All President’s Men and Spotlight are films about two important scandals of corruption that affected two powerful American institutions: the government and the Catholic church. However, both films instead of focusing on the scandals themselves, they narrate it from the perspective of the journalists who investigate both cases. As Renée Loth says in one of her articles “both films are talky, true-life procedurals about the grinding, essential work of investigative journalism”. They are about the process of news gathering to expose the corruption of those institutions.
All President’s Men (1976) is a film directed by Alan J. Pakula that narrates how two reporters of the Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal, the biggest political case …show more content…
That did not occur in the era of Spotlight in which, as Loth says, “the mood can only be called elegiac” as the film seems like “an artifact of an earlier time”. And that is true because comparing both films it seems that time has not passed between them and that both were shot during the same period. Same setting (the newspaper office), same use of resources, similar way of gather news. The only difference that could be appreciate at first sight is the new technologies that appear in Spotlight. However, although there are a lot of similarities between both films, there are also differences. One has to do with the type of reporters that carry out each investigation. As I commented before, when All President’s Men was shot, investigative journalism was on its peak. Because of that, we can infer that newspapers could have a team specialized only in that type of journalism that was exclusively focused on it. However, it is not the case regarding the Watergate scandal. The Washington Post was the “dominant daily newspaper in Washington D.C. during the late twentieth and early twenty-one centuries” (Brooke Kroeger), and it is one of the newspapers involved in the development of investigative journalism in the U.S. Its highlight is the publication of the Watergate scandal, however, it was already known by the publication of other investigative reports such as The Pentagon Papers, a series of articles of a classified Pentagon report that “made clear that the US had been involved in Vietnam far longer than most Americans realized” (Brooke Kroeger). Saying that, maybe the newspaper could have a team focusing only in that type of journalism, but it is not the case. In All President’s Men we see how the editor chief of the Washington Post assigned two fellows, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to gather
All President’s Men (1976) is a film directed by Alan J. Pakula that narrates how two reporters of the Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal, the biggest political case …show more content…
That did not occur in the era of Spotlight in which, as Loth says, “the mood can only be called elegiac” as the film seems like “an artifact of an earlier time”. And that is true because comparing both films it seems that time has not passed between them and that both were shot during the same period. Same setting (the newspaper office), same use of resources, similar way of gather news. The only difference that could be appreciate at first sight is the new technologies that appear in Spotlight. However, although there are a lot of similarities between both films, there are also differences. One has to do with the type of reporters that carry out each investigation. As I commented before, when All President’s Men was shot, investigative journalism was on its peak. Because of that, we can infer that newspapers could have a team specialized only in that type of journalism that was exclusively focused on it. However, it is not the case regarding the Watergate scandal. The Washington Post was the “dominant daily newspaper in Washington D.C. during the late twentieth and early twenty-one centuries” (Brooke Kroeger), and it is one of the newspapers involved in the development of investigative journalism in the U.S. Its highlight is the publication of the Watergate scandal, however, it was already known by the publication of other investigative reports such as The Pentagon Papers, a series of articles of a classified Pentagon report that “made clear that the US had been involved in Vietnam far longer than most Americans realized” (Brooke Kroeger). Saying that, maybe the newspaper could have a team focusing only in that type of journalism, but it is not the case. In All President’s Men we see how the editor chief of the Washington Post assigned two fellows, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to gather