This piece was written for my Arts Journalism class. The assignment was to write a 700-800 word analysis of the movie “All the President’s Men” in the context of 2018 politics. I submitted the story on Nov. 5, 2018 and received a grade of 100 percent.

“Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.”

Ben Bradlee (played by Jason Robards) offers this quip to reporters Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) in the 1976 film about the Watergate investigation, “All the President’s Men.”

He urges the two reporters to check and re-check their facts before publishing their story, because it will rock the government and shake the future of America. (Which it did: the scandal led to 69 indictments, 48 sentencings, and Richard Nixon’s resignation.)

Aside from the very 1970’s hairstyles and rotary phones, the story rings true today. Here are three takeaways from the movie that apply to modern journalism:

1. Reporting is a painstaking, unglamorous process

For some reason, many people think reporters just hit speed dial, talk to the president or their insider CIA agent, and write a 12,000-word piece with the facts from one or two sources. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

“All the President’s Men” offers a glimpse of the amount of cold calls, research, problem-solving, independent verification, writing, rewriting, and editing necessary for even a 200-word story. Yet even the movie cuts corners, by necessity: it had to boil thousands of hours of work into a two-hour film.

The audience also gets to “cheat,” in a sense, because they know that something big is going to come of the investigation. The reporters at the time had no guarantees that any of their work would mean anything. Often reporters spend months tracing a lead that doesn’t even merit a story. Yet they press forward, because that’s their job.