{"id":31837,"date":"2018-03-02T21:19:41","date_gmt":"2018-03-03T02:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31837"},"modified":"2018-03-02T21:19:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-03T02:19:41","slug":"hollywood-hoopla-ignores-medias-history-of-servility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31837","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood hoopla ignores media’s history of servility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hollywood hoopla ignores media’s history of servility<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\u00a9 Getty<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Much of the media nowadays is portraying itself as heroes of the #Resist Trump movement. To exploit that meme, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed<\/a> out \u201cThe Post<\/a>,\u201d a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. But regardless of whether Spielberg\u2019s latest wins the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, Americans should never forget the media\u2019s long history of pandering to presidents and the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Post\u201d is built around the Pentagon Papers, a secret study begun in 1967 analyzing where the Vietnam war had gone awry. The 7000-page tome showed that presidents and military leaders had been profoundly deceiving the American people ever since the Truman administration and that the same mistakes were endlessly repeated. Like many policy autopsies, the report was classified and completely ignored by the White House and federal agencies that most needed to heed its lessons.Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, heroically risked life in prison to smuggle the report to the media after members of Congress were too cowardly to touch it. The New York Times shattered the political sound barrier when it began courageously publishing the report despite a profusion of threats from the Nixon administration Justice Department. After a federal court slapped the Times with an injunction, the Washington Post and other newspapers published additional classified excerpts from the report. Likely because the Washington Post had a female publisher, Spielberg made it, rather than the Times, the star of the show.<\/p>\n

Spielberg\u2019s movie portrays Post editor Ben Bradlee denouncing<\/a> dishonest government officials to publisher Katharine Graham: \u201cThe way they lied \u2014 those days have to be over.” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who deluged the media with falsehoods about battlefront progress, did more than anyone else (except perhaps President Lyndon Johnson) to vastly increase the bloodbath for Americans and Vietnamese.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hollywood hoopla ignores media’s history of servility \u00a9 Getty Much of the media nowadays is portraying itself as heroes of the #Resist Trump movement. To exploit that meme, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed out \u201cThe Post,\u201d a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. But regardless of whether Spielberg\u2019s latest wins the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17430,6033,16594,512,1921,620,15519],"class_list":["post-31837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-daniel-ellsberg","tag-hollywood","tag-james-bovard","tag-media","tag-new-york-times","tag-pentagon","tag-the-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31838,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31837\/revisions\/31838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}