Mediocre Meryl Streep is posed to pull one over on the public yet again.
She's teamed with Spielberg and Hanks to fool the people yet again about THE WASHINGTON POST and, specifically, Katharine Graham.
From Doug Henwood's report for FAIR:
A Post reporter, Peter Perl, researching a story on union-busting consultants, was told by a practitioner that his paper was “a leader in the field.” When he attended one of the anti-union classes, Perl found four Post execs as fellow students.
As Davis tells it, shortly after Graham took over the Post, Jack Patterson, a veteran newspaper executive, offered the following advice: Use rewards and punishment to pit workers against each other; take union officers into your confidence and give them a taste of privilege; automate, and bring in nonunion workers to operate the new machines; and treat journalists as professionals, thereby causing them to compete with each other, killing whatever interest they had in such odd blue-collar notions as solidarity. This latter idea dovetailed nicely with Bradlee’s Hobbesian strategy for running the newsroom: “creative tension.” Only the strong survive this war of each against all, a style called “hairy-chested journalism” by macho Posters.
Graham, who handed out garment workers’ union literature in her college days, broke the press workers’ union in 1975 by provoking a strike and putting out the paper with scab labor and out-of-town contractors. Other blue-collar unions, tamed by this example, have accepted job-eliminating automation quietly.
Fresh from this victory, the paper instituted a two-tier system, in which all news-room workers hired after 1977 are paid an average of $200 a week less than pre-1977 hires. According to the Newspaper Guild, this arrangement saves the Post about $1.5 million a year, about 1 percent of pretax profits, or enough to pay Kay Graham’s salary for 15 months.
The Guild, which represents about 40 percent of the paper’s 2,000 employees in news, circulation and advertising, had worked without a contract from July 1986 to August 1989, a tense interval that reporter and Guild activist Frank Swoboda called “one of the most bizarre labor relations environments I’ve ever seen, and I’ve covered labor for 35 years.” Union sources speculate that the Post Co. management finally tired of warfare and decided to sign a five-year contract, which included a no strike pledge, the first in the Guild’s 51 years at the paper.
Even though Graham runs around the country preaching the need for daycare, she still refuses to grant her employees this benefit. And the Post still refuses to pay reporters overtime—something most big papers do. The Guild has filed suit over the matter.
The contract did address a long-standing Guild complaint—the huge spread between low- and high-paid workers. But even after a disproportionate raise for the low-end employees, the Post‘s minimum salary for reporters is still $250 per week below that of the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, the ranks of the low-paid are heavily female and nonwhite. According to the union, women reporters make $121 a week less than men, and black women make $172 a week less than white men. If circulation and advertising workers are included, the gaps are even wider, with black women making an average of $332 a week less than white men.
While Meryl pretends that Katharine Graham is something wonderful, the reality is that she's just another bitch who worked to deprive other women of their due, who specifically targeted African-American women with low wages.
Graham was in charge.
What did she do with her power?
She went after women.
Meryl doesn't want you to know about that.
She doesn't want you to know much of anything.
She's a kiss ass doing work that wouldn't fly in high school.
Her characterizations are small and meaningless.
If you're an artist, that's about the worst thing can be said of you.
It's a filmography that's inconsequential.
Now she's given cover to a despicable woman who ran things and refused to work to improve the lives of women.
A union buster who thought African-American women should make less than anyone.
In her impersonation -- don't call it a performance -- nothing of this comes out.
In her promotion of this bad film, none of this reality is addressed.
Meryl's your typical liberal war hawk and that's what comes through when you watch her nonsense attempts at acting.
As for Tom Hanks, he's whitewashing a man whose biggest impact was attacking the Rosenbergs on behalf of the CIA.
But somehow they will join with Spielberg (when does he get taken down by the MeToo# movement?) and pretend that they're presenting truth and that this is about a free press.
THE POST is a joke and a dirty one at that.
