CBS Won’t Air Truth Ads: ‘It’s Astounding How Little Truth There Is’

Truth invites comparisons to All the President’s Men and this fall’s upcoming release Spotlight.

LOS ANGELES October 16 When actress Cate Blanchett researched an infamous CBS News expose of U.S. President George W. Bush’s military service that led to the firing of journalist Mary Mapes, she came away with more questions than answers.

Except they didn’t. After Dan Rather aired the story on “60 Minutes II”, bloggers successfully attacked the 1970s-era documents as modern forgeries, and Rather later apologized. Director and screenwriter James Vanderbilt provides no finesse but keeps the movie humming, and though Moss is notably wasted, Quaid’s mixture of easy charm and seriousness anchors every scene. “I think the power of that film was that, yes, there’s two women falling in love in the ’50s, but it really is a film about falling in love”.

The person added: “The film tries to turn gross errors of journalism and judgment into acts of heroism and martyrdom”.

Despite the network’s evident distaste for Truth, Late Show host Stephen Colbert hosted Blanchett last Friday and asked her about the film.

But the whole movie’s like that: lifeless, airless, rote, dumb. A low-level producer is depicted in the movie giving an angry speech about Viacom as the story was falling apart.

“Truth” is told from the points of view of Mapes and Rather, who left CBS News on bitter terms in 2006.

It’s not all a wash; Redford puts across the gravitas of Rather, if not his complexity, and Blanchett has moments where she’s credible, even when the words coming out of her mouth aren’t.

Out of all that murkiness, Truth maintains one sterling certainty: that Mapes and Rather were journalistic martyrs. By the film’s end, she has crumbled as thoroughly as her story. Rather at the time could get anything and everything he wanted, and his threat to give the documents to newspapers if the story didn’t air at once is dramatized as a mark of high principle instead of high dudgeon possibly influenced by his altercation with “Poppy” Bush a decade earlier. In that film, journalists discover they were part of the problem they were investigating.

One has to be willing to accept Robert Redford as Dan Rather, which I did, although he looks nothing like the famous anchorman. It’s a nice visual that doesn’t fit the story one bit, and is thus an appropriate closing image for a film as shallow and superficial as this one.