Hentea Cristina-Maria

LMA EN-GE, year 1

Table of Contents
1. The Post (movie summary)
2. “The doormat wife”
3. “Let’s go. Let’s publish”
4. Women in journalism: then & now
5. Percentage of female top editors in every market
 1. “The Post”(2017) directed by
• Main plot of the movie;Steven Spielberg
• 1971- A 7000 page study comissioned by Robert McNamara (Bruce Greenwood)
regarding the, at that time, ongoing U.S.-Vietnam war gat leaked from the Pentagon
by Daniel Ellsberg (Mathew Rhys)
• The New York Times start publishing extracts of said study but court injection
halters any further publication of the document.
• The Washington Post, a local publication, through one of their editors, Ben
Bagdikian (Bob Odenkirk) get hold of nearly half of the copies made of the U.S.-
Vietnam war study and publish them, picking the story up where The New York
Times left off.
• Katherine Graham(Meryl Streep), publisher
and Chairwoman of the Board, faces a
difficult decision; She decides to go public,
encouraged by her executive editor Ben
Bradlee (Tom Hanks).
• The publication faces court repercussions, in
the end winning the process and marking
their names in history.
• “The newspapers duty is to readers and to
the public at large and not to the private
intersts of its owners”
 2. “The doormat wife”
• Katharine Graham (1917-2001)
– Born into wealth in 1917.
– Her father, multi-millioner investor and government
adviser Eugene Meyer, bought The Washington Post at a
public auction in 1933.
– Katharine attended Vassar, then transferred to the
University of Chicago; recieveing her undergraduate
degree in publishing in 1938.
– After two years after graduating she marries Philip
Graham, Harvard alumni and Supreme Law clerk with
whom she has two children.
– Her father chose her husband, Philip as his succesor to
lead the company, move which she considerd fair at that
time
– She prioritises her family and leaves the workspace up
until her husbands suicide in 1963.
 3. “Let’s go. Let’s publish”
• Forced by circumstances to take the reins of the Washington Post
• Doubted by many of her fellow male board members solely based on her gender and the idea
that only a white man was, at that time, capable of leading a company.
• Despite the judgement she faced, here are some of the most her notable accomplishments
– 1970: the Washington Post is publication in the U.S. to hire an obusman in their staff
– 1971: June 15th , Graham took The Post public
– 1971: June 18th the Post publishes “The Pentagon Papers”
– 1972: The publication tackles the Watergate scoop, event that led to Nixon resignation
– 1973: Katharine Graham election as chairman of the boardof the board and chief executive officer of The Washington
Post Co. yet she continues as publisher of The Washington Post newspaper.
– 1991: The first ever woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company stepps down; during heer time she managed to increase
the companies revenue by more than one billion dollars.

• In 1997 Graham publishes Pulizer Price

winning memoir “Personal History”
• Dies in 2001, President George W. Bush
heiled her as the First Lady of American
jurnalism.
• Along side her jurnalistic
accomplishments she was also involved
in women’s rights issues, her main focus
being the inequality women in this field
face in workspace and the absence of
females in leadership positions.
4. Women in jurnalism: then&now
• “I try to tell young women who weren’t alive then how different it was very recently
and it still is in those leadership circles, we’ve filled up the bottom of the pyramid,
but where it all gets decided, we don’t have parity. We’re not even close.”
-Meryl Streep
Even now a days, 50 years after Katharine Grahams empowering decision to go against
not only the government but also the men advising her not to publish the Pentagon
Files, gender inequality in the workspace represents a very timely issue.
Indeed progress has been made, yet women rarely occupy leading positions in
comparison to their male counterparts, even though the vast majority of jurnalism
students are female.
However to exemplify this minimal progress, according to a study from Indiana
University in 1970 women in this field would’ve earned 63% of the median income of
men.; In 2012, the wage gap between men and women journalists decreased by 20%
since the 70’s.
• The Reuters Insititute study entitled “Women and
leadership in the news media 2021: evidence
from 12 markets” – analysis of 240 media
publications (10 oline, 10 offline) from 12
different markets.
• The data revealed that more women work in
jurmalism (the lower ranking jobs) as there are
women in top editorial posissions.
• Only 22% of the executive posissions were
occupied by women in 2020, the number
increasing to 23% in 2021. Meanwhile 40% of
media employees are women.
• It is important that the people who select the
news are representative for the population
• The lack of diversity narrows the selected
stories and alters the perception of the general public
in regards to the media
• The selection at the top, as important as the
selection at the bottom
5. Percentage of female top editors in every market
SOURCES
◊ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katharine-Graham
◊ https://www.washingtonpost.com/brand-studio/fox/katharine-graham/
◊ https://medium.com/legendary-women/in-the-post-katharine-graham-offers-a-wake-
up-call-for-gender-equality-in-journalism-36c467dbe760
◊ https://womensmediacenter.com/news-features/new-exhibit-reveals-the-feminist-
journey-of-washington-post-publisher-katharine-graham
◊ https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/women-and-leadership-news-media-2021-
evidence-12-markets
◊ https://thelogicalindian.com/history/first-woman-philip-graham-pultizer-the-
washington-post-katharine-graham-31371?infinitescroll=1
◊ https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/women-and-leadership-news-media-2020-
evidence-ten-markets