The Fourth Estate – first look review

“What a sto­ry, what a fuck­ing sto­ry,” quips exec­u­tive edi­tor Dean Baquet on Inau­gu­ra­tion Day. This is the start point of Liz Gar­bus’ The Fourth Estate, a four-part doc­u­men­tary series telling the sto­ry of The New York Times dur­ing the first year of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. The remark is pre­cise­ly the type that sets the NYT’s lib­er­al read­er­ship over the edge – treat­ing the lat­est shock­ing twist in the improb­a­ble ascen­dan­cy of Don­ald Trump as just anoth­er plot point, dis­con­nect­ed from the impact it has on people.

But despite Trump’s com­plete unteth­er­ing from the truth and the Times’s unwa­ver­ing com­mit­ment to it, the role of the Grey Lady is not to be anoth­er pil­lar of the Resis­tance. The dogged, deter­mined jour­nal­ists are there to put the ​“sto­ry” in ​“his­to­ry,” find­ing the true facts and exert­ing repor­to­r­i­al judg­ment to deter­mine the true narrative.

The Fourth Estate depicts how the sausage gets made at the Times, from sweep­ing nar­ra­tives to gran­u­lar head­lines. Gar­bus picks up on both tracks of thought at the news­pa­per, each equal­ly impor­tant to shap­ing their cov­er­age of the new admin­is­tra­tion. From the open­ing scene, in which Baquet leans on the exper­tise of his reporters to gauge if Trump’s inau­gur­al address was more dire than tra­di­tion­al speech­es, she zeroes in on the var­i­ous process­es that deter­mine all the news that’s fit to print. While jour­nal­ists usu­al­ly pre­fer to keep them­selves out of the sto­ry, Gar­bus posi­tions the Times and its staff front and centre.

She avoids rehash­ing some of the great­est hits of the ear­ly Trump days, neglect­ing to depict the Mus­lim ban or the mis­sile strike on Syr­ia. (Which is just fine – expe­ri­enc­ing them once was trau­mat­ic enough.) Instead, Gar­bus lim­its her scope to the moments where Times reporters played a role in break­ing a sto­ry or shap­ing its fall­out. It’s ground­ed deeply in per­son­al­i­ty and pro­ce­dure, allow­ing the jour­nal­ists’ craft and method to shine.

The super­hero, at least of the first episode, is Trump whis­per­er and beat reporter Mag­gie Haber­man, a dogged work­horse with decades of insight into the ani­mat­ing forces behind the pres­i­dent. She’s also the clos­est thing to an audi­ence avatar – Haber­man con­fess­es that she, like many Amer­i­cans, pre­sumed Hillary Clin­ton would win and allow her to return to a nor­mal­ly paced life. But Trump’s vic­to­ry ensured she stay in high demand and on high alert. (Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it also meant she had to renege on her promise that her chil­dren would get their mom back after the campaign.)

The oth­er break­out per­son­al­i­ty, whose name might be less rec­og­niz­able from polit­i­cal Twit­ter or her bylines, is Wash­ing­ton bureau edi­tor Elis­a­beth Bumiller. Peo­ple in her posi­tion tra­di­tion­al­ly clash with the top brass back in the Big Apple because the bureau chief thinks he or she knows the sto­ry bet­ter than any­one else, some­thing Baquet knows from hav­ing filled the role him­self. The belief leads to fric­tion when the New York team com­plete­ly rewrites her lede fol­low­ing Trump’s first Con­gres­sion­al address, a clash that spurs acri­mo­ny and ani­mos­i­ty between the two branches.

Gar­bus fore­grounds the doc­u­men­tary in the shut­ter­ing of sev­en floors at the paper’s Times Square head­quar­ters. The con­trac­tion of media com­pa­nies is an impor­tant con­text for The Fourth Estate but does not ani­mate the sto­ry in the way it did for Andrew Rossi’s 2011 doc­u­men­tary Page One, a post-reces­sion glimpse of a flail­ing (not fail­ing) Times. It’s the Don­ald Trump show; jour­nal­ists, like the rest of us, are just liv­ing it.

Oth­er non-Trump threads, such as Emi­ly Steel and Jim Ruten­berg break­ing the sto­ry on con­ser­v­a­tive media icon Bill O’Reilly’s sex­u­al harass­ment scan­dal, feel a bit super­flu­ous. But they’ll most like­ly come back full cir­cle in a lat­er sec­tion of the doc­u­men­tary when the Time pub­lish­es the first sto­ry about Har­vey Wein­stein and opens the flood­gates for the #MeToo move­ment. Gar­bus clear­ly knows the rule of Chekov’s gun – an off-hand­ed remark mus­ing about Trump fir­ing FBI Direc­tor James Comey fore­shad­ows what will cer­tain­ly become a mas­sive por­tion of the next chap­ter. As does the final word flash­ing on screen in a reporter’s draft­ed arti­cle: ​“col­lu­sion.”