Shock and Awe

 History Doesn't Repeat Itself — But It Rhymes

By: Bria Henry

Rob Reiner's Shock and Awe is set in 2002 and 2003, but watching it today feels less like a history lesson and more like looking in a mirror. The film follows a small team of Knight Ridder journalists who dared to question the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq while nearly every other major news outlet in America amplified the government's claims without serious scrutiny. More than twenty years later, the tensions at the heart of that story have not gone away. If anything, they have gotten louder.

                                                            Photo By: imdb
Main Characters of Shock and Awe

In the months before the invasion, the American press largely failed its most basic duty: to tell the truth, especially when the powerful are lying. The New York Times, CNN, and most of the major networks echoed the administration's talking points about weapons of mass destruction almost without challenge. The result was a nation marched into an illegal war on false pretenses, with the press holding the door open.

The Knight Ridder bureau in Washington did something radical. They actually reported. They talked to real intelligence analysts, mid-level officials, and experts who contradicted the official story. Their findings ran in smaller regional papers while the big outlets drowned them out with wall-to-wall pro-war coverage. They were right. Nearly everyone else was wrong.

Fast-forward to today and the structural problem is remarkably similar. Journalists still face enormous pressure from government officials, from corporate ownership, and from social media audiences to align their coverage with what is popular or politically convenient rather than what is verifiable. Access journalism, where reporters soften their coverage to maintain relationships with powerful sources, is as alive today as it was in 2002. We see it in the way certain narratives get repeated across outlets almost word for word. We see it when journalists at press briefings lob softball questions to avoid losing their seat at the table. We see it when a story that challenges official government positions gets buried while a more comfortable version trends online. The channels have changed. The dynamic has not.

Here is the uncomfortable question Shock and Awe quietly asks its audience: if we know now that Knight Ridder was right and everyone else was wrong, what are we doing with that knowledge? Hindsight is easy. The harder thing is developing the institutional courage to question authority in real time, before the bombs drop, before the damage is done. The journalists at Knight Ridder were not smarter than their peers. They were just more committed to the job. They followed the evidence instead of the crowd. Today's journalists have the advantage of knowing exactly what happens when the press fails that test. The Iraq War cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized an entire region. That is the consequence of a press that stopped asking hard questions.

Shock and Awe is ultimately a film about professional courage, about what it costs to tell the truth when everyone around you has decided the truth is inconvenient. That courage is just as rare and just as necessary today as it was in 2003. The names change, the issues change, but the pressure on journalists to fall in line never really goes away. The question every journalist and every news consumer should be asking right now is simple: who today is playing the role of the mainstream press in 2003? And who is playing Knight Ridder?