Review: Women’s voices and the facts power no-nonsense journalistic drama ‘She Said’
Mama said, “We’ve been here before, and we will come back” (Auburn, Alabama)
The year was 1985, and the television news landscape was pretty much the same as it is today. The news media was dominated by a hierarchy of news divisions that ran one from the corporate level up to the most local outlets, and the only thing about to change was the medium.
The same news organizations that dominated television news with their news divisions were now competing for the same ad dollars on radio, and newspapers.
In the middle of this transition was the fact-based news division that would become, by far, the most powerful news organizations in American, at least from the perspective of the American public. They were the Associated Press and United Press International.
For decades, the AP had been at the forefront of the no-nonsense kind of journalism they called “The Facts,” which included everything from the facts of the day to the facts of history. The AP was the first to use video and the first TV station to start a news department, and to go head-to-head with television’s traditional news divisions was a great move for them.
And their story about a woman who was beaten by her husband and then killed by a sheriff’s deputy, for which the husband was charged with murder, only began to gain widespread public attention at the end of the 1980s. It helped to bring the “facts” of the story to the attention of the American public as never before.
But the facts themselves weren’t what made the story special.
It was the woman’s voice. She was the voice of the woman that was the most powerful, least politically correct, and most powerful. Her voice was also the most powerful because, as it turned out, she was an amazing journalist with a remarkable grasp of fact.
When she spoke, so did the fact-based news division and it took off. The AP put out a series of stories on the story, and the
