Director Oliver Stone slams 'lame-brained' Spielberg movie over WaPo portrayal

RT
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 18:41 UTC

© Mark Blinch / Reuters

Oliver Stone

Director Oliver Stone took a swipe at the Washington Post and Stephen Spielberg's "lame-brained" film, The Post in a Facebook tribute to the late journalist Robert Parry on Sunday.

Stone commended the Consortium News' founder for breaking from the "tyranny of mainstream media conformity" and his breaking of the Iran-Contra scandal.

Stone then pointed to the fact that the Washington Post's publisher Katharine Graham, who is the subject of The Post, "deliberately ignored" that story.

"Note how she's now being lionized in Spielberg's lame-brained The Post," he said of the character played by Meryl Streep.

Scene from 'The Post'

The Post follows the period in 1971 when the Washington Post debated reporting on the Pentagon Papers after the New York Times had been prevented by doing so by a court order.

The Pentagon Papers was a Department of Defense study outlining the history of the US role in Vietnam dating from World War II to 1968. Leaked to the NYT by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, it revealed the government lied about secret military operations including the bombing of Laos and Cambodia.

Graham's decision to side with her editors and report on the Pentagon Papers in June 1971 is depicted as heroic in Spielberg's film, despite her enjoying relationships with establishment political figures such as the Kennedys and Henry Kissinger.

Parry, who was a correspondent for the Post-owned Newsweek in the 1980s, said he witnessed "self-censorship because of the coziness between Post-Newsweek executives and senior national security figures" during his time at the publication.

"On one occasion in 1987, I was told that my story about the CIA funneling anti-Sandinista money through Nicaragua's Catholic Church had been watered down because the story needed to be run past Mrs. Graham, and Henry Kissinger was her house guest that weekend," Parry told FAIR in 2001. "Apparently, there was fear among the top editors that the story as written might cause some consternation."

"As audiences, we're inundated with the surface of events but seem unable to interpret them correctly," Stone continued, "With intelligent, common-sense repetition (not the continual Russia-bashing of NY Times and WaPo), we learn and remember."

Stone is known for a vast body of films portraying political figures and subjects, Including the Vietnam war in Platoon, John F Kennedy in JFK, Richard Nixon in Nixon and George W. Bush in W. He also directed the acclaimed Snowden movie about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.