The first time I saw All the President’s Men was in my freshman year in college. I graduated from Point Park College (now Point Park University) in Pittsburgh, which at the time was known mainly for two majors, journalism/communications and performing arts. Because of the performing arts side, the college had a playhouse/movie theater out in the east end of the city, and we got free admission as Point Park students to any movie or performance.

These movies would be a combination of recent releases and some classics, and this is where I saw All the President’s Men. Robert Redford played Bob Woodward, who, along with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman), brought down the Nixon presidency via the Watergate scandal.

If you are reading this blog, I assume you know the story and know the movie. For me, it was the second cinematic kick in the pants as far as what I wanted to do as a career. The first was “Under Fire,” a movie starring Nick Nolte, Gene Hackman, and Joanna Cassidy. I caught it on cable when I was in high school. Nolte played a photojournalist in war-torn Central America, and since I was heavily into photography, it made me want to become a person who takes photos that make a difference. This is why I ended up at Point Park in the first place.

But it was Redford and Hoffman who made me turn to writing. All the President’s Men portrayed newspaper journalism as it was in the early-mid 1970s, without any Hollywood sensationalism. Redford’s understated acting chops really shone through in this key scene, when Woodward gets a key building block for the story they had been building.

Then, of course, there are the classic scenes of Woodward in the DC parking garage where he met his infamous contact, Deep Throat, played impeccably by Hal Holbrook. Deep Throat turned out to be W. Mark Felt, who served as the Associate Director of the FBI at the time, something that wasn’t known until 30 years after the movie. This particular scene has three incredible things in it: Deep Throat’s “the truth is these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand” statement about the Nixon White House, the deeply creepy story about White House burglar G. Gordan Liddy holding his hand in a candle flame as a party trick, and the famous line that you probably have heard many times, “follow the money.”

Scenes like these launched many writing careers, including some great ones. When word of Redford’s passing hit the world this week, I thought not only of his fine work in this movie, but how far the mainstream media has fallen when responding to an authoritarian grab of power by a president.

Woodward has moved on to write books of varying value. His Trump books are fairly well done, but he was a cheerleader for the Iraq War and was hoodwinked into believing Dubya’s WMD lies. No one’s perfect, I suppose. However, his former employer has fallen even further.

As you may have heard, Charlie Kirk’s murder led to a rash of firings of people deemed not to be mourning Kirk’s death hard enough, and this included Karen Attiah, who was the Post’s sole Black opinion writer before her dismissal. Matthew Dowd, a former Dubya staffer, was canned by MSNBC under similar circumstances. While not a journalist, Jimmy Kimmel’s dismissal by ABC was also similar.

The mainstream media’s approach to the destruction of our democracy has not been strong enough, often falling back on both-siderism and outdated journalistic standards of perceived fairness that even prevent these outlets from telling plain truths about Trump’s authoritarian methods. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein’s response to the Charlie Kirk murder has been maddening, whitewashing his horrifying and hateful statements and beliefs.

The reluctance and/or refusal to call Trump an authoritarian is maddening. It is also dangerous, as this excellent piece in The Conversation points out.

This is not the kind of journalism that inspired a generation of young scribes to pick up a pen and notebook. Robert Redford’s passing, at least for me, was a reminder that our current media is a far cry from the one that challenged dangerous Oval Office corruption more than 50 years ago, one that Redford portrayed so well.

The last word goes to Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson.