bobzmcishl I saw The Post this week and decided to also watch Truth at home to compare two stories about journalism and the media. I found Truth to be just as compelling a story as The Post, with a steller cast and screenplay, with plenty of drama, even though I knew the general outlines of the story and the outcome for those at CBS News. I did not know a lot of the details about how CBS, Mary Makes, and Dan Rather were caught up in some unfortunate mistakes that had little bearing on the veracity of the claims about Lt. George W. Bush and his time in the Air National Guard. This story paints an even larger story about how corporations react to bad publicity and right wing pressures that if anything have gotten worse over time. The movie does a good job in presenting how much fact checking is involved in major news stories, and how easily it can all become unraveled through a series of small errors that add up to one large error. The movie makes a strong case for the truth of the story hence the title of the movie. Cate Blanchett is outstanding as Mary Mapes and Robert Redford is excellent as Dan Rather, and the supporting cast is uniformly excellent. This is a movie that contains top flight actors across the board. Do yourself a favor and watch this movie. It is a worthwhile two hour investment.

Art Vandelay In 2015 who could possible give a sh$$ whether a former (by 7 years already) president skipped out on his National Guard duty It's like Contarded-Americans blathering on about Obama's birth certificate after he's out of office. Nobody cares. They're in the history books So if some picayune detail about George II can't possible hold viewers' interest - I was bored to death by the time Topher Grace showed up 15 minutes in - are we supposed to care about the journalists? Nobody has ever heard of Mary Mapes or any of the other clowns in this drama not named Dan Rather. And Rather was a caricature of a self-satire of a self-important TV talking head years - maybe decades - before the events told in this story. On the other hand I did learn that Rather pounded A&W Root Beer-sized mugs of scotch. So I guess that's something.

codefool This is a very good film. The cinematography, writing, acting, pacing, and most everything else just works. Particularly satisfying is Redford's portrayal of Rather, while not an impression or imitation, treats the man with the respect which is his due. Based on Ms. Mapes's book covering the "Rathergate" scandal, it tends to cover both sides of the issue - was the story politically motivated? The film says "No!" but the words say "Yes!" It's left up to the viewer to decide - which is a welcome and refreshing movie experience in the days of Michael Moore leftist propaganda.The problem I have with the story is the constant assertion that the CBS 60-Minutes news team did no thing other than pursue the truth. This is not the case by the film's own revelations. The team starts off with a clue that George W. Bush was AWOL during his "privileged" tour in the Texas Air National Guard, and that he was "released early" so he could attend Harvard. At times it reads like Stone's JFK with conspiracy theories flying about and fingers pointing at enlarged documents on the wall, building this "solid" case that Bush was deliberately put out of harms way because of who he is while others died in Vietnam. While the film does touch on John Kerry's "purple heart" debacle - it fails to mention stronger issues such as Bill Clinton being the beneficiary of friends in high places regarding Vietnam. The 60-Minutes crew has just one problem - they can't find any collaborating evidence to support their theory. They call everyone they can find and it isn't that no one is willing to talk about it, but they are constantly told there is no story here and getting hung up on. "No stings were pulled" they are constantly told. Suspecting that everyone is afraid of Bush, and rather than "following the facts to the truth," they continue to dig, and end up finding Bill Burkett, who has copies of two memos that seem to suggest that Bush was AWOL from the Air National Guard. They don't say that, but it's what Mapes WANTS to believe, and so they go with it. AWOL stands for "Away Without Leave" which means a soldier who has orders to be at a post at a certain time was not - in fact - there at that time and in violation of those orders. A soldier is not AWOL if he is away WITH permission - something the film glosses over. That is, we never know if Bush has permission or not - just that he was not on base to be evaluated - according to the memos.They try to have the documents authenticated, and two of the four experts refuse to do it because they are not originals. Mapes pushes forward, backed by the belief that even if the memos themselves are fakes, the information on them is at least true, and that's good enough. They put the story together, and because 60-Minutes is being pre-emptied by - shudder, a Billy Graham crusade - they decide to push the story out in four days rather than - well - actually baking the story more before rushing it to air. According to the film, they were editing footage seconds before air time. But, it would seem, it was more important to get "the truth" out about Bush in the election year sooner than later, then say, do their jobs.Calamity ensues after the airing, with everyone pointing out the very obvious proportional fonts used in the memos, the fact that they were copies of copies, the New Times Roman Font, and a silly stunt about the super- scripted "th" which indicate that the memos were produced using Microsoft Word. They actually dig through boxes of documents looking for a super-scripted "th" to "prove" that it was possible in 1972 to have a typewriter with such a feature. Tap-dancing and straw- grasping at its most desperate.The film ends with an inquest, where Mapes defends the memos insisting that they must be real because of the intimate knowledge a forger would have to possess in order to create them, but then make the ridiculous mistake of creating them using Microsoft Word. That alone screams that the documents should not have been trusted, but Mapes did anyway because - well - you can't un-ring a bell and if it gets Kerry elected then it's all in being on the Right Side of History. Yet, it still doesn't excuse why the memo format wasn't questioned until it was pointed out to them. The punch line is that Mapes needed them to be true so they could smear Bush. Right or wrong, true or false, the story was run to smear Bush, which is NOT pursuance of the truth even if it should end up being the truth.The film never takes a solid position on Bush, and I think that's the point. What is the truth here? It's left up to the viewer.

