I wonder if there's a journalism student out there who hasn't in some way been affected by Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men. It has to be responsible for at least half of the majors in journalism since it came out back in 1976. I know my image of journalism, real journalism, the journalism I wish I were going into, is lifted almost verbatim from that film. Like many students, I assume, I watched it in an actual journalism class, my newspaper class when I was a freshman in high school. Watching it today in a film class brought back memories of that time, when I eagerly wrote articles designed to be provocative and controversial.
My big story that year was "Goths, punks not individuals"--a far cry from bringing down the president and many of his underlings with a series of Washington Post articles about Watergate. But it caused a minor stir at Auburn High School that year, or at least it seemed so to me. I asserted that the many black-clad, hair-dyed, lip-pierced kids who always clustered in the commons were laughably conformist despite their noisy claims to the contrary. I was excited when it came out because upperclassmen in newspaper had praised it. The day it came out, the girl who sat next to me in newspaper warned me that her goth friends were out for blood. Apparently people were muttering my name in the hallways. While it made me nervous--I remember being scared to walk through the commons--it also thrilled me. Two years later, my scathing editorial criticizing the hall monitors for verbally abusing students and treating them as "innocent until proven guilty" caused even more of a stir. Then too, I was partly embarrassed and even annoyed at the attention, especially the hall monitors' open dislike of me after that, but I also loved the feel of commanding attention and investigating issues with my words.
Watching the movie today brought some of that back, at least a little. I'm now a third-year journalism major, and I've had the chance to work on some fun and interesting pieces for class and for the Wake, the student magazine I write for. I still love to write, and I still love the feeling of following a story, going from one source to the next, running around campus to meet up with interview subjects and find events. Even though Woodward and Bernstein's investigation in the film is difficult and largely frustrating, as door after door closes in their face and their daring assertions in the paper are contradicted by top officials, their performances convey a kind of joy in the process. It's fun for reporters to ferret out a story, and when the stakes are that high it must be especially exhilarating.
It's a little sad because journalism, though it certainly still involves reporting and investigating, just isn't like that anymore. You don't struggle to meet an evening deadline so your story can be rushed to the presses and land on people's doorsteps the next morning. It's about the Internet and convergence and phones and blogs and citizen journalists. It's a world I don't even know about being part of; right now I'm pretty sure I'm not actually going to pursue a career in journalism. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life; there are possibilities floating around but few concrete plans. It seems kind of sad to me now that all those years of working and writing and aspiring to be like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman with their '70s haircuts and cigarettes will come to nothing.
(Note: This is a bit of a cheat because I'd already seen the movie and I watched it in class. But I'll watch two movies tomorrow or the next day to compensate.)
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