In September 5, the story of a 1972 news team combines the legacy of earlier journalism films. In 2025, it could hardly be more relevant.
I bloody love a good journalism movie. I’m probably biased, but I’m not sure there’s always a correlation between a person’s job and their film taste; do all bus drivers obsessively watch Paterson and Speed? For our sake, I hope they’re not obsessively watching Speed.
Regardless, there’s little more reassuring in a climate of evaporating media outlets than a movie telling you your profession (albeit the slightly more important-sounding investigative side of it) is worth having around. The Post and (improbably) Spotlight have become go-to comfort movies in my house.
It seems I’m not alone, either – since the golden age of film noir, the intrepid journalist has become a helpful narrative replacement for the kind of chain-smoking private investigator’s we all secretly suspect don’t actually exist. Cinema’s obsession with the trench-coat-and-trilby class is such that it’s arguably come to shape the roll of real-life journalists more than any other.
I’d guess a solid chunk of the folks enrolled on journalism courses since 1976 did so after watching All The President’s Men. The father of the modern journalism movie remains a near-perfect masterclass in ‘competency porn’ – the thrill that comes from watching smart people doing a damn good job. That it might inspire multiple generations of wannabe journalists to become the next Woodward and Bernstein, on its release, seemed almost like a useful side effect.
In the years since, the legacy of the very journalism the film celebrates has become far murkier. Woodward and Bernstein, immortalised on screen by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, are now remembered as the journalists who took down a President – a role they, and Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, have all identified as absurd. Over the decades, the subtle distinction between ‘holding power to account’ and playing ‘gotcha’ has become harder and harder to draw – to the point that journalists routinely rank near the bottom of professions the public are most likely to trust.
But there’s a reason more journalists cite All The President’s Men as a favourite film over the similarly brilliant Network. Released within a few months of the Watergate classic, Sidney Lumet’s ratings-chasing news studio takes a much dimmer view of the role ‘journos’ had – and would soon come to have – on the media landscape. Today, the pair act like two sides of the same coin; one celebrating the power of journalism as an act in itself, the other terrified of the society the same journalism is being released into.
Both, too, have their modern-day successors. Spielberg’s The Post ends with the infamous break-in All The President’s Men starts with, and Maria Schrader’s She Said is perhaps the most comparable example of an investigative journalism movie entering development in the immediate aftermath of the events it describes. Nightcrawler, meanwhile, takes a similarly cynical view of the way we react to the moving image with its chilling mantra: “If it bleeds, it leads”.
Bridging the gap between the two is the latest newsroom thriller to hit UK cinemas: September 5. Half the underdog story of a sports news crew learning how to cover a crisis as it unfolds and half an examination of journalistic ethics in the age of live video coverage, it’s a distinctly modern approach to the formula despite its 1972 setting. In ways its creators could never have predicted when it entered production, it might even prove too modern.
Podcast | September 5 (2024), with director Tim Fehlbaum
In the on-screen postscript to September 5, we’re reminded that Munich was the first time a terrorist action was broadcast live on TV. Earlier in the film, we’re told that more people watched it than the moon landing. It’s a story that celebrates a dedicated crew’s ability to show audiences the truth even while asking whether they should be telling it. Like Network and Nightstalker before it, it’s a film that recognises the power a camera has over the written word. In an age of video, we can watch and have watched a thousand tragedies every day. Throughout the film, characters constantly argue for the journalistic value of showing audiences the truth; the problem is, is it a truth that people should see?
September 5 might not be every journalist’s new favourite film. It’s always tempting, particularly in an industry with a habit of being inward-looking, to focus on when the job goes right, rather than when it goes wrong. But for anyone trying to understand the complexities of the job at its best – or even the increasing majority of people who don’t trust journalists at all – it could be one of the most important. In 2025, one line from the trailer stands out more than any other: “If they shoot someone on live television, whose story is that? Is it ours? Or is it theirs?”
