Journalist in Film

BRIAN MCNAIR
Heroes and Villains

Journalists in Film
Journalists in Film
Heroes and Villains
Brian McNair
Edinburgh University Press

© Brian McNair, 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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printed and bound in Great Britain by
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ISBN 978 0 7486 3447 7 (paperback)
The right of Brian McNair

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
List of figures vii

Preface and acknowledgements ix
Part 1: Introductions and overviews

1 Introduction 3
2 A good tradition of love and hate 9
3 Heroes and villains – an overview of journalism on film 23
4 Journalism in film: 1997–2008 41
Part 11: Heroes

5 Watchdogs 57
6 Witnesses 75
7 Heroines 94
8 Artists 114
Part 111: Villains

9 Rogues, reptiles and repentant sinners 137
10 Fabricators, fakers, fraudsters 159
11 King-makers 174
12 In closing 199
Appendix – Films about journalism, 1997–2008 201

Bibliography 253
Index 257
List of Figures
Table 1 Journalism in the movies, 1997–2008
Figure 1 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Source: BFI

Figure 2 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). Source: BFI
Figure 3 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957).
Source: BFI
Figure 4 Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003). Source: BFI
Figure 5 Runaway Bride (Gary Marshall, 1999). Source: BFI
Figure 6 Anchorman (Adam McKay, 2004). Source: BFI
Figure 7 Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994). Source: BFI
Figure 8 A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2007). Source:
BFI
Figure 9 The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006). Source: BFI
Figure 10 All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula). Source: BFI
Figure 11 Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005).
Source: BFI
Figure 12 The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999). Source: BFI
Figure 13 Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). Source:
BFI
Figure 14 Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1984)
Figure 15 Welcome To Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997).
Source: BFI
Figure 16 A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2007). Source:
BFI
Figure 19 Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981). Source: BFI
Figure 20. Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005). Source: BFI
viii list of figures
Figure 21 Infamous (Douglas McGrath, 2006). Source: BFI

Figure 22 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998).
Source: BFI
Figure 24 La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960). Source: BFI
Figure 25 Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951). Source: BFI
Figure 26 Accidental Hero (Stephen Frears, 1992). Source: BFI
Figure 28 J. J. Hunsecker, Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander
MacKendrick, 1957). Source: BFI
Figure 29 Tony Curtis as Sydney Falco, Sweet Smell of Success
(Alexander MacKendrick, 1957). Source: BFI
Preface and acknowledgements
This book is a film fan’s labour of love, and a media scholar’s consideration of
what journalism – one of our key social and cultural institutions – is in our time,
as refracted through the prism of one of our most important cultural forms.
The films selected for discussion are those which I have found particularly use-
ful in my academic work as a researcher and teacher of journalism, resonant in
what they have to say about how journalism is perceived in liberal democratic
societies, and engaging as a film lover. There are omissions, no doubt, and some
readers may disagree with my choices and emphases. Suggestions on films
which I have neglected to mention are welcome.
My thanks go to the University of Strathclyde for a semester of study leave in
which to watch films and write about them, and to those journalists, academics
and others who responded to my request for their views on their favourite films
about journalism. Thanks to Katherine McNair for help in assembling film
stills, tables and formatting of the final typescript, and to Tereza McLaughlin-
Vanova for research and office support. Faye Hammill read and provided use-
ful comments on ‘Heroines’.
Brian McNair
January 2010
Part I
Introductions and Overviews
 
Introduction
I have been researching, teaching and writing about journalism for more than
two decades. I have also written some 200 pieces of journalism of my own
– mainly feature articles, travel pieces and commentary columns for the print
and online media.1 Throughout that time I have been fascinated by feature
films in which journalism is the subject, or is a central element of the narrative.
In my teaching and research work I have found movies a useful, engaging,
sometimes inspirational source of knowledge about how, as members of liberal
democratic societies in which journalism is highly valued, we view journalists.
More often than not they are highly relevant to the analysis and understanding
of contemporary debates around news and other forms of journalism.
And debates there always are, heated and high on the public agenda, about
journalistic ethics, political bias, the effects of commercialisation and compe-
tition on the content and style of journalism, structures of ownership and
control of news media, the consequences of new communication technologies,
the relationship between news media and politics, the role of the journalist
in time of war. The films which have been made about journalism are a
fruitful pathway into those debates, with the advantage in terms of grabbing
students’ attention that they often involve texts which are familiar, even to a
non-specialist audience. Mention of Jurgen Habermas’ theory of the public
sphere will not always prompt excitement in the lecture theatre. Talking about
Richard Gere’s roguish columnist in Runaway Bride (Gary Marshall, 1999)2
will at least get an audience’s attention. This book, necessarily and perhaps
fortuitously, makes frequent reference to George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Kate
Winslet, Will Ferrell, and a host of other A-list stars who have made films
about journalism and journalists a significant part of their portfolio.
Beyond the opportunity they provide to exploit the celebrity factor (not
to be under-estimated in modern media studies pedagogy), we find that
films inevitably, and not necessarily by intention, capture something of the
4 journalists in film
prevailing cultural zeitgeist in relation to journalism. Film-makers, like the rest

of us, live in society. They absorb its changing moods and anxieties and reflect
them back to their audiences. Contemporary concerns inevitably inflect their
work. Films made decades ago, such as the screwball comedies of the black-
and-white era, often speak to and illuminate current debates, contextualising
them in relation to a cultural history which, if never quite repeating the same
thing twice, seems to recycle social anxieties again and again, teaching us that
some things at least don’t change; that the unease and, sometimes, outrage we
may feel about the performance of some journalists in the twenty-first century,
as well as the admiration we have for others, are emotions shared by previous
generations. The issues raised more than half a century ago in Billy Wilder’s
Ace in the Hole (1951) are remarkably similar to those which occupy the critics
of journalism in our own time.
Who this book is for
Apart from being an academic in the field of media studies, a journalism

educator, and an occasional writer of journalism, I am also a film lover who
finds few greater satisfactions than that of combining profession and pleasure
in a scholarly project. I am therefore delighted to have had the opportunity to
write a book about journalism, which uses films about journalism to consider
who the journalist is in the twenty-first century, how s/he has got there, and
where s/he is going next. It will connect, I hope, with three potential audiences.
First, I intend this book to serve as a resource for the expanding numbers
of academics and their students delivering or taking media, journalism and
cultural studies courses in colleges and universities across the world, and who
wish to better understand the ambivalent relationship we have as publics in
liberal democracies with one of our core cultural institutions and the people
who work in them. Journalism is hugely important for the effective working of
democratic societies, all agree, and so therefore are the journalists. This book
explores how that simple truth is reflected in cinema. Introductory chapters
trace the evolution of the journalistic role and identity, and the professional
practices of journalism in its various guises, before we turn to the cinematic
representation of these roles, identities and practices. As we go along, my
footnotes provide a scholarly sub-text designed for the use of students and
teachers in particular.
My second target reader is the non-academic observer of journalism. The
book examines the representation of journalism and journalists in cinema. It
asks: how have journalists been imagined by film-makers down the years, and
what does this tell us about the changing role of the journalist in society, and of
the evolving expectations and tensions in the relationship between journalists
introduction 5
and their audiences? These questions are important for students who may have
journalistic careers in mind, self-evidently, and for working journalists (who
are, like any other professional group, legitimately interested in their public
perception), but also for we non-journalists.
Journalism is a job for some, but part of the social and cultural fabric of
all (or nearly all) our lives. Everyone who has ever read a newspaper, watched
or listened to a broadcast news bulletin, or accessed an online news site, has
an interest in how the makers of news and journalism are represented in
culture. The cultural commentator Joan Bakewell once referred to journalists,
in a book of that name, as The New Priesthood3 signifying that combination
of trusted elder and authoritative moral voice which is the liberal journalistic
ideal. Priests are not perfect, nor are they infallible, and the movies are a space
in our culture where the flaws and weaknesses of the journalistic variety, as well
as their strengths, are rehearsed.
I approach the films discussed in the following chapters not only as cultural
artefacts worthy of analysis in themselves, but as accessible points of departure
for jumping into debates about the state of the news media in the twenty-first
century, and the changes and stages they have gone through in getting to this
point. I hope that, amongst my non-academic readers, journalists in particular
will find this approach interesting and useful, should they wish to reflect on
how their profession is perceived by the people who read their articles and
watch or listen to their output on radio, TV and online.
A third group of readers, lovers of film in general, may approach this book
as a study of one particular cinematic sub-genre which has produced some of
the greatest films ever made, as well as some of the worst. For them, and for
lovers of lists everywhere, Appendix 1 contains short reviews of all the films
about journalism made for the cinema and released in the United Kingdom
between 1997 and 2008 – seventy-one titles in all, from Curtis Hanson’s LA
Confidential (1997) to Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (2008).
Richard Ness’ filmography, From Headline Hunter to Superman (1997), is a
comprehensive survey of the history of journalism in cinema from the 1920s
up to 1996 and contains some 2,000 such reviews. My appendix does a similar,
if much less onerous job for the decade or so after his book ends. While the
following chapters explore the changing role of journalism, using movies from
as long ago as 1940 to illustrate themes and trends, these reviews, ranging from
100 to 1,000 words in length, address the post-1996 films as films. Their focus
is on the aesthetic dimensions of the movies in question – their qualities (or
lack of) as works of cinematic art – as well as the journalism issues they raise.
In addition to reviewing the films these short essays contain background infor-
mation which may be interesting and/or useful to the reader, such as running
length and global box office receipts.
By layering the book in this way (thematic chapters, scholarly footnotes,
review essays) I hope it will be used by researchers, teachers and students of

