My daughter Lea, who is 13 and a citizen of the United Nations of Instagram and Snapchat, lately has taken a turn for Ida Tarbell that gives me hope. Ida Tarbell, as Lea will tell you, was a pioneering “muckraking” journalist at the turn of the last century whose exposé investigative articles helped break up Standard Oil and the oil monopoly held in this country by John D. Rockefeller. “Muckrakers,” Lea explained to me, “dig up the bad things that no one wants to be shown and force the public to acknowledge the truth so that a change can be made.”
Lea was so inspired by what she learned about Ida Tarbell in middle school during a unit last month on “The Progressive Era” that she has decided she wants to become an investigative journalist herself. This announcement moved me to tears just a little, because I’d had the same epiphany at roughly the same age. Which is, more or less, why I am here writing this now.
I decided that Lea had to see two things. She had to see the movie All the President’s Men, about the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s relentless journalistic stalking of the Watergate story in the early 1970s. And, she had to see The Front Page.
I’m happy and relieved to say that Lea was blown away by All the President’s Men. What really got her – and she said so -- was the movie’s silences. Lea is of a generation for whom any thought of a movie is synonymous with slamming volume. Lea could not believe how quiet much of All the President’s Men is, and how ominous and downright frightening silence can be. She also could not believe how much everyone in the movie smoked.
The Front Page, conversely, is anything but quiet, though the smoking quotient is perhaps even higher. The current revival at The Broadhurst Theatre of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 stage classic about jaded Chicago newspaper reporters awaiting a hanging, is a little too slickly staged for my taste, a little too self-congratulatory about its stylized theatrical sass. Still, the reporters’ frenzy after a jail break to get the story at any cost shines forth like a beacon and Lea basked in its glow. The reporters’ unadulterated profanity also made her howl with delight. Contemporary rappers owe these guys a debt of antecedence, if you care to see it that way, and Lea did. A few principals felt awkwardly miscast and the over-delayed arrival of Nathan Lane in Act 3 seemed senseless to both of us – a perverse directorial choice that added nothing to the proceedings – but of course the wait was rewarded richly. Nathan’s clowning was both immaculate and titanic. His intensity also crystalized what is always at stake in The Front Page, and what ultimately makes it both timeless and timely: Truth. Such a kinky word in our age of blithe fakery. The pursuit of truth, at any cost, is what The Front Page is about. It makes you laugh and it can make you cry.
In this hour of discrediting for newspapers, crowned by their collective failure to predict the Presidential election (which, let’s face it, is not actually a newspaper’s job); in this hour of disemboweling for newspapers, as advertising dollars recede and newsroom layoffs ominously pile up; in this hour of desperation for newspapers, as internet disinformation voraciously supplants them; we really need The Front Page. We need to be reminded that newspapers matter, even more than the individual stories they cover. We need to be reminded that, even at their worst (see: Rupert Murdoch & Co.), newspapers sweat to get us the story. Truth is subjective. The full story, though, the objective story – just the facts, ma’am -- is the only way we can begin to get at the truth. Ferreting out truth is a noble aspiration. I’m happy that my daughter Lea understands this. Hopefully, it’s a generational thing.