The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg has been busy covering the awards race, the Toronto Film Festival and the Emmys. But he’s taken time out to cast aspersions on the new James Vanderbilt film, Truth.
Feinberg says he feels an affection and allegiance toward 60 Minutes because he once toured the studio when he was in Junior High, thanks to a family connection. This is part of his explanation for why he felt it necessary, before Truth has even opened, to launch the first of what is sure to be many assaults on the film from the right — and apparently from the left as well.
This is how it goes now. Too many people covering this race, too many people trying to claim a slice of the pie, and before long every daring and provocative movie is savaged and attacked until there is nothing left but the most blandly inoffensive films — because no one can complain about them. Usually, though, this sort of thing happens a little later in the game. Truth, after all, hasn’t even been reviewed by any major outlets. But apparently it is not too soon for the Hollywood Reporter.
Truth tells Mary Mapes’ own first-hand account of events — thus, it is obviously told from her point of view. Feinberg appears to be objecting to the (deserved) skewering 60 Minutes got by not even remotely standing by its reporter. Choosing instead to kowtow to extreme right-wing bloggers who claimed that Mapes was using falsified documents to try to smear Dubya Bush on the eve of his re-election. It should be noted, the story of Bush’s cushy play-date assignment in Texas during the Vietnam war is a fact that remains a fact, even if one piece of evidence cannot be substantiated.
The truth of it is that Mapes had been working on this story for five years prior to the airing of the 60 Minutes segment, which is proof in itself that the story existed with or without the questionable documents. She had two sources do an about face when the shit came down because they were — say it with me now — pressured to do so. Yes, this was a mistake. CBS should probably not have run with the story. But what happened afterward, how Mary Mapes was subsequently treated, how 60 Minutes reacted and made her the scapegoat, is what Truth is ultimately about.
Imagine if Ben Bradlee had bowed to the pressure coming down from the White House while The Washington Post was investigating and reporting on Watergate. Imagine if when Woodward and Bernstein made one mistake (which they do in the film) Bradlee had listened to hysterical extremist bloggers and shut the whole thing down. Worse, what if the Post had assembled a conservative panel to “investigate” the reporters? Imagine if Bradlee has been as weak-willed as the producers at 60 Minutes and fired everyone involved to cover their asses? Yeah, imagine that.
When we see Carl Bernstein verifying names, he needs to have one person he’s calling simply hang up before he finishes counting. That is how he vets the story. Bob Woodward is relying on information from a guy who won’t go on record and calls himself Deep Throat. They were being stalked by thugs from the Nixon administration. Their phones were being tapped. But they had two things on their side: the truth and Ben Bradlee. Mapes had only one thing on her side, the truth. What did she have against her? The internet and all that it has done to help kill journalism in every way imaginable. This story of Mapes and Rather can, in fact, be seen as the final death rattle.
Now imagine 60 Minutes standing behind Mapes and Rather. Imagine them taking a brave stand and working with their reporters to find out if the story really was true or not — let’s say, giving Mapes the benefit of the doubt. Who knows what they might have uncovered. You see, mistakes are made in investigative journalism. The question that needed to be asked was: is the story true? That is what Woodstein believed and why they kept searching for more. If you cut the story off at the first mistake? Well, how can you ever get to the truth?
Or, as this piece in New York Magazine says better:
Unfortunately, in the new world of media, they might have to. Unlike other recent media scandals—Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, USA Today’s Jack Kelly—in which star reporters spent years weaving fake narratives out of whole cloth, the CBS document mess rests ultimately on a mistake, a source who lied, danger signs that were foolishly ignored. Thanks, however, in no small part to CBS’s uniquely favored position as conservatives’ most-hated network, and Dan Rather’s even more distinctive claim to being the right’s most-hated newscaster and unquestionably the oddest duck of the three network anchors, the fact that it is a mistake at the root of the scandal has given CBS not an ounce of reprieve. Which is too bad for Rather and CBS, but maybe worse for investigative reporting. If it has taught the public anything, it might be that the new standard for the media is one in which mistakes are as bad as lies. It is a standard that investigative reporting might find ever harder to live up to, until it is finally swept off the field by the ever-rising tide of commentary, risk-free and mistake-proof.
