Journalism 101: Journalists in the Movies
It’s hard to overstate how much the public’s perceptions of the media come from television and movies. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a good television show about the media since “Lou Grant,” and that didn’t even have Mary Tyler Moore in it, so how good could it have been?
In contrast, journalism’s done pretty well in the movies, with more famous movies about journalists — especially newspaper reporters — than I have time to go through. (Fortunately, other people are willing to take on that task.)
Instead, let’s go through what I think are the best three movies about journalism that I’ve seen:
#3: Broadcast News
This 1987 film does a great job of capturing the deadline-driven environment of the media, the screwed up people who work in it, the disparity between those who view it as a calling and those who view it as a job and the weird (and unhealthy) way that even journalists working for the same organization are competing with each other on some level. William Hurt and Albert Brooks give stand-out performances.
My only quibble with this movie is sort of a big one: The “shocking revelation” at the end isn’t. No one in television would have assumed the shoot in question would have used two cameras, as one camera is the standard on essentially all TV news shoots. (The movie also has a very anachronistic point of view about date rape which is jarring for many modern audiences.)
#2: Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical 2000 movie is about a freelance reporter, and gets the feel of being a reporter, especially a feature reporter, exactly right. The shifting power between reporter and source, the strange “are we friends or not” elements to the relationships and the precarious nature of reputation are all there. As a pure slice of life of what it’s like to be a reporter, in all its frustration and joys, is right here. A brilliant film.
#1: The Paper
Except for a silly change to heighten the tension at the end of the movie — in real life, printing presses rip off careless people’s arms, so there’s absolutely NOT anything covering the buttons to stop the presses in real pressrooms — this 1994 Ron Howard film gets it right, from start to finish. Editorial meetings sound in real life just like they do at the fictional “New York Sun” — when the editors go through the news of the day, discarding any that have no New York connections, it could have been word for word from any newspaper editorial meeting in the country — and the desperation, pride and issues are all the ones raised in newsrooms every single day around the country. The tension between getting something right or getting something first, the relative low pay of people rubbing shoulders (at times) with the rich and famous, the joy in being an ink-stained wretch instead of an uptown reporter, it’s all accurate.
The movie’s so good, even the Hollywoodized final scene in the pressroom is forgivable.
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