A 1976 Oscar-winning film about two young Washington Post reporters chasing a story that would eventually drive a sitting president out of office is heading back to the big screen in Bethlehem next month, and the people who put together NHPR’s Civics 101 podcast are betting that what made the movie work in the bicentennial year still works in 2026. On Sunday, June 7, the Colonial Theatre, the historic 1914 single-screen movie house on Bethlehem’s Main Street, will host a Civics at the Cinema afternoon featuring All the President’s Men, with Civics 101 hosts Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice leading a post-film conversation about Watergate, the role of an independent press in a constitutional democracy, and how a story that broke in the early 1970s reads in a media environment that no one in 1976 could have predicted.
According to NHPR’s event announcement for the screening, the afternoon will begin with a 1 p.m. reception at the Colonial, followed by the screening at 1:30 p.m. and the moderated conversation immediately after the film. Tickets start at $10, and every attendee will be entered to win local gift cards and merchandise from NHPR and the Colonial Theatre. The full program will run roughly four hours from reception through the end of the discussion, and seats are likely to move quickly given the combined draw of a beloved film, a popular podcast, and a North Country venue that has cultivated a serious following for substantive cinema.
Why this film, why now
All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula and starring Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, did something unusual when it was released in April 1976. It took a story that had already been exhaustively covered in newspapers and on television and turned it into a procedural thriller about reporting itself. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay for William Goldman, and it permanently changed the way American culture pictures the work of journalism. The image of two reporters in the back of a parking garage, taking notes from a source who insists on remaining anonymous, became shorthand for accountability journalism in ways that still shape how the public understands the press half a century later.
The decision by Civics 101 to anchor a public conversation around this particular film, in the spring of 2026, is also a decision about what the show wants its audience to wrestle with. American attitudes toward the press are at a generational low. Trust in mainstream media has fractured along partisan lines. Local newsrooms have collapsed in much of the country. The basic premise of the film, that a free press serves as an independent check on power, is no longer a settled assumption in the way it was when Pakula was making the picture. The Civics at the Cinema format gives a room of viewers a shared experience of the original case for that premise and then asks, with the show’s hosts moderating, what survives translation into the present.
McCarthy and Capodice are well suited to the assignment. Civics 101 has built its national audience on the proposition that a refresher course on the basics of American government, delivered with care and humor, is something a lot of adults badly want and rarely get. The show’s segments on the Watergate hearings, the Pentagon Papers case, and the constitutional limits of executive power are among its most-listened-to episodes. Translating that audio sensibility into a live, in-person discussion at the Colonial is a natural extension of what the program already does well.
The Colonial Theatre and Civics at the Cinema
The Colonial Theatre is one of the great surviving mid-Coast cinema houses in northern New England. Built in 1914, the single-screen theater has operated continuously through more than a century of Hollywood history, surviving the transition from silent film to sound, the rise and fall of the studio system, and the long contraction of single-screen movie houses that has erased so many of its peers across the United States. In recent years, the Colonial has become a cornerstone of cultural life in the White Mountains, programming a mix of first-run releases, classic film series, live music, and special events that pull from across the region.
The theater’s Spotlight Film Series and its various special-event programs have become a destination for North Country cinephiles, and partnerships like the Civics at the Cinema afternoon with NHPR are a recurring fixture of the calendar. The pairing makes sense. The Colonial is a venue that takes its audience seriously enough to program complex and demanding work. Civics 101 is a show that takes its listeners seriously enough to assume that they want more than a hot take. Putting them together for an afternoon built around a film that asks hard questions about institutions, accountability, and citizenship is the kind of programming that does not happen accidentally.
For visitors planning the trip, Bethlehem is a small mountain town on the western edge of the White Mountain National Forest, about a two-hour drive from Concord and roughly an hour from the Conway recreation corridor. The town’s Main Street has a small but capable cluster of restaurants and shops that have made it a popular stop for fall foliage tourists and skiers heading to nearby Bretton Woods or Cannon Mountain. The Colonial is at the center of that walkable district, and the early Sunday afternoon schedule leaves time before or after the screening to make the day a full North Country outing.
What the post-film conversation is likely to cover
McCarthy and Capodice will lead the conversation after the screening, and based on the topics Civics 101 has tackled most often, attendees can expect a discussion that ranges across several connected questions. The first is the historical one. What actually happened during Watergate, in what sequence, and which institutions of American government performed well or badly under the pressure of a constitutional crisis. That question is far less settled than people who lived through the era sometimes assume. New documents continue to be released. Recent academic work has reassessed the role of the FBI, the federal courts, and Congress. The film captures one slice of that history, the reportorial slice, but the fuller picture rewards the kind of structured walk-through Civics 101 specializes in.
The second strand is the mechanics of journalism itself. All the President’s Men is, on its surface, a political thriller. Watched again, it is also one of the most accurate depictions of how reporting actually works that American cinema has produced. The hours on the phone. The trips to courthouses and government offices. The crossing and re-crossing of the same set of sources to confirm a single sentence. McCarthy and Capodice are likely to walk attendees through how those mechanics map onto the very different reporting environment of 2026, in which a substantial share of accountability journalism is done by independent journalists, nonprofit newsrooms, and substack-based reporters operating with budgets the Post in 1972 would not have considered serious.
The third strand is the constitutional one. Watergate ultimately produced a body of law and norms around executive power, special prosecutors, and the limits of presidential immunity that has been actively contested over the past two decades and that remains in the headlines as recently as last month. Whatever direction that conversation takes on June 7, it is likely to draw on the kind of careful definitional work that Civics 101 has built its reputation on.
Practical details and how to attend
The afternoon runs Sunday, June 7, with the reception starting at 1 p.m. at the Colonial Theatre, 2050 Main Street in Bethlehem. The film begins at 1:30 p.m., followed by the moderated conversation. Tickets start at $10 and can be purchased through the Colonial Theatre’s online ticketing system. Every attendee will be entered to win gift cards and merchandise from NHPR and the Colonial.
The Colonial is fully accessible. Parking is available in the public lot adjacent to the theater and along Main Street. The town has a number of good restaurants within walking distance for an early dinner after the program.
For New Hampshire residents who follow Civics 101 but have never made the trip to Bethlehem, the June 7 event is a good first occasion to combine the show, the venue, and a North Country afternoon. For families introducing teenagers to All the President’s Men for the first time, the post-film conversation is the kind of structured discussion that turns a viewing into something they will actually remember.
For more on the work happening in New Hampshire civic education, see our recent reporting on the Civics 101 ecosystem and the work being done with St. Anselm College and Pittsfield-area schools. For broader cultural context on how Granite State arts venues are programming this season, our coverage of the work being done at the Outside/In summer programming and the 1936 heat wave history project is a useful complement.
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