We’re all about noise these days. Outrage is consumed like Starbucks, then tossed the next day in favor of another outrage. It all becomes so much noise that the original story gets lost in the details. And people who seek to manipulate the media narrative know this all too well.
Mapes eventually endured the modern day equivalent of a witch being burned — cast her out and you cast out all evil in the village! It was a savage witch burning that needed to obliterate her good reputation and all the fine stories she’d already done, and guaranteed that she would never work in network news again.
No one, including Feinberg, bothers to ask: were the memos real? More importantly, is the underlying story still true, even if some of the memos could not be substantiated
That’s the question people should be asking. Mary Mapes vetted the story with two different people, both of whom later reversed their original statements — under duress. Everything else was just wild speculation. She was a good enough reporter to make sure the story was right before it went on the air.
Scott Feinberg says if you go at the King you can’t miss. He says Mapes missed. I say, bullshit. The deceptions spun by the Bush administration and the people who surrounded him make what Nixon did seem like child’s play. This was a coordinated attack. The message then becomes don’t go after the King if his name is Bush because he will go after you. And they have the power to make sure you lose everything.
We see in Truth a precarious situation that became too big to ignore. Once doubt was cast on the documents, and Mapes by association, there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube even though they DID prove both by logical common sense (who would have forged these documents at that level of detail only to then type them up on a computer), and then by discovering that a superscript “th” was a typical peculiarity frequently found on typewritten documents at the time.
Scott tries to explain why he feels CBS is treated unfairly in the film. I hope we can agree, 60 Minutes doesn’t come across too well in The Insider either, but isn’t it good that Michael Mann made that movie? It’s been 11 years since “Rather-gate.” There’s no new Bush who can interfere with our conversation now. So let’s have one.
60 Minutes had already long ago tarnished its reputation with the Big Tobacco story. Once you cross that line — that line that says profit matters over everything else? There’s really no going back.
“None of this is the fault of the actors,” Feinberg reassures us at the end of his piece. No kidding. In fact, it’s to the credit of the actors, the director, and to Mary Mapes herself that they have tackled the task of telling the other side of this story, a story they knew would get their integrity targeted all over again.
Bryce, you’re sinking to Paul Hanlin levels of ignominy with those reviews. Four stars for the risible Scorch Trials and one for the mesmerising Journey to the West? What is this Rex Reed bullshit?
Explain yourself!
Ry — you know how much I esteem you, but after those two swift seconds of LBJ repugnant depiction this film has ruined Medicare for me and my contemporaries. SELMA also guilty of this. I must speak up.
I’m running a parallel/companion piece to what Feinberg wrote over at the The Paris Review — but mine is about the film “JFK” and how much I don’t believe what that movie is trying to tell me. Humph! I’m on page 18 of my first draft. Look for it in our next issue.
I’m running a parallel/companion piece to what Feinberg wrote over at the The Paris Review — but mine is about the film “JFK” and how much I don’t believe what that movie is trying to tell me.
please quit messing up JFK’s chances of ever being in the Sight & Sound Top 10, even though I trust that’s not your deliberate intention, you must surely be aware of the consequences of what you write in a high-profile publication.
Bob Burns
Yeah, it wasn’t pretty but I figured it’s better to take the power away now than allowing myself to get worked up every time I see a variation of the bullshit for months to come.
“I feel exactly the opposite as he does – that it’s going to be one of those really good years with a lot of movies to choose from.”
Let’s also not forget the indie films and blockbusters outside of the race like Love and Mercy, It Follows, Ex Machina, Amy, Paddington, The Gift, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Trainwreck, Straight Outta Compton, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Spy, Far from the Madding Crowd, etc. This year has been terrific so far and I’m excited for what’s ahead of us.
