Spielberg’s ‘The Post’ Provides Fitting End to Turbulent Year for the Media
And, she wrote, “I did try — in some small ways, some larger — to do something about raising the visibility of women
and increasing the sensitivity toward matters of particular concern to them.”
The women who have bravely shared stories of harassment
and abuse at the hands of powerful men this year — whether on film sets or in newsrooms; on factory floors or in congressional offices — stand on Ms. Graham’s shoulders, as do the trailblazing female reporters who drew attention to their plight.
In a line from the movie referring to Mr. Sulzberger’s bold decision, the fictional stand-ins for the Times editor A. M. Rosenthal and his first wife, Ann Marie Burke, tell Ms. Graham
that The Times’s publisher took the risk only after his Washington bureau chief, James B. Reston, threatened to print the Pentagon Papers in the Vineyard Gazette, the small Martha’s Vineyard paper he had bought a couple of years earlier.
The leadership of the Sulzberger family and Mr. Bezos also provides protection against an executive branch
that seems all too willing to punish news outlets that don’t adopt the standards of that Trump favorite, “Fox & Friends.”
The president’s other frequent media target, CNN, has no family or billionaire protector at a time when it is at the center of AT&T’s proposed acquisition of its parent company, Time Warner, a deal
that the Justice Department has moved to block even as Mr. Trump continues his attacks on the network
As he has said, “Taking an oath as a public servant does not mean keeping secrets or obeying the president — it’s respecting the Constitution.”
Her father granted control of the newspaper to her husband upon his death
because “in those days, the only possible heir would have been male,” as she wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “Personal History.”
But when Ms. Graham’s husband died, control fell to her.