Lions for Lambs

Anyone who's ever had a passing interest in media and the ethical politics that come with it, should see this movie. I'm not sure I agree with all the decisions the director made for Meryl Streep's character, but it was extremely well written and very timely.

Even though I should know better by now, I still tend to fall back into that assumption that when a newspaper or TV newscast releases a story, it's a) true, and b) the whole story. I know that's naive, but even when I'm writing my own news stories, I never consciously think about the fact that someone else might look at my story and point out that I left out pertinent information that might have changed the shape of the story. Everyone leaves out details when they write up an article. You have to. How many times have our profs reminded us -- if your editor asks for 12 inches and you write 20, they won't read the rest of the story just to see what else was going on. They'll chop it off the end. So it's in your best interest to get all the important info into the first 12 inches, and being concise is just a skill you need to develop.

Clearly not one I excel at.

The point is, in the interest of saving space, all news stories are limited. The problem arises when individual humans make the decision to include or exclude particular details of each story. Every reporter would write the same story differently, based on the facts and viewpoints he or she thinks matter the most.

But what about when the decision isn't just which facts to include, but whether to run a story at all? This movie looked at the role the media played in "selling" the Iraq war to the American public. The director's argument, if I got it right, was that the media simply took any and all information the government gave them and published or broadcast it to the public -- and that a good chunk of that information was in fact propaganda. The argument was made that the media should have stepped back and been more critical of what they were hearing, and perhaps covered those stories in 2001 from a different angle.

But the argument was also made that in a time of war, or for that matter any important political situation, any information given out by the government must be made public. Even if a reporter (like Meryl Streep's character) thinks something is bull, without solid proof or a second opinion that reporter can't justify withholding the information. Yet how much more damage could be caused by publishing something that is almost certainly military propaganda?

I think one of the most valuable aspects of this movie was its 'moral', for lack of a better term: that there are often no right answers. It's great that Hollywood is addressing the issue of ethics and transparency in media coverage of the war, but at the same time, it scares me to realize I'll be dealing with this if I enter into this career.