journalism on the one hand; read and enjoyed by journalists on the other; and
read, too, by those who are in neither of the first two categories but merely
love the movies and/or care enough about journalism to have an interest in its
representation in popular culture; the same non-specialists who attended my
lecture on Journalists in Film delivered at the Glasgow Film Theatre in 2005,
and who stayed on that Sunday afternoon to see George Clooney’s Good Night,
and Good Luck (2005). And by those who have seen A Mighty Heart (2007),
Anchorman (2004), Zodiac (2007) or other of the many films about journalism
which have been screened in the multiplexes in recent times.
Outline
I begin in Chapter 2 with a discussion of what it is we as publics in democratic

societies expect our journalists to be in the twenty-first century, and what we
think of how they perform those roles. Chapter 3 presents an overview of the
main features of what has been characterised by others such as Richard Ness,
Howard Good, Matthew Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman as the ‘journalism genre’ –
the categories and sub-genres of film which have been made about journalism.
Chapter 4 focuses on journalism movies released in the period between 1997
and 2008.
The remainder of the book comprises a series of chapters organised themat-
ically around various aspects of the journalist’s role which are central to his or
her position in democratic societies: the journalist as watchdog, and as witness,
especially in conflict situations; as artist, in an era of licensed journalistic
subjectivity; as the king-maker, or pundit, who has nearly as much celebrity
and power as the elites over which he or she is supposed to watch; as the hack,
or villain, the manipulator of the truth and the fabricator of facts.
A chapter is devoted to the representation of female journalists, reflecting the
long-standing importance of the discussion of gender in journalism studies. I
include, too, in the chapter on king-makers, a section on a category of commu-
nication professional who is not a journalist, but whose work is an essential
element in the practice of journalism in our time – the public relations practi-
tioner, or ‘spin doctor’. That fact justifies, I would argue, some discussion of
how PR professionals have been represented in film since the early days when
Tony Curtis’ delightfully dodgy press agent, Sydney Falco, featured in Sweet
Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957).
introduction 7
Exclusions
Cinema is not the first art form to address the subject of journalism. Fiction
writers have been doing so for much longer, and many films about journalism
are based on literary works. The late Gordon Burns’ Fullalove (1995) and Born
Yesterday: the news as a novel (2008), Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1987),
Iain McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) and Sebastian Faulks’ Engleby (2007) are
some of the best known examples of recent novels about journalism and the
people who produce it. Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and many other great
writers of the past have also tackled the subject, often using experience gained
as journalists. I do not attempt to cover the subject of journalism-in-literature
in this book, although there are many parallels and commonalities in the
approach of writers working in both forms. Cinema and prose fiction are both
narrative arts which, aside from their aesthetic attributes, provide observers
with a window looking onto a culture’s concerns and preoccupations. Space
prevents me from including the written word in this volume, however, which
could easily fill another book in its own right.
Neither have I included, except here and there in passing, discussion of the
representation of journalists in theatre and TV drama. Theatre has been the
source of some important movies about journalism, such as Howard Hawks’s
His Girl Friday (made in 1940, and based on Hecht and MacArthur’s 1928
play The Front Page). The final film of the 1997–2008 period covered for this
book was Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008), adapted from Peter Morgan’s
2006 stage play of that name. Tim Fountain’s Julie Burchill Is Away, about the
great British controversialist, was produced in London in 2004, its title refer-
encing another successful West End production about a notorious journalist,
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (Keith Waterhouse, 1989).
There have been some notable TV characterisations of journalists, such as
Channel 4’s Drop the Dead Donkey and Brass Eye, BBC’s The Day Today,4
and James Nesbitt’s character in the 2008 ITV production of Midnight Man.
In March 2009 Channel 4 broadcast an adaptation of David Peace’s Red
Riding novels, in which investigative journalist William Dunford has a key
role. Television programmes tend to be more localised in their references,
less familiar to the world beyond the country where they have been produced,
than feature films made for the international cinema market. Most of the films
about journalism discussed below have had a global audience, and a cultural
resonance extending far beyond their country of origin. Although the great
majority of them have been made in the English language, and in the United
States, reflecting the international dominance of the US film industry, many
have become globally iconic as images of journalism, and commercially
successful all over the world.5
Notes
1. While this experience does not make me a journalist, it has given me some insight into the
professional and editorial practices of the news media, which I hope inform the scholarly
argument and evaluations below.
2. Throughout the book the first reference to a film is accompanied by the name of the
director and the year of UK cinema release.
3 Bakewell, J., Garnham, N., The New Priesthood: British television today, London, Allen
Lane, 1970.
4. Brass Eye and The Day Today were written and performed by a team of British writers
including Christopher Morris, Armando Ianucci, Patrick Marber and Steve Coogan.
Enormously influential, they parodied the conventions of 1990s TV news and current
affairs. Coogan introduced his Alan Partridge character on The Day Today, while Marber
and Ianucci went on to further success on TV, stage and cinema. Ianucci wrote In The
Thick of It, a satirical sit com for the BBC about government public relations in the New
Labour era, and he directed In The Loop about government-media relations in the 2003
Gulf war, which was released to critical and commercial success in 2009.
5. Films about journalism made in languages other than English are included where they have
been recognised as particularly important and influential, and where they have crossed over
to the international cinema market and been released in the UK (and, by extension, USA)
– Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), for example, or Mereilles’ City of God (2003), or Danis
Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2002.
 2
A good tradition of love and hate
‘P eople love to hate the journalist’, wrote Lynda Ghiglione in 1990,1 identi-
fying one strand of a long-standing cultural schizophrenia in public attitudes
to the modern day heirs of Edmund Burke’s Fourth Estate.2 The journalist is
a hate figure, on the one hand, held responsible by many for the debasement
of public discourse and the coarsening of society in general. The journalist is
commonly referred to in these contexts as a hack, a reptile, a sleaze merchant
revelling in other’s miseries, a purveyor of cultural trash. The outspoken Tory
MP and diarist, the late Alan Clark, typified this attitude when he wrote that
journalists are ‘fellows with, in the main, squalid and unfulfilling private lives,
insecure in their careers, and suffering a considerable degree of dependence
on alcohol and narcotics’.3
Clark was not alone in such thoughts (nor is the journalist alone in
harbouring such vices, let us concede at the outset). His comments come
from an essay included in a volume entitled Secrets of the Press: journalists on
journalism. Clark reminds us that much of the loathing expressed for journalists
is actually a form of self-loathing. Journalists often hate themselves, it seems,
just as much as non-journalists do. In the scabrous words of one of the greatest
journalists of the twentieth century, Hunter S. Thompson:
Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs

and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden
little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for
a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a
zoo-cage.4
That might be overdoing it, though it is not uncharacteristic of the great

gonzo’s prose style. Of all the journalists I have met or dealt with, only some
of them could be described as ‘fuckoffs and misfits’. Thompson’s put-down is
10 jounliss in film
illustrative, however, of the extreme reactions journalism provokes, even from

