Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford in 'Truth'

If "Truth" wants to elicit sympathy for the journalists it portrays, then it's honest to a fault.

"Truth" tells the story behind the infamous "60 Minutes II" story on the National Guard service record of then-president George W. Bush, a 2004 piece that ran in the midst of his re-election campaign.

The movie is drawn from the memoir of Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett), the CBS News producer assigned to assemble a team (including Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss) to ferret out the story in Texas.

Their story hangs largely on one source: former Guard officer Bill Burkett (Stacy Keach), who produces photocopies of documents that purport to show Bush was AWOL during his service, signed by Guard officers who didn't want to cover for Bush.

Mapes' team works industriously on a tight deadline to find corroborating information. "Truth" director James Vanderbilt does an efficient job laying out the fact-gathering process - it's all crisp, lucid, nicely acted, leading to the interview in which anchor Dan Rather (Robert Redford) gets Burkett on record. It's a superb turn by Keach, in ways that aren't clear until later in the film.

But "Truth" isn't about the creation of a story; it's about the disintegration of one. There are immediate questions about the authenticity of the documents (you'll learn more about fonts and typewriters and handwriting than you ever want to know). The news gets worse - their big "get" gets caught in a whopper of a lie.

Corporate bigshots (Bruce Greenwood) immediately start risk assessment and damage control. When it becomes obvious that a scalp will be taken, there's a chilling scene featuring Rather telling his old friend Mapes to get a lawyer.

Meanwhile, we're meant to feel that amid the nit-picking a larger truth has been lost - that rich kid Bush ducked the war and that, while in the Guard, he had a shoddy, spotty record unworthy of a commander in chief.

But if the story was that important, Mapes had an extra obligation to present one that was unassailable. And it wasn't, as the movie itself reminds us. The inconvenient truth: Mapes had a flimsy source.

And there's a character missing here. It's the so-called blogosphere, where (mostly) conservative websites poked holes in the "60 Minutes II" story.

Mapes, Rather and others talk about these Internet reports as generic abstractions - invisible, unseen, somehow insubstantial.

But Internet news sites were plenty real, and already supplanting pre-digital brands like "60 Minutes." The literal meaning of "broadcast" was already obsolete, and a network show like "60 Minutes II" no longer had the power to galvanize public opinion the way it had just a few years earlier, as with the anti-tobacco story memorialized in the movie "The Insider."

"Truth" concludes with Mapes staring down a fact-finding panel consisting of lawyers who accuse her of political bias. The movie misses the irony that consumers abandoned the purported bias of programs like "60 Minutes II" for the outright bias of partisan sites.

Mapes was the first casualty, but far from the last. Rather would soon follow. The collateral damage was hundreds of network reporters, bureaus and staffers.

Mapes makes a poor standard bearer for all that has been lost. You'll get a better assessment in the upcoming "Spotlight" (in theaters Nov. 13), about Boston Globe reporters exposing church sex scandals. That's the same Boston Globe group, incidentally, that originally (and more carefully) reported the Bush/Guard story, a fact strangely unmentioned in this movie.