and could never take anything away from what they do for the general public. However, there’s another profession that I would also deem as “essential” and it’s on full display in the movie we just finished reviewing in this episode. Journalists, the oft-maligned and seemingly ever-questioned worker bees who live in a perpetual quest for truth and delivering the news to the masses, are as essential as it gets. I’m admittedly a little biased, having started out in my undergraduate days as a Journalism major (things changed for a myriad of unimportant reasons) but regardless of that close personal connection, it remains a career with a responsibility rivaled by few others. The fact that the term “Fake News” is now so prevalent and journalists are regularly questioned, disbelieved, and even threatened made watching ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN kind of romantic. It was an ode to a time of typewriters and rotary phones, smoking inside and smoking outside, diligent note-taking and fact and source-quadruple checking. I choose to believe that the end of that list is just as prevalent as ever, and thus will continue to heap respect and adulation upon these men and women who spend their every waking moment dedicated to reporting the goings-on in the world, just so the rest of us can make informed decisions. When you consider all of that, it’s hard to imagine too many professions being much more essential than that, even if there’s no way journalists are even close to as handsome as Robert Redford.
