Talking Points Memo

Last week, America lost a real one, as the kids say. Robert Redford was undoubtedly one of the towering figures in the history of cinema, having starred in classics like The Sting, The Candidate, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, The Natural, and so many more. He even gave us one of the all-time memes.
 

And of course, Redford played Bob Woodward in All The President's Men, the film adaptation of the book by the same name written by Woodard and Carl Bernstein about their reporting on Watergate. We'll assume this requires no additional context or explanation.
 

I often wonder what impact All The President's Men had on American journalism, along with the perception of what journalism is and what journalism ought to be. Journalism is many things. Perhaps the most fundamental,  broad definition is the recording and transmission of information. The world's first "newspapers" were mostly designed to help the royal courts of one place understand what was going on in the royal courts of another place. Other newspapers might list basic information — how much things cost, what was going on in wars, things like that. The idea of holding the government accountable, exposing corruption — things modern readers associate with journalism — didn't come along until much later. So-called "Muckrakers" like Ida Tarbell, who reported on John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, didn't come around until the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they helped end the Gilded Age. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the term "Watchdog Journalism" gained common currency.
 

It's important to keep this context in mind because for most of recorded history, journalism and journalists were not in the business of holding anyone accountable. They were in the business of selling people information that was valuable. Or they were in the business of selling ad space, which meant it behooved newspaper moguls to sell as many papers as they could, however they could. 

In other words, if you find a newsroom that is committed to reporting on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust, you should support that newsroom however you can because they are abnormal. It may seem like this is a basic tenet of journalism and that this is what all journalists set out to do, but that is, unfortunately, a romanticisation of the craft. Perhaps that ought to be what all journalism is about. But the fact is that it's often been the job of the independent and even dissident media to hold the powerful accountable and highlight corruption.

TPM, fortunately for you, is one of the newsrooms that exists to do this kind of work. We live in corrupt times. It's somewhat fashionable to say so. But TPM's been on this for the entirety of its 25 year history. As David Kurtz pointed out in yesterday's Morning Memo:

Nearly 20 years ago, TPM cut its chops on the 2006-07 U.S. attorney scandal. The Bush II-era firings of Republican U.S. attorneys for failing to be aggressive enough in pursuing bogus voter fraud charges led to congressional hearings and eventually the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.

It all seems almost quaint now by the standards of Donald Trump.

Redford, I think, would have agreed. Though he only played a journalist on the big screen, he was known to pen an op-ed from time to time. In 2024, he endorsed Kamala Harris saying,  "I don't know about you, but I don't hear anyone asking to hobble our government, toss science out the window and slam the brakes on climate action. Nobody, that is, except Trump and his billionaire buddies, who want to take us back to the days of a political spoils system that served corporate robber barons and left our kids to pay the price."

Journalism alone can't stop the return of the robber barons, but stopping the robber barons will absolutely require good journalism. We hope you'll support ours.