There’s a moment in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane’s financial advisor, Mr. Thatcher, warns that ownership of the New York Inquirer is unwise and losing Kane “a million dollars a year.” Kane, played by Orson Welles at his most dashing and witty, retorts, “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in”—slight pause for effect—“60 years.” There’s a muted trumpet on the soundtrack to underscore Kane’s truth bomb.

In 2017, four years after Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post (and when they adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the Amazon founder became the world’s richest man, worth over $100 billion. Currently, he’s only the fifth richest (not even a bronze!), but his wealth has more than doubled and is estimated at . And yet, in the first week of February, the Post slashed one-third of its entire staff.

There’s a moment in Citizen Kane where Charles Foster Kane’s financial advisor, Mr. Thatcher, warns that ownership of the New York Inquirer is unwise and losing Kane “a million dollars a year.” Kane, played by Orson Welles at his most dashing and witty, retorts, “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in”—slight pause for effect—“60 years.” There’s a muted trumpet on the soundtrack to underscore Kane’s truth bomb.

In 2017, four years after Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post (and when they adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the Amazon founder became the world’s richest man, worth over $100 billion. Currently, he’s only the fifth richest (not even a bronze!), but his wealth has more than doubled and is estimated at . And yet, in the first week of February, the Post slashed one-third of its entire staff.

As it happens, the move to neuter one of the most important checks to institutional power in the world coincided with Amazon’s release of the money-losing-but-ego-enhancing Trump family propaganda film Melania, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s  in Florida, showcasing a relationship that’s given Bezos’ aerospace company billions of dollars in defense contracts. To quote a movie just as rewatchable as Citizen Kane: “Follow the money.”

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That line, of course, comes from William Goldman’s script for All the President’s Men. Today is close to 50 years after the release of the exhilarating film featuring two mismatched young journalists, Bob Woodward (who later popularized the Bezos-approved “democracy dies” phrase) and Carl Bernstein. With time and resources granted them by the Washington Post, this duo exposed President Richard Nixon’s campaign of “dirty tricks,” which led directly to his resignation and made their names synonymous with relentless shoe-leather work. One watches the movie with nostalgia for a great many things, but first among them is a yearning to Make Investigative Journalism Impactful Again.

The film, which somehow makes cold calling names from the phone book look as thrilling as Indiana Jones outsmarting the Nazis, was directed by the great Alan J. Pakula, but was ushered into existence by Robert Redford, who starred as Woodward opposite Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.

Redford, already a significant movie star, met Woodward while he and Bernstein were working on their book about their Watergate reporting. It was Redford, Woodward has said, who suggested that the book should be more about them and their investigation, not just the details of the break-in and the other underhanded actions of the era. And that’s a key part of why the film was such a success. Like Redford’s previous hits with Paul Newman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, this movie—about a seismic political event—was primarily a buddy picture.

The movie presents Woodward and Bernstein as basically strangers, even weeks into their investigation. They are too busy working to get personal. Pakula’s camera catches this in a fantastic series of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glances between the two when they’re—once again—trying desperately to get a source to open up. This time, it’s Stephen Collins as Hugh Sloan, whose conscience and loyalty are waging a war inside of him while he fumfers, “I’m a Republican.”

“I am too,” the clean-cut and handsome Woodward fires back, putting Sloan at ease but shocking his long-haired, chain-smoking Jewish partner. Neither says anything, but their eye contact is enough. It’s a great example of less-is-more storytelling, and particularly funny because, by this point, the two have been through war together—staying up all night getting paper cuts as they riffle through Library of Congress receipts; driving around town getting doors slammed in their faces; getting lied to on the phone; and having their work thrown back at them by their boss (Ben Bradlee, played by Jason Robards in a role that won him an Oscar) because they haven’t gotten the story yet.

Though deadly serious—particularly when it hit theaters with Nixon’s former vice president, Gerald Ford, still in office—there’s a great deal that is humorous in All the President’s Men. Hoffman’s Bernstein is the one who does more of the leg work: He’s out at rooftop bars convincing secretaries to share a little information, he’s the one down in Miami barking at a stonewalling state attorney’s office. But there’s a lot that is sinister, too.

The most famous scenes in the film are probably Woodward’s surreptitious encounters with his pseudonymous source, Deep Throat (now known to have been deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt). The first meeting, in which Woodward’s route to ensure he’s not followed involves walking into and out of a crowd at the currently topical Kennedy Center (a relatively new New Formalist structure at the time of the film), is set to David Shire’s dizzying score of guitar and rising brass that swirls with a mixture of dread and triumph. As far as I am concerned, these nighttime cues are as effective as any music accompaniment of the era, including John Williams’ Jaws. Killer sharks are real, but so are crimes of the executive branch!