Haven’t seen much yet, dyyyying to. But any year with Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out involved is a pretty good start, for me. Yes, some of the Festival titles expected to be showered with praise are not getting the OMG ink. But so many titles sound interesting and have their champions. Can’t wait to see them!
Re: Kris and Carol – Carol is a provocative piece of art. As it always goes with those not everyone is going to like it but Kris isn’t working any agenda there, i don’t think. As to Spotlight vs. Truth – I think it stems from people saying Truth would take Spotlight’s spot. I don’t know about that. I would love to see both in. As to Scott being an “awards analyst” writing such a strong hit piece? Never seen anything like it, especially from him. He tends to always be at least polite to movies he doesn’t really like. I’ve never seen him attack a movie this publicly before. And I wonder what that’s all about.
That piece by Scott is bewildering in so many ways, it truly makes me feel more sad than aggravated.
I sort of get the trip down memory lane, thinking back to his middle school days and the chance for a teenager to take a tour of the CBS studios. Those first two paragraphs are adorable.
But then we’re thrust into regret and recriminations. Some strange regret that “the first thing many of my contemporaries associate with 60 Minutes are two films which paint the tremendously important and influential program in a less than wonderful light.” Already, I’m thinking: huh? Like, dude, you’re hanging out the with the wrong group of contemporaries if they all jump immediately to the most negative thing about anything that is otherwise so great. You’re actually hanging out with a lot of wrong people if the first thing they think about anything is a movie about that thing.
I mean, yeesh, if we learned anything at all from The Unexpectedly Virtuous But Ignorant Birdman, it was this: “a thing is a thing not what is said of that thing”
And then, instead of any real review of Truth, we get to read a few lines about the verisimilitude of the movie that includes factoids about which side of his head Dan Rather parted his hair, and how Redford makes no attempt in Truth to get Rather’s hairstyle right. okaaay…
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Then Scott ponders: “do Rather and Mapes actually speak in long and grandstanding monologues about journalism, as he does in the film when he rings her up…? Who knows…”
As if the concept of creating message and theme speeches in movie dialogue is an indulgence that no movie before Truth has ever done?
hey, remember last year when all the Oscar pundits were pondering about whether or not Chris Kyle’s father ever actually delivered THIS speech?
Remember when The Hollywood Reporter published a piece before American Sniper was ever RELEASED pondering the unlikelihood that Chris Kyle’s uneducated dad ever uttered such a load of blowhard grandstanding gun-nut bullshit? yeah, me neither.
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I could go on, sentence by sentence, and try to dismantle THR’s attempt to dismantle Truth.
But let’s jump to the thing Scott saves for his coup de grâce. Quoting Omar Little in The Wire:
Scott cites this line almost as if he believes there’s a real King being assaulted, and that “King” would of course be Bush.
(I will say, I’m relieved Scott put “the king” in irony/sarcasm quotes.)
But are we expected to overlook the actual context? Oman Little, as charming as he was in The Wire, was still a ruthless murderer. Like Bush, Omar might like to characterize himself as a “king” but (like Bush) he was still a reckless deceptive purveyor of death.
So it seems unusual to me that this surprising THR takedown would use that line as some sort of delusional ego-inflated trump card to be thrown in the faces of Mapes and Rather. Because why? Because these journalists should have been thinking in the same terms that “even a street gangster managed to figure out”?
THR wants to publish a piece to undermine the message of Truth by quoting a desperate gangster who has just finished gunning down his rival with a sneak attack? Wow. Talk about amBush.
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And anyway, as Sasha makes clear in her level-headed piece, the message of Truth is less about the sadly moot point of whether or not Bush was a cowardly liar or not. That shit is a given.
The more important message of Truth seems to me to be much sadder. It’s a tale of the way the news media, even a pinnacle of news integrity like 60 Minutes, can become corrupted. The 4th Estate we need to rely on to reveal what’s wrong with the Powers That Be — that corporate media now allows noise-makers on social “media” to intimidate them into ruining the careers of actual dedicated journalists who have devoted their lives to digging up the Truth.
