Streep and Spielberg on the media: Trust but verify

Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg say they have no way of trusting everything they read in the press.
“Broadly? All of it? No,” Streep, who stars as late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in the upcoming Spielberg-directed Pentagon Papers film, “The Post,” tells The Hollywood Reporter in a story published Tuesday, when asked if she trusts the media.
“You trust but verify,” the Academy Award-winning actress explained. “We get betrayed.”
Streep, who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and has been an outspoken critic of President Trump, says she’s been duped before by false reports.
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“I thought of one in my private life, which I don’t wish to talk about. It involves people who are not at the table — but yes. In my political reading, I read The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian.”
“I check in on Politico, Axios and Drudge,” Streep, 68, said, “and I go to Fox often to see the manipulation.”
Spielberg tells The Hollywood Reporter, “I’m not going to go on record saying which media I trust.”
“I’m just saying, obviously, there is media that you would imagine I would not trust,” Spielberg added with a laugh.
“Obviously, there is media you would take for granted I trust, and you would be right.”
Spielberg says he laments the current political climate, because “we’ve lost the majority of good listeners” and “our conversations have turned into skirmishes.”
“We live in an area where we don’t know a lot of red-state voters. Well, I know a lot because I have friends and family in other parts of this country, and so at dinner table conversations outside of California, I’m completely mute or I get into these huge rows,” said the 70-year-old Oscar winner.
“The gray and the blue have become the blue and the red. And it is as vast a chasm as our nation faced before the Civil War. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“We don’t know where north is,” Streep added. “People disagree on what actual facts are. Whether this table is really a table.”
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