All the President’s Men was the third collaboration between director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis, who by this point had earned the nickname “the prince of darkness.” (Not because of anything bad he’d done, but for his love of backlighting.) Their previous two pictures, the underworld thriller Klute and the political assassination thriller The Parallax View (which I’ve written about with great enthusiasm before), are marvels of 1970s paranoia with a keen visual flair. All make great use of color saturation and negative space, but none quite so subtly as in All the President’s Men.

A lot of this movie is just watching guys make phone calls. (Sure, they are handsome guys, but still!) Around the frame, Pakula’s company built out a modernist newsroom bursting with activity. Watching it today, one is particularly taken with all the books and paper and the absence of computer technology. What’s there instead are people who are reacting and listening, either to what’s happening in the center of frame or to their own, unrelated stories.

Willis uses the split diopter technique (also seen quite a bit in Brian De Palma’s similarly paranoid political thriller Blow Out) in which subjects in the foreground and background are both in focus. The human eye doesn’t see like this naturally, so it adds a hard-to-pin-down tension when used onscreen, especially in long dialogue sequences. Add the formidable Robert Redford trying to keep a nervous source from hanging up, his entire career at stake, and suddenly a guy talking on the phone is more thrilling than any shootout.

That’s what is ultimately so remarkable about this movie, even 50 years later. You are still rooting for Woodward and Bernstein, even though you know they eventually land the story. It’s an uphill, underdog struggle. They only get the assignment at first because it’s thought to be a nothing story: They’re on the metro desk, the least important news section at the Post. Bernstein isn’t even on the story at first, he just kind of sticks his nose into Woodward’s work. (Woodward is annoyed but recognizes that the changes are good. “I don’t mind what you did, I mind the way you did it,” the Boy Scout-ish blond says.)

But section editor Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) pushes to keep his guys on the case once things start to pick up steam. To managing editor Howard Simons (Martin Balsam) he implores: “They’re hungry! You remember when you were hungry?!” This reaches a crescendo when Bradlee, the tough old man, sticks his neck out for “Woodstein,” as he calls the two of them. With the fury of the White House breathing down on him, and no other paper, not even the New York Times, still pursuing Watergate, Bradlee concludes a meeting with a rather surprising line for a PG-rated film: “Fuck it, let’s stand by the boys.” It’s a real stand up and cheer moment. About journalism.

For better or worse, the film is accurate to the time when depicting the paper’s top brass: It’s all men making the big decisions, and with the exception of one fella who doesn’t say anything, all white men at that. When women are depicted in the newsroom, they are primarily deployed by Woodward and Bernstein—mainly Bernstein—to squeeze information out of men in high places that they know socially. Still, watching professionals weigh the ethics of publishing a story (in a printed newspaper!) knowing that it will have a real impact feels like a transmission from another world. It can make anyone who cares about journalism in 2026 a little depressed.

All the President’s Men has an unofficial sequel—or, I guess, prequel—in the very good but nowhere-near-as-good The Post, a 2017 release from Steven Spielberg starring Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as someone only mentioned in the Pakula film, Katherine Graham.

Graham was the well-heeled Westchester and D.C. socialite who inherited ownership of the Washington Post after her husband’s death. The Post shows how she grew into the role, ultimately steering the paper toward the bastion of journalistic righteousness it is still—for now—known for. The movie is not about Watergate (indeed, the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters is almost a comic book-style stinger at the end) but rather the newspaper’s decision to defy the Nixon White House and publish excerpts of the Pentagon Papers.

The Post is great, so long as you don’t watch it directly after the masterpiece All the President’s Men, as I recently did. But in addition to spectacular performances from Hanks and especially Streep (plus Bob Odenkirk as Ben Bagdikian and Bruce Greenwood as Robert McNamara), Spielberg really leans into fetishizing an “important newspaper.”

By 2017, of course, subscriptions of physical papers had already dwindled, so for some, watching the scenes of delivery men tossing stacks at newsstands before dawn was a great nostalgia show. (I, for one, fear the day the email comes telling me that my beloved local Asbury Park Press is pivoting to digital only.) Being set in the early 1970s, there’s a loving montage of pre-computerized typesettings and ink cauldrons; I really hope that Tom Hanks, who’s a freak for analog print, was on set the days these sequences were shot.

The movie’s central drama hinges on Graham taking the plunge and publishing important work, choosing to ruin her personal relationships with Washington insiders for the greater good.

Though the character with the arc is Graham and the best performance belongs to Streep, the most searing line, at least watching it in February 2026, goes to Hanks’ Bradlee. In a climactic scene, lawyer and Post board member Fritz Beebe (played by the wonderfully sniveling Tracy Letts) warns that if they publish the story and the government’s lawsuit is successful, “The Washington Post as we know it will cease to exist.” Hanks fires back: “If we live in a world where the government could tell us what we can and cannot print, then the Washington Post as we know it has already ceased to exist.”

Looking at recent events, one could surmise that the government doesn’t have to actually tell anyone to do anything, though. The current ownership class will do it all on its own.