Hacker Cinema
The Post
2017 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Steven Spielberg
A cover-up that spanned four U.S. Presidents pushed the country's first female newspaper publisher and a hard-driving editor to join an unprecedented battle between journalist and government. Inspired by true events.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Post_(film)
Interestingly enough, that was an event related to classified information with the same newspaper.
> Set in 1971, The Post depicts the true story of attempts by journalists at The Washington Post to publish the infamous Pentagon Papers, a set of classified documents regarding the 20-year involvement of the United States government in the Vietnam War and earlier in French Indochina back to the 1940s.
> In the 2017 film The Post, Daniel Ellsberg, portrayed by Matthew Rhys, is seen using a Xerox 914 to copy the Pentagon Papers.
This is annoying. What copier model did the real Ellsberg use? If it was the same model, each full copy of the 7000 page study would have taken him at least 16 hours 39 minutes under perfectly ideal conditions of 7 pages per minute. Ellsberg made at least 18 full copies, and I can't imagine he didn't make at least one for himself, which, again, under perfectly ideal conditions without breaks is 13 full 24 hour days, 4 hours 40 minutes. 133,000 pages of copies spread over the 18 months (~547.5 days) it actually took Ellsberg to make the copies is an average of nearly 243 copies a day, and under perfectly ideal conditions of 7 pages per minute, at an absolute minimum took an average of about 35 minutes every day. I wonder how long it took Snowden to copy 1.7M classified documents. Assuming one page per hardcopy document and only one copy, if he used a Xerox 914, at a bare unattainable ideal minimum, 168 days 15 hours 37 minutes straight, and averaging 243 copies a day, it would have taken him 19 years and two months for each copy.
> Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, All the President’s Men, or The Post
Those movies are also propaganda, but in a more subtle and effective way; The message of these movies being that while america sometimes makes mistakes, in the end the american has a good heart and conscience and should be forgiven.
You don’t see in these movies american soldiers raping civilans, laughing about it, and suffering no ill consequences
Interesting to see this shortly after the release of the movie The Post. Obama attempted something similar. Basically Nixon had more respect for the independence of the press than current administrations.
This is the one compelling argument in this subthread. Thank you.
Hollywood has a long history of entanglement with the CIA and DoD in general. (How do you think so many war movies get access to equipment?) The Post was produced by Stephen Spielberg, an entertainer, not a typical careful documentarian. The social purpose of the movie is to soothe liberals at a time when their minds are being fractured by DJT and cries of "fake news". I wouldn't put it past Hollywood and the military to take this prime opportunity to insert propaganda via framing and selection of quotes.
Of course, I can't prove it that this is how this quote came to be, but what I can with certainty is to be skeptical of taking away core moral and factual positions from mass political entertainment and be doubly skeptical of claims (referring to the original claim sans movie) that come from the intelligence services (whose job it is to lie cheat and steal, duh).
EDIT: Here's an example of the CIA getting involved in the movie business https://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/the_cias_insidious_hollywood_propaganda_new_report_highlights_alarming_details_about_zero_dark_thirty/
> The Post is a movie about the Washington Post, which has a large undisclosed financial conflict of interest with the CIA.
A conflict of interest would be relevant, in different ways, if it was current with the events that the movie is about, or if the movie was produced by the Post.
But neither of those is true, sonit seems to be a non-sequitur.
The Post is a movie about the Washington Post, which has a large undisclosed financial conflict of interest with the CIA. Jeff Bezos's AWS has a large CIA contract, and Bezos owns the Post. Getting a take about leakers in such a movie is not the best way to acquire a real picture of the world.
The CIA only locks up brown people and tortures them in Thailand (star). It refers US leakers to the FBI which throws them into lonely prisons, terrifies, and abuses them.
EDIT: (star) Or rather it did. That's what Gina Haspel, our new CIA director nominee, is famous for.
EDIT2: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/why-the-washington-posts_b_4587927.html
The notion that leakers are driven in part by ego was not invented by the CIA. It's well-known and exploited by reporters.
As an example there's a short discussion in the recent movie The Post where Post reporters are trying to figure out who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Ben Bagdikian says something like these guys are always a bit of a showboat and it leads him to remember Ellsberg at Rand.
EDIT to add: the CIA is interested in why people leak because the #1 job of the CIA is to create leakers in other countries.
You mention locking people up, but that is not the CIA's job. The FBI is the counter-intelligence lead in the U.S.
So much craft is lost! In the Spielberg movie "The Post" there are some wonderful scenes of type setting using boards and lead. I also enjoyed the scene where the printed, folded newspapers ran on a huge conveyer belt until they were taken and collected for delivery. When I graduated from high-school, we got the final results from the morning newspaper. Hundreds of us and our parents got up before dawn, drove downtown, and waited until the huge doors of the paper delivery dock opened. Kids whose job was to sell papers on the street ran out and made a bonanza day selling the first edition to us. What followed were the cheers and tears you would expect. The day is etched permanently in my memory. No comparison with an email congratulating me and enclosing my transcript.