You might think, as the New York Times pointed out in reviewing Steven Spielberg'smuch-praised new movie, The Post, that “shaping a drama around a newspaper that didn't break the story” would be “an odd path to Hollywood triumphalism.”
And yet, there it is: A hagiographic treatment about a newspaper, the Washington Post, that was beaten by the New York Times in 1971 in exposing the Defense Department's voluminous secret history of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers.
After the Times published lengthy articles drawn from the archive, the administration of President Richard M. Nixonobtained a restraining order that barred the newspaper from running further reports about the Papers.
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