And THR wants to jump into this important debate by piling on top of Mapes and Rather once again, dwelling on trifles like “Did Rather and Mapes really have a father-daughter bond? Perhaps — but isn’t it odd that…” erm…
hey, listen, if Dan Rather gets choked up watching the way his relationship with Mary Mapes is depicted in Truth, how about we give the genuine emotional reaction of this distinguished news legend the benefit of the doubt, and TRUST that he is reacting to what he recognizes as the REALITY of what he experienced.
That’s something Dan Rather said without turning to a gangster on The Wire to be his moral compass.
More megaweekend updates:
THE SCORCH TRIALS (Ball) – My heart is still racing. Stunning action, adrenaline, emotion, big ideas. En route to be the best YA adaption by a country mile. I can’t wait for the grand finale. ★★★★ (B+)
EVEREST (Kormakur) — Good faces, but you’re better off staying home streaming VERTICAL LIMIT. Contemptible misuse of Kiera Knightley. ★½ (D)
JOURNEY TO THE WEST (Tsai) — Are you shitting me with this shit? ★ (D-)
I totally agree that it seems bizarre that THR would let their “awards analyst” write a piece like that without even talking about the merits of the film at all, before it even opens. That screams of some other agenda at work here. Has he ever gone after another movie that way? It doesn’t even have anything to do with Truth’s awards chances. It really stands out that he would even write something like that, in my opinion. Weird.
I never got the inkling Tapley did “smears”. He championed films he loved but he always seemed to take a pretty objective approach to what he was watching. If he didn’t like Truth then that’s one thing, Carol too. But if he’s pitting them against other movies so “there can be only one” then that’s something I haven’t read before.
Kris Tapley also seems to be trying to pit Spotlight and Truth against each other (to the detriment of the latter).
Sasha, I’ve noticed Kris trying to diminish Carol every chance he gets. For whatever reason he “just didn’t get it,” but my perception is that he’s trying to squash any run it has at the big awards.
Um yeah Kris is an idiot. .. tomorrow seeing black mass and everest on imax. .. woot!
A little bummed to see Kris Tapley write that he thought this year’s Oscar slate was “weak” so far. I don’t know where he gets thate or at least I can say I can’t relate at all. With Spotlight, Room, Mad Max, Steve Jobs, Truth, Suffragette, 45 Years – these are great movies. I feel exactly the opposite as he does – that it’s going to be one of those really good years with a lot of movies to choose from.
Honestly, it’s sad to me that THR gave an “awards analyst” the opportunity to address a film in a way other than through the lens of awards weight or as an actual bit of film criticism. He barely discusses the merits of the FILM.
We don’t need think-pieces from an awards columnists about whether or not a film should have been made. Sorry.
Good God, Phantom. After that you might need an exorcism…. opening your soul to the publicist demons. Brave but foolhardy?
Oh, fuck no. Already ? All right, let’s just get these out of the way then :
1. Carol is boring (= about (gay) women) so it doesn’t deserve Oscars.
2. “Steve Jobs” has no respect for Steve Jobs : he is an asshole in the movie which is rather disrespectful considering he was an asshole in real life…oh, wait. Oh, who cares, the film is shit.
3. Suffragette just isn’t good enough (= too many women behind the camera).
4. Son of Saul refuses to be American (= voters can’t be bothered to read subtitles)
5. Mad Max is overrated (= “we just don’t get it”).
6. Inside Out is a kids movie (= “we just don’t WANT to get it”).
7. Beasts of No Nation is too brutal (= “we don’t do “realistic””)
8. Brie Larson (Room) is not pretty enough therefore her film is bad/boring (she may not be a jenniferlawrencesque bombshell but she still is a unique beauty).
9. Black Mass is shit and Johnny Depp once again just plays a weirdo (= the film is just OK and he is not conventional enough for our taste).
