All the Presidents Men at 50

To celebrate fifty years of All the President's Men, Tom sits down with Professor Jon Lewis, University Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at Oregon State University, who has been teaching and writing about Hollywood for over forty years.

Jon traces Alan Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy from Klute through The Parallax View to All the President's Men, explaining what made that era of New Hollywood so obsessed with surveillance, institutional rot and the fragility of truth. He also reflects on what it was like to live through Watergate as a young man, and what was genuinely lost when the blockbuster era arrived and Hollywood stopped asking hard questions.

Then Steven Renderos, Executive Director of Media Justice, brings the conversation into the present. The journalism, he argues, is still happening, the Panama Papers, the Pegasus Project, ProPublica's reporting on Clarence Thomas. What's broken isn't the press. It's the institutional willingness to act on what journalists find. And with Jeff Bezos, a key Donald Trump ally, now owning the same Washington Post that Katharine Graham used to back Woodward and Bernstein at enormous personal risk, the contrast could not be starker.

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