journalists.
Those in the entertainment industry, sport and other spheres of celebrity
who are the objects of unwelcome journalistic attention also tend to be critical
of journalists, and who can blame them? In 2004 Mel Gibson co-produced a
film called Paparazzi (Paul Abascal) in which a Hollywood movie star dishes
out summary and lethal punishment to a group of hacks who have been
harassing him and his family. The film was not well received critically, but the
contempt and hatred for journalists which it displayed are widely shared senti-
ments amongst the rich and famous who so often feature in the huge sub-sector
of the journalism industry that is celebrity news.
Politicians, themselves not the most popular of professional groups, hate
journalists because they are often the targets of the news media’s disrespect
and degeneracy (as they would see it), their thoughts, actions and behaviours
exposed to merciless scrutiny before the wide-eyed gaze of a public encouraged
(by journalists, who else?) to be evermore voyeuristic and judgemental. From
this perspective, journalists are disreputable scandal-mongers, ‘porno-
graphers’ even, in the words of former British prime minister John Major.
‘Are we now in a world’, he asked rhetorically, ‘in which peephole journalism
will print anything, true or false, that is said by anybody, sick or otherwise,
on the grounds that the subject is a public figure and therefore the public has
a “right to know”?’5 Himself a victim of relentless press attacks during and
after his time in office, Major was referring on this occasion to online coverage
of alleged details of the private life of HRH Prince Charles in 2003 which
threatened to make it into print (but never did because of the UK’s libel and
privacy laws).
Tony Blair’s director of communications in government, Alistair Campbell,
does not bother to disguise his contempt for journalists in his diaries, referring
to them repeatedly as ‘wankers’. ‘Why’, he wrote in 1998, after another
bruising day with the Westminster lobby journalists, ‘should I pretend to
respect them when I don’t?’ (2007: 301). In this case one imagines the feelings
were mutual, given the notorious spin doctor’s reputation for bullying and
abusing journalists with whom he was displeased. But his views are common
amongst politicians and their media advisers. Another of Blair’s spin doctors in
the 1990s, Tim Allan, wrote an impassioned piece denouncing ‘punk political
journalism’ and what he called ‘a self-appointed priesthood that believes only
relentless attacks will inform our democracy. With their puffed up self-impor-
tance, their unelected, unaccountable status and their huge and corrosive
influence on political discourse, they have become the trade union barons of
our day’.6
In January 2005, just as the dust was settling from the Hutton inquiry into
the Andrew Gilligan affair,7 the Guardian newspaper ran a special issue headed
 good diion of lov nd  11
‘The fourth estate under fire’, under which rubric an assortment of distin-
guished voices lined up to put the boot in to their journalistic fellows. Anthony
Sampson, for example, much-respected author of books on the structure of
power in British society asserted that ‘journalists have gained power hugely …
[and] become much more assertive, aggressive and moralising in confronting
other forms of power’.8 In his influential book, What The Media Are Doing To
Our Politics, journalist John Lloyd concluded of the BBC’s performance in the
Gilligan affair that ‘we have produced a media culture which in many ways
contradicts the ideals to which we pay homage’ (2004: 140). Lloyd’s complaint,
echoed by many others, was that his co-professionals had by the early years of
the twenty-first century become locked into a vicious and destructive cycle of
attack journalism, tearing political reputations and careers apart in reckless
pursuit of competitive success. Dressed up as legitimate adversarialism and
the necessary harryings of the Fourth Estate, modern journalism had become
what James Fallows in his 1996 book Breaking the News called hyperadversarial,
in pursuit of no cause more noble than that of professional vanity and institu-
tional advantage.
As for the publics of those countries where journalism evolved first and
has become a key cultural institution, opinion polls indicate that in the league
of most despised professions journalists feature prominently, listed alongside
lawyers, estate agents and politicians in the ‘most hated’ charts. An Ipsos-
MORI poll conducted in the United Kingdom in 2006 showed journalists to
be the least trusted to tell the truth among sixteen professional groups,9 while a
2008 YouGov poll showed steadily declining trust in journalists over a five-year
period.10
In the United States research collated by the Pew Center for the People and
the Press on changing attitudes over the period 1985–2007 showed that those
who believe in the morality of journalists had fallen from 54 per cent to 46 per
cent of the population. Nearly one third of those surveyed by Pew believed the
US press to be ‘immoral’, more than double the figure for 1985.11 Nearly two
thirds believed US news organisations to be politically biased, while slightly
fewer – 59 per cent – regarded their stories as ‘often inaccurate’. Sixty-eight per
cent of those canvassed in this survey did not believe that journalists care about
the people in their stories. And in the wake of such stories as the disappearance
of four-year-old Madeleine McCann while on holiday in the Algarve in 2006,
leading to unsubstantiated newspaper suggestions that the parents had killed
their own daughter, with or without the connivance of their holidaymaking
friends, that belief seems entirely reasonable (Kate and Gerry McCann, and
their friends, were subsequently awarded substantial court damages against
the newspapers who libelled them in this way).
The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2008 report on The State of the
Media found that growing numbers of people in the US regard journalists
as ‘immoral’ (32 per cent, up from only 13 per cent in 1985), ‘inaccurate’
(53 per cent), ‘politically biased’ (55 per cent) and ‘unprofessional’ (22 per
cent). Americans, concluded the PEJ, ‘have formed the deep impression
that the press is an institution of immense power that should be viewed with
suspicion’.12
AND NOW … FOR SOME GOOD NEWS
If journalists are loathed by large numbers of people, or at least disliked and

distrusted, they are also admired, respected and, yes, one might even say loved
for the work they do, and the crucial role they are recognised to play in liberal
democratic societies. The investigative journalist who tirelessly campaigns
to get an innocent man out of prison, or a corrupt politician out of office;
the foreign correspondent who risks her life to reach a town or village where
civilians are under siege from marauding armies; the dedicated seeker-after-
truth who fights against the censorial tendencies of advertisers and corporate
sponsors – these are esteemed figures in the value system of our culture, before
whom we are humbled, sometimes shamed by our own everyday inaction and
apathy. The journalist can be our collective conscience, going to places and
doing things that we ourselves dare not, and without whose courage we would
as societies be very much worse off.
Journalists can be celebrities, idolised for their perceived status and glamour
almost as much as rock and movie stars. Wolfe, Thompson, Murrow, Cronkite,
Paxman, Frost, Adie, Amanpour – these are the familiar names of journalists
past and present who have become ‘stars’ in the universe of news media
because they are perceived to stand for something important, or because their
reportage, analyses, insights and judgements are recognised as particularly
sharp and revealing. As Alex Gibney’s 2008 documentary on Gonzo shows,
Hunter S. Thompson, at the peak of his journalistic powers in the early 1970s,
was more glamorous and exciting a figure than many of the top rank musicians,
sporting celebrities and politicians whom he wrote about and with whom he
mixed. Larry King’s interviews on CNN became the vehicle for the journal-
ist’s celebrity as much as, if not more than that of his guests.
Journalists can become too famous, and some notable cinematic represen-
tations have satirised the excesses of celebrity journalism. In Oliver Stone’s
Natural Born Killers (1994), about the incestuous relationship between the
news media and crime in the United States, Robert Downey Jr plays a TV
host whose ‘true crime’ programme leads to mayhem and death, including his
own. Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s star foreign correspondent of many years,
is loosely parodied in David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), disguised as the
female correspondent Adriana Cruz who drops in to the scene of the battle like
a celebrity around whom everything else must revolve, utterly convinced of

her own importance.
There is, however, more than a grain of truth in this self-perception. At the
top of their profession journalists wield huge political influence and command
stellar salaries, inspiring those thousands of young people all over the world
who enter colleges and universities to study and train to become journalists
like their heroes and heroines. In late 2008 Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon was
released, a study of the famous TV interview given by the disgraced former
US president to one of the UK’s leading journalistic inquisitors. It was indic-
ative of the degree of name recognition attached to the protagonists in 2008
that the film’s title was Frost/Nixon, rather than Nixon/Frost.
In the United Kingdom university programmes in journalism are among
the most heavily in demand of all higher education degrees in the humanities,
a fact for which I and my academic colleagues are duly grateful, and which
merely makes more paradoxical the cultural schizophrenia reflected in the
opinion polls. In the United States there were 50,000 students taking BAs in
journalism-related subjects in 2007, and 3,800 taking Masters courses.13 For all
that public perceptions of journalism, and the expression of these in cinema
and other narrative arts are often negative, journalists are at the same time held
in admiration, sometimes awe. The journalist is a cultural icon surrounded
by both love and loathing, resentment and respect, admiration and anger – a
figure perceived as both hero and villain, treated like a rock star at one moment,
and a reptile the next. In relation to few professions are cultural stereotypes so
extreme and apparently opposed. Nor are there many professions in which the
imagined reality is so different from the actual.
JOURNALISTS IN FILM
Film, as Thomas Zynda observed in 1979, and Hollywood film in particular,

