Good evening, you're listening to Thru Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakene, joined once again by 3MA founder, Troy Goodfellow.

Hello, hello, hello.

So one of the defining features of this week and really the last few years is a conviction or a hope that there's some kind of hidden truth that will come out and lead to some kind of redemptive justice.

And a lot of that energy was focused on and fed by news media.

And I think it's too reductive to say that there's any one reason for the conviction that

the news can reverse or transform the politics and culture of a society.

I don't know.

I do feel like a lot of this fixation goes back to Watergate and the

mythology that built up around it. So this week, Troy, I thought we'd consider two movies

about investigated journalism, 1976's all the president's men, and 1999's The Insider. Or to put it

another way, we take a look at the apotheosis of Hollywood's

journalism fetish, and then we look at Michael Mann's attempt to sound its death now.

Troy, right at the top of the show, what did you make of these two movies?

What were the most salient contrast for you as you watch them?

All the President's Men is a lot more boring than I remember it being.

It is, frankly, a very dull inside baseball movie that requires you to know a lot about what is going on in Watergate.

It's very much a movie of its time and of its period.

And I don't think it has aged very well at all.

Leaving aside its position on the role of the media and journalism and politics and space,

leaving that aside, which we can get into, which is really the important thing.

I do not think the movie ages very well,

especially if you're kind of only a little bit interested in Watergate.

...