katz6 This film came out in the twilight of the Obama years, and it's now 2017, and how the country has changed. I resisted seeing this film because I knew it would make me angry. And it did. But that does not take away from the story, and especially the acting. This film is more about Mary Mapes than Dan Rather, and the roller-coaster ride she and her crack team of reporters (all beautifully played by Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Moss, and particularly Topher Grace) took while investigating the military background of soon-to-be-re-elected George W. Bush. Although I have not researched this myself to confirm, the film mentions that Mapes, Rather and CBS wanted more time to verify the sources and evidence, but "60 Minutes" and other hard news programs were being relegated to late hours with millions of less viewers, to be replaced by evangelical programming and reality TV shows. In the end, the film is about how hard news was once, as Rather says at the end, a big draw for viewership. Americans had an insatiable appetite for the truth. The Watergate Hearings in the summer of 1973 was the top rated show of the summer. I am old enough to remember the days when "60 Minutes" was the number one viewed show for years in a row. This was when most Americans had only 4 or 5 networks on TV to pick from (the big three, plus an independent station or two, and PBS; Fox did not arrive until much later). The elimination of the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987 by the Reagan Administration allowed news networks to air on cable presenting woefully one-sided material without a requirement to present the other side. This led to Fox News on the right, and MSNBC on the left (although I would argue MSNBC does in fact present the other side with Morning Joe and other conservative- leaning anchors). Fox News does not...liberal guests or, in the case of Alan Colmes, anchors, were there to be whipping material, and were shouted down or cut off completely by the conservatives.We are now living in an era of over 500 cable channels, not to mention the internet (and the internet will probably be the one place where Americans can get unfiltered truthful journalism; that is, if the Trump administration does not eliminate net neutrality). Americans are more interested in sports, reality TV, and Game of Thrones, and have been turned off by the news, with the exception of the 70+ Fox News addicts out there (who are akin to heroin addicts). When Dish Network threatened to drop Fox News from their roster, because NewsCorp raised the rates (and it was Dish's free market decision to do so), I saw posts by Fox News addicts complaining that they could not sleep "without their fix of Fox News." Thanks to this brainwashing, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Time Magazine, etc. have been dubbed "fake news," while the National Enquirer and New York Post are trusted by this group as "legitimate." Something the real Rather has been fairly vocal about. But I digress. If they could turn back time, would Mapes, Rather, and CBS had waited until after the election to present the story, or not, if the sources had been revealed to be inaccurate as they were? Who knows. It is a fascinating story, and although many right wingers in my family adamantly refuse to watch the film because of its story, the "liberal actors," and their irrational hatred of Dan Rather ("a traitor and a commie" to them), the movie is not the extreme left wing film they may imagine. The Oscar-winning "Spotlight" actually had more of a left slant than "Truth."Robert Redford as Dan Rather is a revelation. Redford doesn't look much like Rather, but he's mastered Rather's mannerisms and vocal style in the same way Christopher Plummer mastered Mike Wallace in "The Insider." Seeing this film some 40 years after "All the President's Men" was released is also interesting; how much news has changed, regardless of media outlet. And Cate Blanchett as Mapes...what can I say, an incredible performance. Watch out Meryl Streep--Cate Blanchett is on your heels as the greatest female actor on the planet today. The film could have been a little longer to flesh out some characters (Moss more or less disappears after the first half), but highly recommended. Especially in this era when "facts" are being deemed as "fake news" by the current President, while conspiracy theories (as the Republicans called the story Mapes broke in 2004) are being called "real news." I didn't hear a fraction of the anger the Republicans displayed in 2004 from the Democrats when Fox News called Barack Obama a "non American."