has been one of the main sources of the representation of journalism in western
popular culture. There have been many excellent novels written on the subject,
as already noted, and many TV dramas produced, but cinema has a broader
popular reach than either of those media, crossing national borders and taste
hierarchies as part of cultural globalisation, impacting on the publics of many
and diverse countries with a force rarely seen in a particular work of prose
fiction or TV drama. Many more people have seen the film of All the Presi-
dent’s Men (1976) than have read the original book by Woodward and Bernstein
(the former took more than $70 million at the US box office on release, and
continues to sell to new generations of viewers on DVD. The book was a best-
seller too, but not on the scale of the movie). Citizen Kane (1941) is an icon of
global cinema, familiar (even if only by reputation) to everyone with even a
passing interest in film history.14 Global screen stars such as George Clooney
and Angelina Jolie play journalists in movies which are often in the box office
charts all over the world.
Movies, then, have a reach and a resonance which make it reasonable to
consider them a particularly fertile source of how a society perceives and
relates to the phenomena which they address. They are not – or rarely are – a
‘mirror’ held up to society, reflecting us back to ourselves without distortion
or error, but they are certainly a prism, through which is refracted a society’s
conception of itself, or that part of itself which is the subject of the movie, and
which is then played back to the audience as a text which may be at one and the
same time an entertainment, an ethics lesson and an invitation to reflect on the
big domestic and foreign policy issues of the day.
Movies are collective productions, of course, the work of many artists,
technicians and producers, all of whom may be presumed to play a larger or
smaller part in mediating the final product, but we experience them as single
texts comprising a vision, or viewpoint about how things are. They present a
statement which can be attributed at least in part to the individual accredited
as the director. Citizen Kane is perceived as an ‘Orson Welles’ film, even if
it was made with the help of many hundreds of others. Michael Winterbot-
tom’s three films discussed in this book (Welcome To Sarajevo [1997], Twenty
Four Hour Party People [2002], A Mighty Heart [2007]) are in large part the
products of his particular directorial style.
Narrative film is also a product of its time, weaving prevalent moods
and trends into stories which both reflect and reinforce them. In short, the
cinema produced by a given society at a given time is one source of data on
how that society views itself – in this case, its journalists, and also the publics
who consume journalism, in so far as the tastes and demands of audiences
determine to some extent which films are made.
Cinema is not bound by the normative principles of journalism, of course,
but is structured by aesthetic, commercial, technical and creative factors
and constraints. Films in a capitalist cultural economy are first and foremost
commodities which must achieve commercial success on the various platforms
where they are distributed (including, today, cinemas, DVDs and Blu-ray,
and online channels for streaming and downloading). This requires of the
film-maker acceptance of those cinematic conventions and tropes expected
by an audience. A film is never, therefore, real or true in any simple sense.
Like journalism itself, but to a greater extent, it is an account of the real. No
cinematic text, no matter how ‘true’ are the events on which it is based, nor
how realistically it is directed, can be entirely factually accurate. Incidents in
a ‘true story’ will often be invented, or several incidents collapsed into one,
which then comes to stand for the greater whole.
Contemporary film-makers hardly bother to deny this and are more likely
to assert merely that their fact-based accounts capture the essence of a rather
than the truth. A writer of prose or poetry may legitimately aspire to capture
at least some element of the truth of a phenomenon – love, for example, or
sadness, or the beauty of nature – and to find that truth accepted by a reader.
The film-maker has the same expectation, to be achieved through the creative
manipulation of the elements of the story being represented. This is, and
always has been, in the nature of art.
Cinema, like all art, can be viewed as an arena for the mediation of social
complexity, a vessel for its reduction down to its key strands and features.
Cinematic representations of a particular social type inevitably draw upon
the prevailing models of that type which a particular society harbours, and
in the process contribute to consolidating and reinforcing their prevalence.
In the case of journalism some of these types are clearly based on normative
models of the journalist’s role – watchdog, witness, sense-maker; others are
dysfunctional and toxic, such as the character of Chuck Tatum whom we shall
encounter later on. The film-maker is a lightning rod for these competing
images of heroism and villainy, licensed to dramatise them, and thus to furnish
the material for public debate around the performance of the journalists.
MOVIES AS MYTH
Movies are the central myth-making media of our societies. Films about
journalism, by extension, are the main cultural space in which societies (or
their artists) articulate their agreed journalistic values, explore and inter-
rogate them, and critique the application of these values both by the journal-
istic media themselves (as in Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass [2003]), and by the
powerful in their relationship to the news media (Good Night, and Good Luck
[George Clooney, 2005]). Some films, such as Michael Mann’s The Insider
(1998), critique both journalism and power. I will characterise the movie-
maker’s cultural roles in this context as:
• educational (and normative, imparting public knowledge about what

journalism is expected to do in a democracy);
• mythological and celebratory (bringing public attention to, and solic-
iting praise for, the achievements of journalism at its best);
• regulatory (undertaking critical scrutiny of the scrutineers, acting as
watchdogs of the watchdogs);
• defensive, as against those who would neuter or suppress the critical
and dissenting tendencies in liberal journalism.
What, then, do the movies tell us about journalism, and about journalists’
relationship to the societies within which they ply their trade? Matthew
Ehrlich observes that the movies have ‘provided models for real-life journal-
istic conduct’(2004). Actually, very few movies about journalism can be read
as how-to manuals for journalistic professionals. Rather, they are ambiv-
alent, often highly critical explorations of the tensions structured into liberal
journalism by the context of its origins in early democratic societies. They
form an evolving narrative about what those tensions are, how they have been
manifest in particular societies, and how they have changed over time.
Those in power at any given time, as they are monitored by the fourth
estate of journalism, monitor in their turn what journalists say about power,
and then too what the film-makers and the artists say about both. In democ-
racies the powerful are accountable to the people, who are informed and
influenced by the media. What film-makers say about power, and about the
relationship between power and journalism, does not go unnoticed by the
powerful, because they are aware that these performances, scripts and images
comprise an important part of the stock of public knowledge, the knowledge
that informs public opinion.
In these respects, movies about journalism are documents of a society’s
ongoing engagement with this key cultural and political institution. And like
all documents, they require to be studied with care. The finished film we see
on screen is the work of a collective. Sometimes the influence and signature

of a particular director, writer or actor is unmistakeable, and we can speak
of a ‘Billy Wilder film’ with some expectation that others will understand
what is meant. On the other hand film-makers are not the only source of the
‘messages’ on screen. Reading a film is therefore much more than coming to
an understanding of who made it, and why. A contemporary auteur is unlikely
to wear his politics, or his attitudes to journalism on his sleeve, preferring to
leave interpretative space for the audience to read his work in their own way.
But film-makers, like it or not, soak up the cultural atmosphere around them,
internalise it, reproduce it, and thus cannot help but be viewed as sources for
something.
My approach to reading film is auteur-based, in so far as I attach signifi-
cance to the name of the director, writer, actor involved in its production
and whose ideas are embodied to some degree in the finished work. But I do
not assume a simple translation of those ideas, or of the ideas out there in
society into what is up there on screen. The personal visions of the contrib-
utors (which are expressed in the cinematography, script, mise en scène, and
so on), the production constraints on a film (and there are always many), the
commercial pressures – all have to be taken into account as factors in inter-
preting what a film about journalism is trying to say, if indeed it is trying to say
anything. But even when a film is not trying to say anything very much – take,
for example, the lightest of romantic comedies in which journalism features,
such as the Angelina Jolie romantic comedy vehicle Life or Something Like It
(2002) as compared with the message-laden Good Night, and Good Luck – we
find evidence of what journalism represents at a given moment in US society,
of what its producers assume journalism to represent in the minds of the
broad American public, of what they think journalism represents, or should
represent. Such movies – think too of Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003)
or Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999) – are packed with jokes and asides
which make sense only in the context of shared stereotypes and cultural cliches
about the nature of journalism and journalists.
THE REGULATORY ROLE OF THE JOURNALISM MOVIE
If journalists are, among other things, the principal cultural watchdogs of our
society then movies and movie-makers are part of the apparatus of scrutiny
which brings to bear on the journalists. Films, like novels and other forms,
draw our attention to the flaws in journalistic practice, often by contrasting it
with the normative standards journalism is subject to. Cinema monitors the
media, criticises it, and praises it too. Cinema is a place where society’s cultural
representatives talk back to the media, and thence to power itself.
Within even the most mainstream of cinematic genres the performance of

