Looking for the light: Books and movies rekindled Ollie Reed Jr.'s confidence in his profession

When Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency more than 50 years ago, on Aug. 8, 1974, to be precise, I was a reporter for my hometown newspaper, the Natchez (Mississippi) Democrat.

Nixon’s downfall was due to newspaper reporting that connected the White House to a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Hotel, so I was feeling pretty good about being a journalist.

Looking for the light: Books and movies rekindle one reporter's confidence in his profession

On the afternoon of the day after Nixon’s resignation speech, I sat with a young woman reporter, my future wife, on the steps of her house as we talked about how magnificent it was that America’s free press could curb corruption at the very highest level of power.

That’s why she and I got into the business. Oh sure, we covered city councils, county commissions, water boards, police departments and Friday night football, the day-to-day life of our community.

But the Nixon resignation proved to us what we believed in our hearts — that newspapers are the watchdogs of the nation and the most effective defenders of democracy.

Fifty years later, that does not seem so certain.

Competition from the internet, as well as public apathy, has bludgeoned the newspaper business. I’ve read that between late 2019 and May 2022, the United States lost an average of two newspapers per week.

What happens without the watchdogs? People who research such things say the demise of newspapers leads to a decline in civic engagement by citizens, more waste by governments and an increase in political polarization.

It’s enough to make some reporters — especially those who have been at it as long as I have — want to hang it up, concede that their time in the business is past. But not me. I just reread “All the President’s Men.”

Recharging

Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein earned national acclaim for their dogged coverage of the Watergate scandal. Their work was noted when the Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973.

In 1974, “All the President’s Men,” Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, was published, and in 1976 the movie version, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, was released.

When I get to feeling low about the challenges of the newspaper business today, I charge up my spirits by turning to nonfiction books and fact-based films that depict newspapers during their heyday and during their most notable achievements.

“All the President’s Men,” the book and the movie, is a suspense story and a detective story, and the good guys win in the end. I can dip into the book, read a section, and come away confident there is nothing else I’d rather be than a newspaper reporter.

When I was an undergraduate journalism major at the University of Southern Mississippi, I read Gay Talese’s 1969 book, “The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at the New York Times: The Institution that Influences the World.” In Journalism 101, I had been warned off writing lead sentences as long as that title.

But I found the book fascinating. It gave me my first sense of what being in an actual newsroom might be like, and I was surprised and encouraged to discover that Times managing editor, and later executive editor, Turner Catledge was from small town Mississippi.

Giving light

I remember seeing once on TV, probably while I was in high school, a 1959 newspaper movie titled “-30-.” The movie’s name comes from the symbol reporters put at the bottom of their copy to indicate the end of a story.

It was set during the late shift of a Los Angeles daily newspaper and starred Jack Webb as the night managing editor and William Conrad as night city editor. All the action happens in the newsroom as the staff tries to nail down a breaking news story before deadline. It probably wasn’t very good, but I did not know a lot about newspapers back then, and I ate it up. I was intrigued all the way through.

It is said that the movie “All the President’s Men” enticed many young men and women into the newspaper trade. But I started studying journalism in college in 1966, 10 years before that movie’s release, and landed my first newspaper job in 1973, three years before it came out.

Maybe it was “-30-” that put the notion of being a reporter into my head.

I have been inspired more recently by newspaper movies such as 2015’s “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe’s investigation of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, and 2017’s “The Post,” which recounts the story of The Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, classified documents about the U.S. government and the Vietnam War.

But books have been my major source of rejuvenation.

On my desk here in the Journal newsroom, I have copies of:

• “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s account of the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential race between Nixon and George McGovern, 1973.
• “Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg,” 2000.
• “Deadline Artists: America’s Greatest Newspaper Columns,” 2011.
• Calvin Trillin’s “The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press,” 2024.

Also here on the desk is what may be the best-titled newspaper book ever, “Citizen Carl: The Editor Who Cracked Teapot Dome, Shot a Judge, and Invented the Parking Meter.”

That book, published this year, was written by Jack McElroy, a colleague of mine during my years as a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune.

Jack’s book is the biography of Carl Magee, a tough, crusading newspaper editor who once owned the Albuquerque Journal and founded the paper that would become The Albuquerque Tribune.

Magee’s motto was “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.”

Shining the light. When I read these books and watch these movies, I’m reminded that’s what newspaper work is all about. And it’s worth doing.

-30-