Katharine Graham

Ben Bradlee

The Post is set in a time when the media was revealing information the White House wanted to withhold from the public. It was 47 years ago and members of the U.S. armed forces were dying on the other side of an ocean. A lot has changed, but other things haven’t.

The Washington Post, once managed and owned by the Graham family, is now an asset in the Jeff Bezos portfolio. Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, bought The Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction in 1933. Meyer handed the paper over to Katharine’s husband, Phillip, in 1946. Following Phillip’s death by suicide in 1963, operation of The Washington Post fell to Katharine. In a time when her male colleagues and employees were not accustomed to taking female leadership seriously, Katharine Graham moved her newspaper into national prominence in the era of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal.

Aspects of the The Post that prompt my recommendation of this movie include the following:

• Empowerment of women. Katharine Graham was the first woman to head a Fortune 500 company. Despite her lack of experience and confidence, her abilities and persistence allowed her and her paper to succeed.
   
• The importance of a free press. Media can’t be effective if publishers, editors, and journalists are restricted by government or impeded by personal relationships.
   
• Publishing truth is a bold and risky enterprise. Media outlets provide a service that is much greater than the average commercial business. There is a social responsibility that demands risk and boldness in order for the media to serve the common good. 
   
• Lastly, something I enjoyed were the nice shots of typesetting on a Linotype—insignificant to most viewers, but delightful to me.

At the time Katharine Graham assumed managing control of The Washington Post, I was getting ready to start my senior year of high school and I was completing my first year of an after-school job at the Ontario Argus Observer. The Argus Observer had about as much in common with The Washington Post as Ontario, Oregon, has with Washington, DC. But in both cases the owner/publisher was female. I’m grateful to Agnes Lynch for the job that began a meaningful career in communications.

*In the movie, Katharine Graham tells Ben Bradlee that her late husband said the news is a first rough draft of history.