Times change, people change, but facts remain.

History and journalism go hand-in-hand. As time goes on, readers have the opportunity to look back on stories they read lifetimes ago.

Ever so often, people find themselves looking back on life events through old newspaper clippings, to current google searches. We use journalism as a way to corroborate our life stories.

Textbooks tell the stories of historically-significant occurrences that affected life as we know it. From the Revolutionary War, to the Great Depression, and everything in between, these instances have shaped the way children learn, and elders tell stories.

Nowadays, we rely on the many different forms of journalism and media coverage to tell these stories. I will be able to look back on instances like 9/11, the 2016 Election, among others, and use journalistic outlets to illustrate what these times were like for me when I tell my children, and their children.

Journalism plays a key role in telling these stories. History is a story. Without journalism, history would not be recorded, and its’ predecessors would have nothing to look back on. The development of society relies heavily on its’ comparison to its’ past.
Journalism gives it that. Journalism gives us our past.

This film is about a journalist named Stephen Glass, hence Shattered Glass, who fabricated more than half of his stories at a political magazine in Washington D.C. to rise to fame in the industry.

Stephen Glass writes a story that interests Forbes magazine, enough so that they wish to do a follow-up piece. Upon doing so, the magazine discovers that many of the “facts” and sources Glass used to write the story, ended up being fabricated.

This causes a huge problem for Stephen, obviously, but also his boss because he has to test himself to see how far he will go to protect his writer, but more importantly, his magazine.

I didn’t particularly enjoy this film as much as the others. Maybe it’s because, to me, fabrication is obviously not a good idea and I think Stephen should have seen this coming from a while away, but it also could be because this movie wasn’t really that interesting to me.

I think the storyline was kind of dull, and I didn’t like the casting all that much either. I know Glass is supposed to be a young writer, but I felt Hayden Christensen was almost too young for the role. I don’t know, the whole thing felt kind of forced to me.
Other than those two things, the movie was OK. I don’t particularly think I would recommend it to my friends, but I wouldn’t complain if I had to watch it in class or something like that. I think I’m just underwhelmed by this film because I just watched Citizenfour, which was so juicy and exciting, so I would see that one over this one any day!

Not going to lie, this one creeped me out. Like a lot.

This movie by-far changed my opinion the most. You always hear things about government agencies hacking people and infringing on our rights to privacy, but you never really consider it on a daily basis, at least I didn’t, until I saw this movie.

Citizenfour is a documentary about a woman named Laura Poitras, who had been working on uncovering government corruption for some time, when she was contacted by someone named “Citizenfour” with information about how the government had been watching her do so. This film follows Poitras on her journey to finding out who this anonymous person is.

Citizenfour turns out to be a man named Edward Snowden, an expert analyst who had been digging into the NSA’s privacy violations for years. Snowden reached out to Poitras because he knew she had been working on a film about security, and wanted to expose the NSA.

Throughout the course of the film, this amazing story unfolds. You learn about all of the crazy things the NSA has access to, and how really nothing in this world is private. They could even be watching me type this review right now, and I would have no idea. That to me is so creepy.

I admire Poitras’ gut to come out and produce this film. She flew all the way to Hong Kong to meet Snowden, and piece together this story for her viewers. I really believe everyone should watch this film. It was really eye-opening and absolutely relevant for the media age that we live in today.
I would 100% recommend this to anyone. This film sucks you in and makes it impossible to stop watching. Definitely a must-see.

All the President’s Men chronicles the reportings of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post amidst the Watergate Scandal. The movie uncovers the efforts made by these two reporters and how their discoveries lead to the resignation of Richard Nixon in the 1970’s.

This movie was a huge deal when it came out. I told my dad I was watching this for class and he nearly had a heart attack. He told me that I would really enjoy it and that the film is super interesting.

He was right.

I would definitely say that I kind of had a preconceived notion that this movie was going to be boring because it was kind of old, but I was totally wrong. It was very engaging and I found myself so caught up on the story of Watergate that I ended up looking things up on google during the film because I couldn’t wait to see how it all turned out.

This film is so fast-paced. I think the production team did an excellent job of showing just how quickly a story can grow and change in investigative journalism. I would definitely recommend people watch this film, if not to learn about journalism, just to learn about a scandal that rocked American history.

Spotlight is the story of a scandal rooted in Catholicism. The movie uncovers the tragic occurrences of sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic church, and the church’s efforts to cover them up.

This film was very interesting. At times, I found it really hard to watch, yet I couldn’t turn away. It was crazy to see the disgusting story unfold about an age-old institution that is supposed to provide safety and security for its patrons, but is, in fact, morally corrupt.

What I loved about the film was the way the story unfolded and how they used the interview process to piece together the story. With every lawyer came a priest, with every priest came a victim, with every victim came a story, and so on and so forth. I thought the writing was really good in that regard because going into watching the film I semi-knew what it was about, but seeing it really unfold in front of my eyes kept me interested.

In all honesty, I was kind of dreading watching this because I was afraid it would scar me. I am not a religious person, but for some reason I was still scared to watch this movie because I know so many people who are. In fact, my roommate works at a rectory, and after she watched this movie and she said it made going to work really hard.
Any time a movie comes out that tells a compelling story about something sensitive like this, people are going to react. I think the producers did an excellent job of capturing the true emotion and urgency of the reporters at the Boston Globe.