these cultural roles means there is both homage to and substantive, radical
critique of the media and its relationship to power.15 Both can be excessive, in
that legitimate praise can tip into panegyric and sycophancy, while criticism
may become ‘corrosive cynicism’ (to use a term often applied to journalists
themselves). That being so, it is important for the analyst to maintain a critical
evaluative stance towards films about journalism.
It will be my argument in this book that mainstream movies can be and –
more often than has tended to be acknowledged – are the site of substantive
critique, not just of the workings of power in capitalism, but of the media (the
journalistic media in this context) and, in some cases, the relationship between
media and power. Yes, as we shall see, and as many observers have asserted, the
movies perpetuate stereotypes of journalists which are stupid and crass (and
why not? Some journalism is certainly possessed of those qualities), but they
also contain sophisticated, often radical critiques of how the media work, and of
how they relate to political and financial power. The movies represent journalists
as heroes and villains, and that is appropriate, because journalists are both. If the
media are a key source of what Niklas Luhman called a society’s ‘self-recursive
myths’ (2000) – that is, the narratives through which a society talks about itself
to itself – the movies represent a second-tier symbolic system; a set of media
representations which function to elucidate, interrogate, and comment on the
workings of the first-tier regulatory system of journalism itself.
It is a myth (in the other sense of untruth, unfounded assertion, or false
perception) that movies tend to show journalists only or mainly as villains.
Some do, and some journalists are, but in many of the films discussed in
this book we see sophisticated and, at times, subversive critique of: (1) how
journalists and journalism, given the normative functions they are expected
to perform within democratic societies, do in fact relate to their publics, their
audiences, conceived as non-elite readers, viewers, listeners and (now) internet
users; (2) how news media relate to power elites in all those spheres of a society
where authority and control are wielded; and (3) the relationship between
journalists and power. Narrative feature films – including those financed,
distributed and marketed by the biggest and most mainstream of Big Media
– are significant locations for the articulation of critical perspectives on the
workings of power and media, separately and in their inter-relationship. They
are watched by millions upon millions of people, in circumstances which might
permit them to have some kind of impact on how those audiences perceive the
events and issues being portrayed on screen. They are to this extent a signif-
icant mechanism in the self-regulation and management of the public sphere
in democracy.
If, for the sake of analytical convenience and using for a moment the
language of estates, we think of social and economic power as residing in the
first, second and third estates in democratic societies, and journalism as the
fourth estate, charged with monitoring that power, constraining it and enabling
the people to evaluate and debate its acquisition, distribution and performance
– a public sphere engaged in the critical scrutiny of power – then movies about
journalism sit alongside other cultural forms (novels and TV dramas, satirical
comedy, the meta-journalism of journalistic commentary on journalism
produced by pundits, essayists and others) as a further level of critical scrutiny,
this time including the scrutiny of journalism itself. A fifth estate, as it were.
The film-maker is, at his or her most socially engaged, an important category
of public intellectual taking on the work of monitoring the monitors, scruti-
nising the scrutineers, facilitating public debate about the performance of the
news and journalistic media by inserting into the public sphere another kind
of knowledge, comprising fact, interpretation and comment. The film-maker’s
contribution to knowledge is of a more reflective, subjective, aesthetically self-
conscious kind than that of the supposedly objective journalist or scientist,
embedded within texts which are designed not just to draw attention to the
workings of power and prompt public debate, but to entertain.
DEEP IMPACT?
Films reflect the agenda of public debate at any given time, and may help set
it if they have sufficient impact. Film-makers, to the degree that their works
are well received, construct an arena for debate, often very high profile, and
inform the public and the media – or remind them, if they think they know
already – of what is expected of journalists, and ask if those expectations are
being met. They contribute to an ongoing public conversation within which
the role and functions of journalism are never far away from that same public’s
zone of interest and legitimate concern. That this is true even of the most
mainstream films is, when one thinks about it, good news for the state of our
political culture, and for the relationship between politics and culture.
As is true for all media, some caution is required in relation to judging a
film’s impact on its audience, and on the wider public amongst whom it circu-
lates. All the President’s Men is widely believed to have made a major impact
on the practice of journalism in the United States after the Watergate scandal.
If ever a film fits Ehrlich’s description of a movie which provides a positive
model for journalistic work, it is Pakula’s study of the Woodward-Bernstein
investigation. Others have questioned the extent to which this presumed effect
has been mythologised, just as the Watergate investigation itself has become a
legend (Schudson 1995). What we can say with certainty is that its production,
and its commercial and artistic success both reflected and reinforced US
public anxiety about, on the one hand, the state of the presidency, and on
the other, the state of the media. If in the Nixon era all US journalists had
been like Woodward and Bernstein in their dedication and tenacity perhaps
the film would not have been necessary, nor would the Watergate scandal have
been allowed to happen. The Watergate investigation can justifiably be seen as
a triumph of American liberal journalism. The film of that investigation fed
back into a debate which concerned not just the corruption of politics, but
the potentially corrupt relationship of journalism to power. Its effectiveness
as a work of cinematic art enabled it to provide a model for future journalistic
practice, although we cannot know how influential the model was or has been.
In this respect the journalism movie is part of the mythology of American
society, part of its ideological foundation (and that of liberal democratic
societies more broadly). Ehrlich notes that movies about journalism reflect
‘myths coloured by nostalgia’ and ‘address contradictions at the heart of both
journalism and American culture’ (2004: 1). Myths can have conservative
ideological functions within a society, legitimising the state of things as they
are. But myth ‘can also critique or change the status quo’ (ibid.).
Debates rise and fall on the agenda, cultural and political environments
change, and movies about journalism have value in so far as they document this
with accuracy. The 1980s TV newsroom featured in Broadcast News (James
L. Brooks, 1987) is very different from that of All the President’s Men, both of
which are far removed from the monochrome smokiness of the newsroom in
Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) or the production offices used by Ed
Murrow and his team in Good Night, and Good Luck. Future generations of
journalists will look back with amazement to those days from their smoke-free,
air-conditioned, health-and-safety compliant work stations.
George Clooney’s much-admired film addresses what was already, by the
1950s, a prominent debate about the negative impact of commercial pressures
on journalistic quality. That debate continues to this day in recognisably similar
form, as we shall see, in films such as Accidental Hero (Stephen Frears, 1992)
and Mad City (Costa-Gavras, 1997). If we were to watch either of these movies
a half century from now we might conclude that in the late twentieth century
when they were made the United States was a society uncomfortable with the
tension between the role of journalist as informer and that of entertainer; with
the journalist-as-infotainer under pressure to produce news which holds an
audience’s attention as much as it improves public understanding of current
events.
A more recent film such as Shattered Glass deals with a phenomenon specific
to its time, and the impact of this on journalistic traditions and conventions.
Billy Ray’s account of the fabrications inflicted on the New Republic by Stephen
Glass allots a key role to the then-rising online journalism sector. It is an online
publication which blows the whistle on Glass, and which leaves the esteemed
New Republic embarrassed and compromised. Likewise, a film such as Welcome
To Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997) addresses the role of the foreign

correspondent in an era when the ideological certainties of the Cold War had
given way to much older, more primitive passions, and the identification of
Good and Evil had become much less straightforward than in the days of the
Communist menace. By comparing films about foreign correspondence made
between, say, the 1940s and the 1990s, we learn much about the changing role
of the conflict reporter, and the changing nature of conflict, over this period.
Films about female journalists, such as Veronica Guerin (Joel Schum-
acher, 2003) and David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006) document the
outcomes of a century-long process in which women have made great advances
in respect of their historically dominant male counterparts. Have the movies
accelerated those advances, or allowed them to be embedded more securely
in our societies because of the impact they have had on the women who have
seen them? This book cannot answer that question, but does view cinema as
one way of identifying what has changed in the status of women in society, and
within the journalistic profession (see Chapter 7, Heroines).
NOTES
1. ‘The American journalist: fiction versus fact’, paper delivered in 1990, accessed on the
website of The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (ijpc.org).
2. The first three estates in pre-revolutionary France were the clergy, the aristocracy, and the
common citizenry. After the French Revolution, Burke first referred to journalists seated in
the Press Gallery of the House of Commons as the Fourth Estate, expressing their political
role as watchdogs over the powerful.
3. Clark, Alan, ‘Why I hold journalists in low regard’, in Glover, Stephen (ed.), Secrets of the
Press, 1999.
4. Quoted in Wise, Damon, ‘Gonzo’s back’, Guardian, 6 December 2008.
5. Major, J., ‘We’re hurting ourselves as well as Charles’, Sunday Times, 16 November 2003.
6. Allan, T., ‘Puffed up punks’, Guardian, 4 December 2004.
7. Andrew Gilligan was the BBC correspondent who, on 6 May 2003, asserted that a key
document used by the British government to justify its invasion of Iraq had been ‘sexed up’
in order to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons
of mass destruction. The Gilligan report, and the government’s furious response to it, led in
due course to the death by suicide of a key source for the story, government scientist David
Kelly, the forced resignation of the BBC’s director general Greg Dyke and its chairman
Gavyn Davies, and a wholesale restructuring of the BBC’s internal management systems.
8. Sampson, A., ‘The fourth estate under fire’, Guardian, 10 January 2005. Sampson died in
2004, just before this piece was published.
9. Ipsos-MORI, Opinion of Professions, April 2008 (http://www.ipsos-mori.com/content/
turnout/opinion-of-professions2.ashx).
10. Reported in Barnett, S., ‘On the road to self-destruction’, British Journalism Review, volume
19, number 2, 2008, pp. 5–13.
11. Views of Press Values and Performance, 1985–2007, Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press, August 2007 (http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/348.pdf).
12. The State of the New Media 2008: an annual report on American journalism (www.state-
ofthenewsmedia.org/2008/narrative_special_attitudes.php?cat=1&media=).
13. From the Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates, AEJMC News,
volume 42, number 1, November 2008.
14. In 2008, once again, Citizen Kane was named best film ever by the authoritative French
periodical Cahiers De Cinema, and also by Sight & Sound.
15. As Howard Good has observed, ‘the narrative patterns of the journalism film genre are
mirrors of, and metaphors for, the relationship between the public and the press, its ruined
hopes, desperate wishes, and ambiguous promises’ (1989: 2).
 3
Heroes and villains – an overview

of journalism on film
R ichard R. Ness filmography of journalism in the movies lists some 2,166

