All the President's Men

If there are any aspiring journalists out there that want to watch a movie that exemplifies what it takes to be a journalist, All the President's Men is definitely the movie. Starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redfod, they play the two reporters that uncovered the Watergate Scandal during Nixon's administration. I thought the movie did an excellent job portraying the daily life of a news reporter. They showed all the grunt work and dead ends that happen when trying to get the big scoop for a story. Although there were dramatizations like any other movie, All the President's Men did a great job of keeping things real. This movie debuted in 1976, so it was definitely dated. If I was in college when this movie came out and I was a journalism major I would have promptly switched to a different major. All the research for the story had to be done in libraries with huge stacks of books. Redford and Hoffman had to contact numerous type of administrations for different documents or receipts just to confirm their sources. The computer and internet has done incredible things to the business and its quite amazing to see how things worked back then. The typewriters were something else though. Even writers for the Washington Post were using the two-finger method as they typed up stories that would be read by thousands of people. Towards the beginning of the movie, Hoffman takes a piece that Redford has written and starts to retype it without asking him. In today's world, that would not of been possible thanks to email and other types of file sharing. However, the file sharing would have allowed both of them to continually edit their story as more pieces came to the forefront. This would have been much easier than re-writing  the story everytime a source went dead or turned out to be misleading. I was into the movie for the majority of it, only stopping to get a snack. This movie is a must-see for anyone that is thinking of becoming a journalist or is interested in reporting.