‘Civil War’ gets the failures of post-War journalism
What happens when the ideals of a profession become bigger than its purpose
One of the first things I remember being struck by in the first journalism class I took at the University of Maryland back in 2001 was that members of The Washington Post’s editorial board (at least at the time) took the appearance of neutrality so seriously that they didn’t vote in elections.
It’s hard to overstate the power of this anecdote when relayed to a room full of eager 18-year-olds. Here are people at the absolute peak of the profession you’ve chosen to pursue setting aside the most basic and most dearly held right in a democracy for something seemingly even more noble. If we don’t participate directly in democracy, the logic goes, then our words can serve in a different kind of way. Even back then, you didn’t choose journalism for the money. So here’s a powerful story to tell yourself about why to pursue it anyway. Here’s why it is a higher calling. If you buy in to the ideals of the American tradition, you can serve the public and carry on that tradition - a sacrifice that connects the past to the present and shapes the future.
More than two decades later, I am troubled by the ideals that that story was meant to encapsulate. The flaws in it have been visible for quite some time, even prior to the Donald Trump era, which has laid bare so much institutional failure. Of course, I thought of it when Jeff Bezos abruptly intervened to prevent the Post from publishing an endorsement just weeks before the 2024 presidential election. Truth is, it was already floating at the front of my mind because of Alex Garland’s Civil War.
Garland’s film, which depicts a present-day America at war with itself, isn’t for the faint of heart. There is a secessionist force closing in on a military victory over a third-term president, untethered from reality, surrounded by a shrinking circle of loyalists. It is grim and violent, and, because it looks like only a slight distortion of our current reality, it is deeply unsettling.
At the heart of film are a small group of journalists documenting the final days of the conflict - headed toward Washington D.C. to capture the final words and actions of a soon-to-be deposed leader. Lee Smith, played by Kirsten Dunst, is the cold, determined driver of their mission. She’s a legendary war zone photographer, and waiting for her, it would seem, is the crowning achievement of her career. Tagging along with Smith is Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny, an aspiring Lee Smith.
Jessie holds a mirror up to Lee by trying to learn the tricks of her trade. There are horrors all around - brutal fighting, mass graves, torture - and at every turn Lee admonishes Jessie for not having the stoic toughness to dispassionately document it all through the lens of her camera, even when, for example, what she’s documenting is a man wielding an assault rifle and posing proudly in front of two mutilated bodies hanging from the ceiling of a building. Lee is perpetually tired and emotionless as they move through an American war zone toward the capital. The 18-year-old me would have appreciated this facade a lot more. Someone has to show things as they are as neutrally as possible. This is the role of the fourth estate - to inform - and what is more compelling or more informative than photographs. I don’t need to invoke the old maxim about how much pictures are worth, do I?
Garland doesn’t buy the facade Lee has put up, and, speaking for the 41-year-old version of myself, neither do I. A series of flashbacks show just how brittle that facade is - how much unprocessed trauma she has as a result of this worldview. Jessie, like any impressionable young person, doesn’t see the damage that facade has done to her hero. As a consequence, even though Lee seems to be on the verge of crumbling in to a thousand pieces, the outward story she has told herself and others is being absorbed and adopted by her protégée.
In the film’s climactic scene, Lee and Jessie wind up in the White House as it is being stormed by secessionist forces. Lee is exactly where she set out to be. But the close quarters of a firefight turn deadly. She shoves Jessie out of the way, saving her but going down in a hail of bullets. Jessie presses on and is in the room when the president is captured. She stops the soldiers from summarily executing this apparent tyrant, but only so she can ask him for a quote.
“Don’t let them kill me,” he says. She gets the soundbite, then steps out of the way, and moments later, he’s dead.
There is so much meaning tied up in this sequence. For example, is it fair to ask Lee, or any human being, to give up so much in the pursuit of her craft? Decades ago, I would have said yes, that’s the job. Now, I think that any job that asks you to essentially dehumanize yourself in pursuit of it needs to, well, think again about the ideals to which it aspires. Isn’t it time to re-examine the arch-documentarian streak taught in journalism schools? There are severe limits to the notion of “capturing things as they are” as it is practiced in the journalism of the present day. Recording the final words of a president as he is about to be executed seems like the absolute apex of newsworthiness, but what does it really add to the story we see unfolding? Not much at all, I would argue. Indeed, Jessie stopping the execution just to ask the question manufactures a moment that otherwise probably wouldn’t have taken place. It puts her in the story.
Of course, journalism as an institution isn’t wholly to blame for the decline of its standing in society. Many of the issues which have plagued it are not new or even solvable. If you think rich men consolidating and controlling media outlets is somehow specific to our moment, you need an education and should probably start with Citizen Kane. Similarly, technology as a disruptor of media ecosystems is an ever-present fact of life. The damage didn’t start with Facebook and Twitter.
But journalism isn’t blameless. To be specific, it has, in my view, become overly concerned with the conventions of the craft, and that has often come at the expense of the real story. Put another way, do the last words of a president about to be executed by a rebel military force matter in this case? Jessie has effectively inserted herself in to a story that doesn’t actually need her in it to be told.
Donald Trump, of course, has exploited this vain weakness of the media to great effect for more than a decade. He says crazy things all day long, and mainstream journalists have still not yet figured out how to best handle it. They spend some of their time fact-checking him or reaching out to opponents or campaign officials for comment. They spend still more of their time going to diners in Trump country and asking patrons why some of those crazy things he says resonate with them. Everyone is quoted accurately, and yet no one really learns anything. It’s all palace intrigue and fact-checking.
Needless to say after Trump’s election this week, journalism, like many other institutions, must evolve. In some ways that means abandoning conventions that have become dogmatic. Yes, there is a difference between requesting comment from a corrupt government official and allowing them to have 50 percent of the space in the story you are trying to tell.
In other ways, it must get back to a soul that has been a bit lost in all those meta-stories told about the noble sacrifice at the heart of the profession.
A few years after that introductory journalism course, I took a history class about the Vietnam War. In it, I learned that the Tet Offensive was actually a military victory for American and South Vietnamese forces. For all the spectacle of the war being brought to the South by insurgent forces, it didn’t achieve its military objectives. Of course, that’s a fact that belies the real story. Wars aren’t won only on the battlefield, and, anyway, understanding why they’re being fought is as important as who is winning.
One gets the sense that today’s journalists would have reported that exclusively military version of the story, using casualty figures and maps of territorial gains to buttress sound bites from press conferences and anonymous sources inside the Pentagon. In fact, we know they would. All we have to do is look back to the War on Terror. Of course, doing so means missing the real story - the one the great Walter Cronkite honed in on immediately. Most of the people in Vietnam really, really didn’t want us to be there, and the American military had obscured that fact up until that point. They lied to the nation about our progress there, and that was a much bigger deal than who won or lost ground.
The character of Lee Smith is, in some ways, the logical endpoint of the approach to journalism that Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow and Woodward and Bernstein made famous if you learned all the wrong lessons from them. Lee is documenting the horror of the moment, but not really doing anything to tell the bigger story, which is how this happened at all. Sadly, Lee’s protégée Jessie doesn’t offer us much optimism that the next generation of journalists will be able to evolve effectively.