US-, and around eighty UK-produced films made between the early years
of the silent cinema and 1996. In many of these films journalism is present
only as a bit player, part of the backdrop to a story which is not really ‘about’
journalism, but in which journalists are involved to a greater or less extent. In
some – the many Superman movies, for example, in which Clark Kent’s mild-
mannered reporter is the mask behind which a superhero resides – a character’s
journalistic status is a convenient plot device, a vehicle for a particular kind of
narrative (in Superman’s case, one in which breaking news is an opportunity
for displays of heroism and action-packed battles between Good and Evil).
The prevalence of journalism in these contexts reflects the extent to which our
contemporary societies are, in so many respects, ‘mediated’. News media are
the ever-present backdrop to both private and public life, part of the cultural
furniture and ambient noise of our society. Cinema reflects this.
In many films, however, the journalist, and his or her profession and its
outputs, has been the star of the show, the fulcrum around which the story
revolves. These are films in which journalism is unquestionably the subject of
the work; the source of the dramatic tensions and narrative structures which
fuel the plot; the focus of the dilemmas and challenges driving the characters.
Within this broad category there are films about virtually nothing except
journalism, which I will call primary representations, and films – secondary
representations – in which journalists are certainly centre stage, but which use
their journalistic setting as a jumping off point for a movie which is mainly
about something else, such as the nature of love, or war.
There is, to repeat, a third category of films in which journalists appear as
background characters, with or without lines. In Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies
(2008), for example, TV news footage punctuates the story with ‘coverage’ of
the terrorist atrocities the central characters are trying to prevent.
There are some films, such as Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1998), in
which journalists play a supporting or minor role, but in which the subject of
journalism is still primary rather than incidental. Three Kings is superficially
a thriller, a heist movie, set in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf war.
A group of US soldiers set out to appropriate Saddam’s gold bullion and end
up helping refugees from his regime cross the border to safety. Along the way
we see the horrific arbitrariness of war, and the chaos and confusion which
accompanies it. The narrative is punctuated by appearances from TV news
journalist Adriana Cruz, a character reportedly modelled on CNN’s Chris-
tiane Amanpour, whose presence allows the film to address the role of real-time
news in the conflict, and the implications of an environment in which all wars
have become ‘media wars’. She voices what many people felt about that conflict
– what was it for? The impact on war-fighting of the need to provide the news
media with stories and images (preferably positive), and for military managers
always to be aware of the media dimension of what they do, is a constant theme
running through the film. The same is true of Danis Tanovich’s No Man’s
Land (2002) about the Bosnian conflict. Again a TV news journalist has a
supporting role, but one which allows a focus for much of the film’s running
time on the exploration of journalism’s distorting impact on conflict, and the
idea that in observing and reporting such events journalists also affect them,
and not always for the better.
Whether primary or secondary in plot terms, journalism’s prominence
within the cinema of the past 100 years, and in the past decade no less so, leaves
us in no doubt that journalism has been and remains a subject with immense
appeal to those who make feature films – writers, directors, actors and producers
– as well as the audiences who make the movies one of the key popular media
forms. Not all of the films discussed in this book are mainstream Hollywood
fare. Some have achieved little or no commercial success, remaining within the
avant-garde or art-house scene. Such films have often been extremely influ-
ential, and here one thinks of Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) or Fellini’s La
Dolce Vita (1960). Films about journalism have also been among the biggest
earners in cinema.1
Films about journalism have also been among the most celebrated as works
of art, and regular recipients of Oscars and other awards. The film most often
cited in polls as the best film of all time, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941),
is a film about journalism as much as it is about power and empire. Kane’s
acquisition of both is built on journalism, and he spends much of the movie’s
first act as a working editor and journalist, engaged in the news room with
his colleagues to produce the popular progressive newspaper he wishes to
own. Although the practice of journalism becomes steadily less important
as the story of Kane’s rise and fall proceeds, that story is itself presented in
the form of a journalistic investigation, in which facts and their meanings are
os nd villins 25
gradually unearthed through interviews with protagonists and the assemblage

of secondary sources such as news reel footage, as well as our access to the
thoughts of Kane himself. Other acknowledged film classics – Sweet Smell
of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957), All the President’s Men (Alan J.
Pakula, 1976), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) – have journalism at
their narrative cores.
The first question to be answered, therefore, is why? What is it about
journalism which drives the most talented cinematic artists (and many who
are not so talented) to write, produce, direct and perform in movies about it?
What is the source of the fourth estate’s enduring fascination to film folk and
their audiences?
First, as Ness, Ehrlich and others have noted, journalism is highly
functional for cinema in that its nature as a professional practice generates
the incidents and narratives which make a good movie. Movies tell stories, and
therefore require scenarios in which good stories can be credibly and efficiently
told. In this the journalist consistently delivers. Journalism, in a manner akin
to the policeman or the private detective, is a licensed exposer of the things
which some people might wish to remain hidden away from public view. The
journalist investigates scandal, cover-ups, corruption, crime. That’s his or her
Figure 3 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957). Source: BFI
job, ordained by four centuries of liberal democratic history and enshrined

