Civil War, from a journalism student’s perspective
Much has been said about what the A24 film Civil War about our potential political future given the not so subtle allusions to our political present. The dystopian action thriller paints a picture where America is embroiled in a civil war that reaches its climax in the nation’s capital. We see all of this from the perspective of three war journalists, and this is where my analysis will center.
If we haven’t met yet, I’m both an avid photographer and someone who went to journalism school but well doesn’t have a job in journalism.
Lee Smith. Kristen Dunst’s character, has a mea culpa where she reflects on a career spent photographing war zones to warn Americans back home not to engage in the sort of warfare she’s now covering on American soil. For as much as Civil War tries to avoid coming too close to home, I think the movie nails the exact question that the journalism industry is facing in a post-Trump world after witnessing previous authoritarian regimes from around the world. Does journalism matter if at best it’s ignored or at worst actively having to compete against nonsense that has no factual rooting? Is it worth the physical and mental trauma that the job demands to keep shooting as someone’s life is ruined?
The movie doesn’t offer many answers for these questions, but it’s definitely one that I grappled with for a time while pursuing my degree in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter movement and a global pandemic. I’m not sure that I have any answers either, but Civil War did reinforce my belief in the power of journalism through showing the power that a photograph can have to make the viewer think. It instantly made me think of how journalists in Gaza have used social media to tell an unfiltered view of what’s happening in a territory that’s been extremely hard for traditional media to get access to. While there’s been no way to replicate traditional media’s access to newsmakers, all of us have the power now to be journalists that open the world’s eyes to what’s really happening.
All of this comes as trust in the media has tied record lows. An October 2023 Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Americans had either “not very much” trust in the media to report the news is a “full, fair, and accurate way” or “none at all.” That none at all statistic is the highest on record since the poll was first conducted in 1972. Conversely, the remaining 32 percent of Americans that have either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust ties the record low for that figure set in 2016. The industry certainly has tried to persuade its service as essential even as it was attacked on a daily basis from the White House briefing room. While you can certainly call this steep decline in media trust a reaction to Trump rilling his base up to essentially trust him and him alone, I do also think that part of the problem lies in the fact that consumers are essentially being told to trust an authority that largely operates in secret beyond the finished product. If I was leading marketing for a news organization, I would be spending significant resources on showing how journalism is made and the ethical decisions that go into publishing every article, social media post, or video package.
I feel like the only way to end this is to tell you to support journalism from the outlets that are actually doing the work on the ground that funnels through to the talking heads. (This is certainly not to slight the “mainstream media”: I’m a paying New York Times subscriber and NPR supporter, along with being a subscriber to my local Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I even subscribed to CNN+ for all two months it lasted!) It may take some more digging than simply scrolling through Instagram or TikTok, but I promise that you’ll come out of it a more informed global citizen.