“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

– A.J. Liebling, U.S. journalist

For decades, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has served as the feel-good Frank Capra of our time, polishing tarnished historical truths into shiny happy stories for commercial consumption on the U.S. silver screen. The Post, Spielberg’s latest, is post-truth Hollywood propaganda at its finest. “A cover-up that spanned four U.S. presidents pushed the country’s first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between the press and the government,” summarizes the IMDB, which misleadingly categorizes The Post as “biography, drama, and history.” Nothing new for Hollywood, but given the intensity of our twin 21^st century imperial news and political climates, The Post is worth a more critical reading.

To wit. Clocking in at just under 2 hours, and featuring an all-star cast – at the top is Meryl Streep playing Post proto-feminist publisher Katharine Graham opposite Tom Hanks as likeably macho Post editor Ben Bradlee – Spielberg’s The Post makes mythical mincemeat out of the Post’s decision to publish U.S. marine-turned RAND analyst-turned-government whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg’s (played by Matthew Rhys) “Pentagon Papers,” 7,000 pages of top secret classified information detailing US policymakers’ cover up of the Vietnam War debacle. Spielberg is at his best in capturing the frenetic nature of the Post newsroom (Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk as Post reporter Ben Bagdikian steals the show) in the act of bringing a controversial, politically charged national news story into public view in the oh-so-slow and cumbersome Age of Analog. Witness Spielberg’s lovingly filmed close ups of the setting of metal typeset, and his romance to mechanized lines of newspapers flying through giant presses on their way to Washington D.C. news stands.

Spielberg also excels at individual (if fictional) character studies, capturing the frisson and friction between friends – Graham confronting JFK’s Camelot in the form of D.C. party pal and “defense” secretary Robert McNamara (a deviously charming Bruce Greenwood) about the lies of Vietnam, and then challenging the corporate roosters gathered around her by daring to publish the Pentagon Papers against their collective masculine judgment – as much a feminist battle cry as a critique of U.S. foreign policy, in the hands of Spielberg (and a scene that prompted spontaneous clapping from Montpelier Savoy filmgoers.)

Spielberg concludes The Post at the DNC’s D.C. headquarters, in darkness, as a night cop discovers “burglars” prowling the building – a Hollywood head-bashing to Nixon, Watergate, and the story that put the Washington Post on the map as a national-caliber investigative news journal – All The Presidents’ Men, and all that.

On Vietnam, in The Post, Spielberg has Nixon take the fall, despite the decades-long machinations of the Deep State, and the bipartisan imperial nature of the Vietnam invasion, begun by 1950s Republicans (Ike), ramped up in secret by 1960s Democrats (JFK and LBJ, who invented the Tonkin Gulf “false flag” and fed it to US news outlets to justify full scale escalation), and ending in the 1970s with defeat and retreat under Nixon, after the deaths of 57,000 U.S. soldiers, and three million (!) Vietnamese men, women, and children. The country of Vietnam, having requested national sovereignty from the Great Powers for decades under French occupation, again found itself under attack – military, industrial, chemical, and geoengineered – as part of a 10+ year US occupation that laid waste to the entire country, courtesy of the Pentagon’s ‘Kill Anything That Moves” policy (see U.S. investigative journalist Nick Turse’s 2013 book of the same name).

Daniel Ellsberg meets the press – 1971.

And this is the problem with Spielberg’s film. Passing off The Post as “biography and history” obscures much more than it reveals, functioning as pop culture propaganda at a time when Americans need a deeper and more nuanced understanding of our 100+ years of history as a global Empire. To name but one example – the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird” saw hundreds of “intelligence operatives” “seeded” into U.S. news organizations to “steer” news stories in pro-US imperial directions. Beginning in the 1950s, CIA ally Frank Wisner, and then CIA director Allen Dulles, recruited Washington Post publisher Phil Graham (Katherine’s husband) to run “Mockingbird” within the US news industry, bringing into the Deep State fold respected news men at CBS, the New York Times, TIME, LIFE and other national news outlets. These cozy Deep State/US news connections, solidified through personal relationships at the dinner parties and cocktail clubs that Spielberg lovingly depicts in The Post, help explain why U.S. “news” outlets remained silent on critical questions of Empire, war, and peace, even as ordinary Americans courageously took to the streets to confront the imperial Beast (a reality Spielberg turns into brief but bizarre “La La Land” moments in The Post.)

And today? The Washington Post’s Graham family sold their newspaper for $250 million in 2013 to the world’s richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($100 + billion), who sits on Pentagon boards, enjoys a $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA, hoovers 1 out of every 2 U.S. retail dollars out of the U.S. retail economy, systematically guts working class wages, jobs, and small businesses from coast to coast, and (insiders secretly say) orders Washington Post reporters to refrain from writing stories critical of, um, you guessed it – Amazon, as well as all of their advertisers. “Democracy Dies In Darkness” is the Washington Post’s new Bezos Era slogan. No joke! Perhaps someday, Spielberg will make a sequel to The Post, a beautiful, thrilling, but simplistic propaganda piece. And when he does, he can correct the historical record, and simply call it Post Truth.

by Rob Williams, Publisher, www.vermontindependent.org.