Steven Spielberg's new movie "The Post" depicts a newspaper's decision to defy the government, risk its financial health and imprisonment of its editors to report a hard truth and defend the First Amendment rights of the press by publishing the Pentagon Papers.
After The Washington Post's decision to inform the American people that top government officials had known that the Vietnam War was unwinnable yet had repeatedly lied about it for years, editor Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks) dumps a pile of out-of-town newspapers on a desk for publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) to see. We've started a "rebellion," Bradlee informs Graham. We're no longer alone in speaking truth to power.
No way would that happen today.
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