Peter Bart: Even In The Movies, Media’s Quest For Objectivity Has Been A Lost Cause

“Politics is poisonous – even in making movies.”

Those were the words of William Goldman, the gifted screenwriter, who was finishing his script for All the President’s Men in 1972, when his director told him to quit writing. It seems Robert Redford, the co-star, had a new take on his character and he would take over the writing.

Goldman was shocked. His director, Alan Pakula, was depressed. The movie was stalled. Ultimately, Redford pumped up the polemics, the script was finished and the movie was a hit. But for Goldman and Pakula, the lesson was clear: No more political movies; too up tight and personal.

I was reminded of this incident this week when a network executive told me, “Objective coverage won’t stand a chance in the 2024 election. Look at the early mess in covering the Trump trials” – week two of the civil trial began Tuesday, with four criminal trials to come.

The executive is far from alone. “Trump will hijack coverage until the fact-checkers want to shoot themselves,” one on-air anchor says.

The nightmare goal of “objective” coverage dominates two thoughtful new books about media written by Martin Baron, retired editor of the Washington Post (he was depicted on screen in the the Oscar-winning Spotlight by then-Ray Donovan star Liev Schreiber) and Adam Nagourney, a veteran reporter of the New York Times. Both deal (in part) with the challenging impact of Trumpism.

And, taken together, both implicitly raise this question: Is “objectivity’ a realistic goal in covering contemporary politics? Would it be more realistic for TV or print organizations to acknowledge that political news takes on greater clarity and intelligibility when the façade of objective truth is dropped?

Both Baron and Nagourney are firm believers in the theoretical pursuit of ”truth.” Yet both have also witnessed how truth is often annihilated by instant disinformation.

As editor of the Boston Globe, Baron valiantly supported his reporting troops in exposing stories about pedophile priests. Spotlight disclosed the personal and commercial hazards entailed in that crusade. At the Washington Post, Baron’s reporters over the years have survived bitter entanglements in revealing even relatively trivial stories like the Billy Bush tapes.

Trump jumped from ally to enemy toward Baron and his paper’s inexperienced new owner Jeff Bezos in those struggles.

Baron’s resilience contrasted to the turbulence at the New York Times, where as many as seven executive editors came and went because of controversies about breaking news.

While the Times’ editors idealistically pursued objectivity, their newspaper over the years occasionally fell victim to journalistic “truth tellers” on the staff — those who went on ideological tangents about Iraq or Cuba, one even plagiarizing stories from other papers. (Full disclosure: I was a Times political reporter for eight years pursuing the rigors of objectivity. Ronald Reagan once praised the fairness of my coverage, adding: “You probably aren’t a progressive like your colleagues.”)

Nagourney himself has won wide praise for his reporting and testifies to his newspaper’s consistently high principles. He acknowledges, however, that members of his community can display “sprawling egos and chronic insecurity,” traits mirroring those of the prominent sources they cover.

The issue of objectivity is presently playing out most dramatically on cable television, where the new leaders of CNN have rededicated the network to centrist coverage, rather than advocacy on the left or right. Critics have attributed the vastly superior ratings of Fox News and MSNBC to their skill in promoting their most sharply opinionated anchors.

“In cable news, advocacy is defeating objectivity,” comments one anchor, “and as the election approaches this trend will be exacerbated.”

Will a free press survive? Growing up, my parents subscribed to one newspaper on the right and another on the left, reflecting their bias. I read both. The upshot: I ended up in the smug no-man’s-land of the muddled middle.