in the constitutions of many countries,2 notably the US where most of these
films have been made.3 The journalist, like the private eye, can be a sleazy and
distasteful figure, and there have been many such portrayals in film; but where
the private eye slinks around on the fringes of respectable society, often a failed
law enforcer brought down by personal inadequacy or frailty, the journalist
exposes the truth, painful as it may be, with the full support of society, proud
and purposeful, and no matter what the opposition. In The China Syndrome
(James Bridges, 1979) the journalists played by Michael Douglas and Jane
Fonda act as the catalyst for the exposure of nuclear hazard.
The business of exposure naturally provokes resistance, and this too is
fuel for the story-hungry film-maker. Story-telling often involves a protag-
onist confronted with an obstacle to reaching a goal, and journalists are all
too often obstructed in their profession. Resistance and conflict generate
drama, suspense, violence and tragedy. In films based on real life stories, such
as The Insider (Michael Mann, 1998), conflict and the responses to it by the
protagonists – in this case, a tobacco industry whistle-blower and a TV current
affairs producer respectively – are the core of the work. All the President’s
Men, too, has little room for characterisation or emotion amidst its narrative
of a journalistic struggle for truth against the highest power in the land. The
relationship between the journalists and their subject is the drama, and there is
more than enough of it to sustain a two-hour movie.
Movies about journalists make good stories, then, because the situation
of the journalist in society is inherently dramatic. For the majority of actual
journalists, of course, the reality of professional life is less exciting than its
portrayal in cinema. Movies are not reality, but representations of the real
which cut and compress the everyday detail of events – in our case, the often
unglamorous details of how news is gathered and distributed – in order to
render them engaging for the audiences on whose patronage the industry
depends. Movies are mythological – dream factories, indeed – and films about
journalism are no less prone to the inclusion of stereotypes, caricatures, and
fantasies than any other kind.
The ideal of journalism, and not infrequently the practice of it, neces-
sarily takes the journalist, and we as audiences, into the heart of a plausibly
real darkness where all manner of twists and turns can be expected. Dennis
Hopper’s news photographer in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1978)
is in that dark place first imagined by Conrad, captivated by the charismatic
magnetism of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz as the latter awaits the assassin’s bullet.
Coppola’s film also recreates the work of a TV news crew filming the aftermath
of a US attack on a Vietnamese village, and the banal obscenity of a culture
which permits such images to be valued as news, and which subordinates the
reality of human suffering to the production demands of the network news
bulletin.
Films about journalism often take us to the seat of power, as in Pakula’s
film about Watergate. And for those reasons, too, journalistic stories are often
heroic, realisable as simple but stirring tales of Black and White, Good and
Evil. Journalists in film often represent a kind of cultural nobility, like the
incorruptible cop and the self-sacrificing soldier – an ideal which may be
challenged by events, to the benefit of a good story. Journalists can also be –
hence the sub-title of this book – screen villains, irredeemably wicked, amoral,
worthless. Kirk Douglas’ Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole is such a villain,
with his merciless manipulation of a redeemable situation to the point that it
destroys lives, including his own. J. J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success is
another, played by a sinister Burt Lancaster loosely modelled on the real-life
career and persona of Walter Winchell.
The fact that these stories are often true, or based on truth (not, of course,
the same thing at all) reminds us of another reason for the appeal of journalists
to film-makers: journalism is important, in a way that few other professions
can be. Film-makers (from now on I will include in this term of convenience
all contributors to the film-making process) are people too, fully aware of and
engaged in the public debates which occupy the society around them. In recent
times Hollywood stars such as George Clooney, Sean Penn and Angelina Jolie
have demonstrated their political commitment to such causes as opposing the
war in Iraq and world poverty. This has exposed the movie-making elite to a
certain degree of mockery from those on the right who see them as a liberal
front within the establishment (and from the left, from those who question
their motivations and sincerity). They can defend themselves well enough
against that caricature, and I will say here only that many cinematic artists are
self-evidently intelligent, talented individuals who care about politics, and thus
about the media which are so central to the political process in a democracy.
Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck exemplifies that concern, in a real-life
story from the 1950s made with an eye on the performance of the media in the
‘war on terror’ which was at its height when the film was released.
Movie-makers, perhaps more than some other categories of professional,
are also aware of the impact of the media on public opinion, and thus more
inclined to explore issues around the performance of the media. Maybe,
too, the experience of at least some of their number in the frenzied arenas
of celebrity culture attracts them to stories in which journalists themselves
become the scrutinised subject, and often in an unflattering context, in which
cinema plays out debates around the ethics of journalism going on in the wider
public sphere.
Films about journalism, then, allow film-makers to engage with substantial
social issues, and important public debates, and to do so in ways which allow
for the telling of compelling stories through characters who resonate in the
public imagination. The potential for gripping tales of glamour and grime,
of sharply drawn heroes and villains, is a large part of the reason why there
has never been any shortage of A-list actors to perform journalistic roles, nor
of top directors eager to demonstrate their seriousness and commitment to
public affairs through making films about the news media and their often
difficult relationship to the societies in which they circulate. Alfred Hitchcock
made Foreign Correspondent (1940); Orson Welles made Citizen Kane; Billy
Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of his greatest works. Stephen Frears, Alexander
MacKendrick, Oliver Stone, Michael Winterbottom, and many others have
hit their creative peaks with films about journalism.
THE JOURNALISM GENRE
Many writers about journalism in the movies refer to them collectively as a

‘genre’. I will follow that convention here, although it may be more accurate
to say that the ‘journalism genre’ refers to a wide variety of types of film
made about journalism, within a range of genres. There is in film scholarship
a long tradition of ‘genre studies’ which categorises film into various types
dependent on subject matter (the western, the war film), the narrative arc
(film noir, in which a central male character is brought low or destroyed by
a seductive femme fatale), the intended audience (the women’s film; the teen
film), the production context (independent film, blockbusters, auteur film),
or the presence of a particular aesthetic (French New Wave, Dogme 95).
According to the Wikipedia definition of the term, ‘genres’ are recognised
as ‘vague categories with no fixed boundaries, formed by sets of conventions
… many works cross into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recom-
bining these conventions’. To say that a film is a ‘genre movie’ is to say that
it adheres to some or all of the conventions associated with a particular genre,
often though not always as a consequence of conscious auteurial choice. The
rules of the Danish movement Dogme 95 are clearly articulated by Lars Von
Trier and the other directors who wrote them – no artificial lighting, no music
on the soundtrack, and so on. Sometimes, genres are recognised as such only
retrospectively. How many of those 1950s Hollywood directors of moody,
monochrome thrillers recognised that they were making ‘film noir’? Though
the term was first applied to a particular style of Hollywood movie by French
critic Nino Vance in 1946, it was not familiar to the film-makers themselves,
and would not achieve common usage until much later.
If films about journalism can be regarded as a genre, then it is one which
contains within it, or which crosses over into, many other recognised genres.
Ace in the Hole may be viewed as ‘film noir’, for example, given the relationship
between the main male and female protagonists, and the classic ‘noir’ trajectory
of the former’s story. Citizen Kane is sometimes described as ‘noir-ish’, as
is Sweet Smell of Success, because of their cinematography and also the role
played by female characters as ‘femme fatales’ in their stories. The 2007 film
version of the life of Jesse James,4 and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) are
westerns in which journalists feature prominently, if not centrally, as part of
the myth-making apparatus of the old west. These are westerns made against
the backdrop of awareness of the media’s power to construct legends, and to
manufacture celebrity.
Many of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, including His
Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), and It Happened
One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), are also part of the genre of journalism films,
the journalists’ roles often being played by the leading Hollywood men (and
women) of the day such as Clark Gable, Cary Grant and James Stewart. More
recent romantic comedies starring today’s leading men and women, in which
journalists often feature as protagonists – Runaway Bride, for example – are
thus often described as ‘screwball’.
When I refer to the ‘genre’ of journalism movies, therefore, I have in
mind all those films of which it can be said that one or more of the main
characters is a journalist. This is a smaller category than the set of films in
which journalists appear as characters, and can be further sub-divided into

two categories.
First, and the main focus of this book, are those films which are, in an
unambiguous way, primary (or instrumental) representations, about journalists
and journalism. Whether marketed as period dramas, or romantic comedies, or
bio-pics, or thrillers, journalists and journalism are their subject. Capote would
be such a film, or A Mighty Heart. In Shattered Glass the lead characters are
all journalists, the main location is an editorial office, and the subject of the
work is unmistakeably the state of US journalism at a particular moment in its
history. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck is similarly focused on
questions to do with the role of journalism as a democratic support.
Second, which I will call secondary representations, is that category of films
which feature journalists, often as central characters, but in which journalism
is an incidental element of the story. One thinks here of The Shipping News
(Lasse Halstrom, 2004), where the subject of journalism – the job into which
the central character is propelled by events – is less important to the playing
out of the story than the movie’s main themes of personal redemption and
rediscovery. The same point can be made of Dan in Real Life (Peter Hedges,
2007), which stars Steve Carell as a recently bereaved newspaper ‘agony
uncle’. Secondary representations may be concerned with the life issues which
a person who just happens to be a journalist might encounter in or out of the
working environment. Journalism may in this context function as an important

plot device, as in Dan in Real Life, where the lead character’s journalistic
status is principally a vehicle for establishing him as a certain kind of person-
ality – intellectual, sensitive – with a certain kind of romantic potential, here
developed in his relationship with Juliette Binoche’s character. The nature of
his journalism, or the processes which lead to its production are not discussed
or explored in any depth in the film – it is simply there in the background.
Steve Carell’s Dan could have been a poet or a novelist, if the aim were simply
to construct a character who is a writer. Creating him as a columnist allows the
script to play on the ironies of a man who gives public advice on relationships
to his readers, but is somewhat dysfunctional in his own private life. Beyond
this, his journalism is marginal to the story.
Vantage Point (Pete Travis, 2008) is also a secondary representation, in so
far as the film features a TV news team led by producer Sigourney Weaver,
who provide one of five points of view on the action (the apparent assassi-
nation of a US president). The journalists are positioned as witnesses to an
event, alongside the tourist, the policeman, the presidential bodyguard and
so on. The film is not in any sense ‘about’ journalism, although the successive
presentations of the five perspectives on the event do serve to highlight the
relativity of truth, the limits of objectivity, and the fact that what one believes
to be true is at least partly determined by one’s view, or vantage point. Like
Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), although it is unlikely ever to be praised as that
film was, Vantage Point plays with the idea that one cannot always believe what
one sees with one’s own eyes. Films in this category often have insightful,
humorous and thought-provoking observations to make about journalism, but
they are incidental rather than core to the plot.
JOURNALISM IN THE MOVIES: A GENERIC MATRIx
If films about journalism are a category defined by their subject matter

