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Article IndexBY JOE TYRRELL
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
MOVIE REVIEW
The smart but jumpy documentary "Page One: Inside The New York Times" is a must-see for news junkies who may excuse its tendency to wander off in mid-thought looking for a fix.
Director Andrew Rossi and co-writer Kate Novack picked an auspicious time for a look at America's foremost purveyor of news. Both the Times and that more amorphous mass, "media," are trying to stay above financial floodwaters.
Bad news is still news, perhaps especially when the newsmedia are the subjects. Rossi quickly moves from scene-setting about the newspaper's importance into its changed environment, with the initial Wikileaks scoop of a U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians.
In the most celebrated previous triumph for informed democracy, the Pentagon Papers case of 1971, leaker Daniel Ellsberg turned to the Times and The Washington Post to reveal the secret history of the Vietnam War.
But Wikileaks' initial releases came over social media. That caused Times editor Bill Keller to admit "the bottom line, Wikileaks doesn't need us. Daniel Ellsberg did."
That's a pregnant moment in an old media/new media world, especially in light of Wikileaks' subsequent cooperation with a handful of major newspapers, including the Times.Rossi might have followed the ins-and-outs of attempts by staffers to portray the newspaper as the proprietor of the disclosures, rather than simply one of the conduits for Wikileaks and a presumed leaker, Pvt. Bradley Manning.
That's been seen most notably in Keller's self-serving article in The New York Times Magazine about the paper's dealings with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and its unflattering reporting on Manning, being held in abusive conditions after leaving many red faces inside the Washington Beltway.
That movie could also note the two men's legal troubles, and take a cue from clear-headed Washington Bureau chief Dean Baquet, briefly seen talking about the need to focus on the content of the material rather than the politics.
If not under cyber-attack, Wikileaks speaks for itself here: http://wikileaks.org/
Manning supporters defend him here: http://www.bradleymanning.org/
But Rossi moves on, casting a wider net, and then casts again.
It is logical that he aims for the Times' media reporting, a good vantage from which to observe a changing landscape. But that bounces around — sometimes literally — from talking heads to conferences to tearful farewells to street views of the Times building to driving around.
That's a lot of motion, only some of which follows a narrative. Of the four principal subjects, all are male. Jill Abramson will become the paper's first woman editor when she succeed Keller in September, with Baquet as managing editor. But she gets only a couple of passing remarks. (The women on the media desk reportedly declined to participate in the documentary.)
Rossi's star becomes colorful media reporter David Carr, a middle-aged hipster with a repeatedly cited background as a crack addict and single father.
Carr is a great reporter. He is also one in a position to engage champions of new media, who often come across here as overweening or—the horror—failing to be hip. And despite Carr's off-brand background and demeanor, the Times could hardly have chosen a more loyal spokesman.
Meeting for some reason with the less-than-youthful braintrust of cool-ish Vice Magazine, Carr explodes when one extols their reporting on cannibalism and public defecation in strife-ridden Liberia.
"Before you ever went there, we had reporters there reporting genocide after genocide," Carr says. "So just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and look at some poop, that doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do.”
Similarly, he eviscerates Newser founder Michael Wolff at a panel on the future of media, simply by holding up a photocopy of the aggregation site's front page with all but its own stories removed. There are a lot of holes.
That is the state of the current media world. There are a lot of holes. You can see it on the site you are reading, which features self-generated entertainment coverage, content from Trenton and an aggregation of pieces on Google trending features.
Meanwhile, the Times has one of the best news websites in the world, and continues to put out a strong print edition. Decline is far more pronounced among other American newspapers.
That is due to poor management decisions as well as to changing economics. The Star-Ledger, a former employer for many of us, hangs on with a mix of brilliant and brain-dead coverage, and at that does better than many of its counterparts.
