Another Spielberg talkfest
When I think back on the experience of watching The Post tonight, I realized it reveals practically nothing about the significance of the real Pentagon Papers aside from telling us the not too earthshattering revelation that Pentagon analysts already regarded the Vietnam War as unwinnable as early as '65.. But Ellsberg and the Papers are just the Macguffin anyway so Spielberg can have his little onscreen debates about the importance of a free press. I hope no parallelism was intended to suggest WaPo has even remotely the integrity now that it had in the era of Ben Bradlee. Now it's a dishrag owned by Jeff Bezos spewing out whatever propaganda the military-intelligence apparatus wishes to make public. It was overtaken by the CIA ages ago and now serves as its mouthpiece. These days these two newspapers lionized in The Post (NY Times and WaPo) have become purveyors of militarist propaganda offering unquestioning support to the War on Terror. Just to use an example of how degraded WaPo has actually become, just a couple of days ago as part of its support for the #MeToo witch-hunt hysteria, it ran an op-ed by a deranged puritan attacking Woody Allen for his allegedly perverse sexual desires. Spielberg is right: we need a free press now more than ever, but it's time the NYTimes and WaPo actually do their jobs and not serve as apologists for our latest military misadventures.
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