10. If Spotlight wins anything, it’s because the Academy/Hollywood/the entire world hates Christians.
11. Emily Blunt (Sicario) finds the GOP debate ridiculous so clearly she hates America therefore shouldn’t be nominated for an Oscar.
12. Malala should stop milking it (=she is a young girl who should know her place and shut her mouth).
13. Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl, Ex Machina, The Testament of Youth) is overrated already (like fuck she is).
14. 45 Years (or Youth for that matter) is a boring film because it is about old people (=not sexy enough).
15. Marion Cotillard (Macbeth) is a bad actress because she has an accent.
16. Amy Schumer (Trainwreck) deserves nothing because her film is trashy (=unapologetically funny) and she is a bitch (= a woman with opinions).
17. If Cate Blanchett dared to deliver another performance worthy of awards talk, she is overrated and should just go away. Ditto Meryl Streep.
18. Kristen Stewart (Clouds of Sils Maria) shouldn’t be nominated because she is a bad actress (= starred in a bad franchise and a bunch of good/great indies), doesn’t smile in public (= isn’t fake and bubbly all the fucking time) and may even be bisexual (= which is a double edged sword because if she is, she is a bitch for not coming out because clearly she is not allowed to keep her private life private, and if she isn’t, she is just an attention whore).
19. Blythe Danner (I’ll see you in my dreams) is only in the conversation because she is Gwyneth Paltrow’s mother and definitely not because she is a respected, beloved Tony and Emmy winning veteran who at last got the chance to carry a critically acclaimed indie hit.
20. Jane Fonda (Youth) doesn’t deserve acclaim because she is Hanoi Jane. Also she should be run out of the country.
21. The Martian is just a light tentpole (=”we don’t do genre”).
22. Spectre is just another Bond film (=”we don’t do genre”).
22. Angelina Jolie is the worst director of all time (=”she is too pretty and has too much so we hate her extra hard”).
23. Quentin Tarantino is mediocre and repetitive therefore Hateful Eight is shit that deserves nada.
24. Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu doesn’t deserve back to back Oscars not even if The Revenant dares to be a masterpiece for the ages.
25. Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant) is just so desperate to win an Oscar that he continues to refuse to do bad movies and embarrassingly enough delivered another great performance.
26. There were better Best Actor contenders than Sir Ian McKellen (Mr. Holmes). Meaning, his film was released too early and we can’t be bothered to remember anything before November.
27. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a flop (= a critical hit but it dares to be about teenagers so clearly we can’t take it seriously).
28. The Danish Girl is shit and if it wins anything it’s only because the campaign is milking the transgender wave (= we hate transgender people).
29. Brooklyn is boring (=about a woman).
30. Jennifer Lawrence is a bad actress (= dared to win an Oscar young).
P.S. Don’t take this word by word, people, clearly I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. But you get what I mean. The nasty, baseless, ridiculous and annoying trashtalk that is inevitable during Oscar season, clearly will be present this year, too. I just summed up the most likely attacks we’ll probably encounter in the next few months, so we can all get this bullshit out of our system and then just ignore them when they rear the ugly heads in a couple of weeks. And for the record the Academy can’t be blamed solely, a lot of the nonsense BS comes from us, Oscar watchers…shame. I know.
I wonder if this piece was instigated by publicists trying to take down a potential rival. My guess is that Feinberg is acting like a lone wolf bomber, though, eager to do the bidding of the right wing mullahs, given the opportunity.
Yeh, this is a rly great article. One of your best, Sasha. Eloquent, succinct, and appropriately outraged in precisely the right manner. Fab stuff, and worthy too.
Beautifully written, Sasha. Thank you.
Don’t underestimate the number of people who will read and then talk about this piece that you’ve written.
I’m trying to figure out what group I would defend the way that Scott Feinberg did with the group of 60 Minutes. I can’t think of any at the moment. It’s interesting that Scott felt it neccessary to defend them from the film.
I like the comparison you made to All the President’s Men Sasha. That was a great film as was others like it, like Good Night, and Good Luck.
Yass, drag him!!
I thought the same when I read that article, Sasha.