Lori Rasmussen

I’ve been out of the media industry for almost eight years, having worked as a public affairs reporter for Oklahoma’s PBS affiliate and covering the state Legislature as my primary beat. I loved the work, but transitioning into the PR side of the house was a move I made for many reasons, not the least of which was in consideration of my family’s needs.

I enjoy my current professional work space. Still, I look back at my days at OETA with a bit of wistfulness at times. I miss

the adrenaline of daily deadlines, responding to breaking news and being a person who was “in the loop.” I enjoyed the opportunity to needle some of our state’s shadier lawmakers who were not serving the public interest. Some of my favorite targets are now convicted felons. I remember the day months after I left my reporter role when I was waiting on line in a restaurant near the state Capitol. A state senator, one of the “bad guys,” walked in. He took one look at me, immediately did a 180 and left the restaurant. I later recounted the incident to my old news manager and told him I wanted the episode engraved on my tombstone. To this day I consider pissing this particular guy off a feather in my cap.

So I guess I will always be a journalist in my heart, even if I don’t get to flaunt that title anymore. Maybe that’s why it absolutely infuriates me when I hear the current president’s attacks on the media. How dare the holder of that office show such disrespect for the First Amendment when he tweets nonsense about “opening up” the libel laws. It sickens me to see the press taunted and outright threatened by a number of the president’s supporters at his pointless and narcissistic rallies.

So this past week I went on a little movie watching spree, watching great films about assholes in power being taken down by the heroic Fourth Estate. There’s a double feature I enjoy: Watching 2017’s “The Post” immediately followed by 1976’s “All the President’s Men;” watching in that order explains the chronology of events in historical terms.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Steven Spielberg ended “The Post” (which is concerned with the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971) with
the events of the Watergate break in in 1972, which is where All the President’s Men picks up the story and is concerned with that same newspaper’s investigative reporting of the event. In fact, the ending sequence in “The Post” was shot almost identically to the beginning scene in “All the President’s Men.” Also in “The Post,” there’s a scene that takes place in a movie theater, and we see prominently displayed a poster for a movie starring Robert Redford, who portrays Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men.” Genius move by Spielberg, in my opinion.

I also love the fact, while I was I was on this movie watching spree, Bob Woodward sprang back into the headlines in a big way with the publication of a book that investigates the current president, focusing on his dealings with his staff, and casting the president in a very unflattering light. Reactions to the book were unsurprisingly negative, but what is interesting to me is that while the president is using words like “cowardly” and “TREASON?” and a threat to national security, no one seems to be doubting the book’s veracity or the truthfulness of the auth

or. The man who (with partner Carl Bernstein) brought down President Nixon, is viewed as a reliable source of information, and that’s encouraging to me.

When we talk about “disrupting journalism,” the context is typically how digital media has brought revolutionary change to the profession and its economics. As we debated in class, there are pros and cons to be argued relevant to that discussion. But we as communications grad students should also be talking about how tyrants and dictators thrive by disrupting journalists from doing their jobs. Open government by and for the people relies on the work of this profession and democracy won’t survive without it.

In the words of Justice Hugo Black in the U.S. vs. New York Times case that cleared the publication of the Pentagon Papers: “The press serves the governed, not the governors.”