In America, we currently have a laughable, ego-fuelled show pony who kicks out when people don't say nice things about him, no matter how true they are. Including journalists doing their job.
Meanwhile, here in jolly old England we have a Foreign Secretary — essentially Britain's face to the world, our top diplomat — who utters complete, and at times racist, balderdash but refuses to apologise or even to be held to account.
In both cases, and it could be argued Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are hewn from the same shabby, repugnant cloth, they don't think they should be held accountable by anyone.
Especially not a free press.
In fact, especially in The Donald's petulant perceptions, a free press has no business being free. They are there to simply reiterate his lies and bullshit.
Dissension will not be tolerated.
Which makes parallels with the Nixon era both chilling and fascinating.
And brings us nicely to The Post.
Essentially the story of a woman in a man's world, The Post is both a tale of press freedom and government bullying and the prequel to Watergate.
Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, it's a film Spielberg felt so passionate about he worked on it while also finishing off Ready Player One, feeling it was a story that needed telling now.
And he's right.
With "fake news" becoming a by-word (OK, two) for stories Herr Drumpf doesn't like, the press has never been so under attack - especially The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The story itself looks at the Pentagon Papers scandal — papers that disclosed the truth about the Vietnam War — from the perspective of The Washington Post, a story that was breaking just as The Post was trying to raise much-needed capital through floating on the stock exchange.
Now, to those of us too young to know what happened, the skewing of history isn't too big an issue — but for those who were, namely the NYT journalists who actually broke the story — it's a bit of an issue.
But in a way, for this story, that doesn't matter too much.
Matters when you were the guy who actually broke the story, I'll admit, but this is a film not a historical archive.
And to be honest it makes a nice change for Hollywood to be pissing about with America's history rather than ours.
But I digress.
As for the film itself, it's totally fine — an important one to watch for the message if not the cinematic experience.
It's well written (history issues aside), Steep and Hanks do their stuff well without really breaking sweat and the assembled supporting cast all do what is needed.
It would have been nice if the other female members of the cast had more to do than answer the phone and hand round sandwiches, but hey ho. It was a different time...
The pacing is a bit off at times, and while there are sections that are nail-biting and gripping, there are other bits which lag and feel out of step with the main thrust of the movie.
And the opening war scenes do feel like they're from a totally different movie.
On a personal level, the shots of papers going through the press are beautiful. You could easily lose them, but as someone who always got a thrill watching the presses roll and taking those first copies off...
...ahh, those were good days.
But I appreciate that's an entirely personal reaction.
Overall, The Post is a perfectly good film — probably the very definition of 6/10 — with some fine performances.
It needed more of an edit, but gets kudos for not spending time explaining what's going on and just expecting the audience to be intelligent enough to follow events.
It also needs watching by anyone, just so we can all see that Trump is basically my generation's Nixon.
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