In an interview to promote her new movie, “The Post,” Hollywood legend Meryl Streep discussed her media habits and admitted she reads Drudge and Fox News, along with The New York Times.
Streep, along with director Steven Spielberg and several of the film’s collaborators, discussed the new movie that tells the story of the Pentagon Papers through the eyes of Washington Post reporter Katharine Graham. Never shy about her left-leaning politics, Streep discussed a wide variety of topics with The Hollywood Reporter, including the recent spate of sexual harassment claims (“We are on the way to something better”) and her media viewing habits. Asked if she trusts the media today, Streep answered, “Broadly? All of it? No.” (No thinking person would disagree with her on that.)
Spielberg jumped in: “I’m not going to go on record saying which media I trust.” (Don’t worry, Steven, we know.) He added, “I’m just saying, obviously, there is media that you would imagine I would not trust. Obviously, there is media you would take for granted I trust, and you would be right.” (Hint: It’s not Fox News.)
“You trust but verify,” Streep added, “we get betrayed.” She recalled a time she had been burned by the media. “It involves people who are not at the table,” she said, declining to reveal the specifics.
But then she revealed some surprising facts about her rather eclectic media viewing habits. “In my political reading, I read The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian. I check in on Politico, Axios and Drudge.” She also goes to Fox often, “to see the manipulation.”
Amy Pascal, producer of “The Post,” piped in: “Now everybody has their own news programs and things that they read and, except for Meryl, nobody reads the other sides.”
They went on to discuss women in the workplace and the First Amendment (Streep said that if people were killed or compromised, Edward Snowden should be held accountable while Spielberg said Julian Assange committed no crimes).
Streep revealed later in the interview that her thinking is shifting constantly. “That’s the point of being an actor: You shift your weight and try to see as much as you can,” she said. “I don’t have a fixed sense of myself. I know my loves, my beliefs. I have people that I wish the world still had in it.”
If she’s adding Drudge and Fox News to her steady diet of left-leaning news sources —even if she’s doing it to “see the manipulation” — more power to her. Maybe she’ll learn something. It would behoove us all to follow Streep’s lead and get out of our comfortable media bubbles to see what the other side is saying — and not just what our side says the other side is saying.
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