Worthy documentaries on journalists – and freedom

Bill Knight column for 6-20, 21 or 22, 2019

This spring 230 years ago the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment took effect; 84 years ago this week, newspaperman Pete Hamill was born. As attacks on the press – commercial as well as political – persist, recent documentaries remind us of the value and virtues of a free press and how journalism and its practitioners help us have and hold our democratic republic.

By revisiting several stalwart journalists, we might appreciate how threatened and fragile the republic would be without a strong, independent “Fourth Estate” that gives voice to the voiceless and holds the powerful accountable.

In November, Hamill and colleague/competitor Jimmy Breslin were showcased in the documentary “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” which premiered on HBO in January. Also in January, the Sundance Film festival screened “Mike Wallace is Here,” about the long-time CBS correspondent. And in April, PBS’ “American Masters” featured the best of the bunch, “Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People.”

Breslin and Hamill, born in 1928 and 1935, respectively, understood and worked the streets. More than newsmen, they were authors, literally and stylistically, telling the city’s countless stories. Co-written and -directed by Jonathan Alter, a Chicagoan who became a journalist/author/producer, “Breslin and Hamill” is affectionate and eye-opening, a 108-minute tribute to two guys and also to a time when newspapers appreciated having adequate staffs and eloquent professionals covering their areas like no other medium could.

A film about the hard-hitting “60 Minutes” interviewer, “Mike Wallace is Here” is a 94-minute documentary by award-winning director Avi Belkin, who also hints how broadcast journalism deteriorated to the questionable state it’s in. For more than five decades, Wallace, born in 1918, was the fearless, fearsome newsman who went face-to-face with people in power, from dictators to grifters claiming to be elected representatives. Watching archival footage, we see what’s mostly missing today.

The Pulitzer film, directed by award-winning filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, is the most compelling. Joseph Pulitzer was born in 1847, a member of Hungary’s oppressed Jewish minority. Responding to an offer for foreigners to join the Union army during the Civil War, Pulitzer immigrated here and served in the federal cavalry, after which he moved to St. Louis and started newspapering in 1868.

Recalled as a businessman and publisher, he started as a gifted journalist, initially in St. Louis’ lively German-language press. Ten years later, he bought newspapers and merged them into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and in 1883 purchased the New York World. There, he became a crusader and creative entrepreneur.

An outspoken advocate for regular readers – whether immigrants like himself or hard-working laborers who wondered how the deck got stacked against them – Pulitzer opposed the Gilded Age and that era’s 1%. His reporter Nellie Bly had herself committed to an insane asylum for an expose on conditions there, and he dabbled in stunts, such as assigning Bly to duplicate Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” trip, and launching a campaign to build a platform for France’s gift to the nation, the State of Liberty – eventually raising $100,000 from readers. His efforts increased the World from a struggling 15,000-circulation daily to a dynamic paper reaching 10 times that many people every day.

Like Wallace, Breslin, Hamill (and most heroes), Pulitzer wasn’t perfect. Rudavsky displays his weaknesses, from occasional sensationalism (dubbed “yellow journalism,” for the World’s comic strip “The Yellow Kid”) and a marriage to a relative of Jefferson Davis, the president of the forces he’d fought in the War Between the States, to his seemingly contradictory economic standing. However, like contemporaries William Randolph Hearst and E.W. Scripps, Pulitzer became wealthy serving regular Americans instead of elites.

Pulitzer’s legacy is substantial, from his many philanthropic endeavors to the Columbia School of Journalism and the annual prizes that bear his name.

Narrated by Adam Driver and featuring Liev Schreiber and Tim Blake Nelson in audio dramatizations, the production is comparable to Ken Burns’ style of documentaries on the Civil War, baseball, jazz and other wholly American phenomena. It’s most definitely worth watching (and if you’d rather not wait for “American Masters” rebroadcasting the 84-minute gem, it’s available online at pbs.org).

Finally, when few newspapers did, Pulitzer attacked corruption in government and business, advocated for decent pay and a shorter workday, and unselfishly defended journalism, once commenting, “The complaint of the ‘low moral tone of the press’ is common but very unjust. A newspaper relates the events of the day. It does not manufacture its record of corruptions and crimes but tells of them as they occur. If it failed to do so it would be an unfaithful chronicler. The daily journal is a mirror. It reflects that which is before it. Let those who are startled by it blame the people who are before the mirror, and not the mirror, which only reflects their features and actions.”