(journalism and journalists), we can identify the many genres and sub-genres
into which these films can be fitted. Movies about journalism are not a genre,
but encompass a variety of generic conventions.
DRAMA
Defined by Wikipedia as a genre that ‘depends on in-depth development of

realistic characters dealing with emotional themes’,5 dramas about journalism
include early classics such as Citizen Kane, with its examination of the
destructive (and self-destructive) impact of media power on relationships and
lives. Good Night, and Good Luck is a drama based on actual events about the
struggle for media freedom at a time of heightened political anxieties. Broadcast
News (James L. Brooks, 1987) is described on the sleeve of its 2004 DVD
release as a ‘quirky romantic comedy’ but could just as easily be classified as
drama, exploring as it does not only the personal relationships between a group
of journalists working for a local TV news organisation, but complex issues
around the perceived commercialisation of news in the 1980s. William Hurt’s
newsreader represents not just the love interest for Holly Hunter’s producer,
but the mounting superficiality of TV news in an era when (the film suggests)
good looks and smooth delivery (including, in one key scene, Hurt’s fake
tears as he interviews a rape victim) count for more than journalistic integrity.
Dramas can contain humour, of course, but in a subsidiary relationship to the
main themes, which will rarely be funny in themselves. The Devil Wears Prada
has many funny scenes which gently mock the fashion industry and those who
see it as only marginally less important than life itself, but beneath its glossy
exterior lies a serious exploration of what modern journalism is about, particu-
larly for the increasing numbers of women entering the profession. It is also,
in its most dramatic moments, an impassioned defence of the seriousness with
which successful women in the style journalism sector – represented in this
film by Meryl Streep’s Miranda – approach their work.
COMEDy
Speaking of romantic comedies, this genre is among the most common

in films about journalism. Themselves a sub-genre of comedy, romantic
comedies typically present a battle of wills between a male and female lead,
resolving in a more or less happy ending. The screwball comedies of the black
and white era famously featured sparkling, witty verbal exchanges between
their stars, and remain much loved to this day. More recent examples of the
journalistic romantic comedy include Runaway Bride, in which Richard Gere
plays a roguish, unethical columnist working on an exposé of a woman (Julia
Roberts) who repeatedly absconds from her wedding arrangements. As in the
classic screwball comedies, the humour arising from the Gere-Roberts duel
is set against a more serious engagement with the nature of journalism itself.
Gere’s character is sacked for getting his facts wrong in a story about Roberts’
character. ‘Journalism lesson number one’, his editor explains, ‘if you fabricate
your facts, you get fired’, and the film is genuinely interested in the ethics of
the intrusive, human interest journalism which features in much of the news
media today. In the balance of the piece, however, these reflections are of far
lesser importance than the comic interplay of the stars. The film, and the
genre, are comedy first, drama second.
The broader category of comedy is represented by films such as Bruce
Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003) and Anchorman (Adam Mackay, 2004). In the
Figure 5 Runaway Bride (Gary Marshall, 1999). Source: BFI
first, Jim Carrey’s jaded local TV news reporter acquires the powers of divine
intervention, which he uses to enhance his chances of getting the girl, and
to extract revenge on his rivals, such as Steve Carell’s anally-retentive news
presenter. The film is typical Carrey-esque comedy, and often very funny, but
it also contains a message about the importance of local journalism. Carrey’s
character begins the film with a view of local journalism as inferior and boring,
reflecting its low status in the journalistic hierarchy (where people learn their
trade in local papers and broadcast news organisations, before graduating to
the big time and the big city). By the film’s end Carrey has rediscovered his
enthusiasm for local homespun stories such as the ‘world’s biggest cookie’.
The local journalist has gone from loser to community lynchpin.6
Anchorman fits into a recent sub-genre of film comedy which takes us back
to the recent past, and has fun with the startlingly (from this distance) non-PC
attitudes of the 1970s in which it is set. The film-makers have been associated
with a variety of retro-comic projects of this kind, such as Starsky and Hutch
(Todd Phillips, 2004), and the film delights in its defiantly sexist humour (from
the safety of a post-feminist perspective, within which it is permitted to laugh at
how reactionary and backward we used to be without being accused of actually
endorsing those views). The hypermasculinity of the 1970s TV news room,
the treatment of the pretty blonde female journalist who joins the team, and
turns out to be a more dangerous adversary to Will Ferrell’s anchorman than
he could have imagined – all are played for laughs which come mainly at the
expense of men and 1970s notions of masculinity. As with the other comedies
mentioned above, though, as we laugh at the downfall of Ron Burgundy, there
is a serious kernel for the student of journalism who wishes to know what life
was like in the news media before feminism and its critique of patriarchal
news culture became accepted. Athough its status as satire is challenged by at
least one reviewer, ‘its one explicit message has to do with the sexism of 1970s
television’.7
SATIRE
Somewhere between comedy and drama sits satire, of which there have been
many excellent examples in the journalism genre. Satire uses techniques of
exaggeration and ironic humour to comment on those individuals, institutions
and social trends which it targets. Humour, to the extent that it is used in satire,
tends to be bitter-sweet, cerebral, dark-edged, and happy endings are by no
means guaranteed. Satire is political comedy which aims to show up the absur-
dities and hypocrisies of the social world. Sydney Lumet’s Network explores
the encroaching commercialisation of TV news in the United States in the
1970s – the rise of infotainment, as we would characterise the trend today –
through the eyes of its central character, a jaded journalist of the old guard who
submits to the corporate agenda and turns his programme into a freak show.
The plot is absurd, but just close enough to actual trends in the actual news
media of the time to be believable – could a news presenter ever be shot live
on air, by a member of the studio audience, professional journalistic integrity
literally sacrificed in the name of the ratings war? An extreme idea, but one
which in the era of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle seems at least within the
realm of the possible.
The best satires are those which achieve believability, or the suspension of
disbelief within imagined worlds which are just real and consistent enough to
be true. Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997) tells the story of a US president
who manipulates the media by staging a fictional war to detract from a looming
sex scandal. Inspired by the mediated nature of the first Gulf War in 1991, the
critical success of the film was heightened by the convergences between its
plot and the news management practices of the Clinton administration which,
if it never actually faked a war for publicity purposes, was accused in 1998
of launching cruise missiles at a chemical factory in Sudan as a diversionary
tactic to deal with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.8
Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995) satirises the vacuity of the American
media with the story of how a pathological career-climber (Nicole Kidman)
is prepared to do anything, from sleeping with the producer to arranging her
husband’s death, for the sake of advancement as a TV presenter. The film’s
exaggerated vision of the industry might be read as an indictment of the self-

centred amorality of the media profession. It also plays into stereotypes of
the competitive young woman who achieves success not through talent but
through the calculated use of her own body.
Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), hugely controversial on release
because of its violent content, is also one of the most biting satires about media
ever made. Natural Born Killers makes the media complicit in the construction
of celebrity criminals Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson and Juliette
Lewis) as they go on a mammoth killing spree across America. Robert Downey
Jr’s Wayne Gale, who conducts a live, televised interview with Mickey in a
high security prison, sparking off a riot which will lead to many more deaths,
and ultimately his own, is an extreme caricature of that type of TV presenter/
journalist who actively cultivates trauma and dysfunction in the pursuit of
ratings. He is wholly amoral, and painted so unsympathetically that when he
is summarily executed by the killers at the end of the film we are inclined
to approve. The closing credits include scenes from the real-life case of the
Menendez brothers, who became celebrity criminals after killing their parents.
Stone’s point is clear – there is something far wrong with a system in which the
media make spectacle out of crime, and celebrities out of criminals.
THE THRILLER
Another staple type of the journalism genre is the thriller. As noted above,
the role of the journalist can be the vehicle for exciting tales of investigation,
discovery, cover-up, confrontation. The journalist is a kind of detective, whose
progress towards the resolution of a mystery or injustice often follows the
classic thriller structure. Denzel Washington’s character in The Pelican Brief
(Alan J. Pakula, 1993) is one example, as is Cate Blanchett in Joel Schumacher’s
Veronica Guerin (2003). The latter’s plot, based on actual events involving the
assassination of investigative reporter Veronica Guerin in Ireland, follows the
journalist as she seeks to resolve corruption and incompetence in the name
of justice. As is typical of the thriller form, the protagonist is in jeopardy
throughout the story, and indeed is eventually killed. A similar fate awaits
the central character of Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart – Daniel
Pearl. This ‘true’ story has a pre-ordained conclusion, thanks to the worldwide
publicity which followed Pearl’s decapitation by his Pakistani kidnappers,
but getting to that point, and the harrowing experience of his wife (played by
Angelina Jolie), is as thrilling as any thriller could be, and more tragic than
most, because we know that the events depicted on screen did actually happen.
The film noir works of the 1940s and 1950s are often placed within the
thriller genre. Some, such as Ace in the Hole, have journalists at their heart.
In noir, however, the question posed by the narrative, and answered by the
journalist, is not ‘who did it?’ but what will befall the protagonist because of his
transgression? In film noir the central male character is someone who crosses
the line between right and wrong, good and evil, often under the influence of
an alluring femme fatale. This transgression brings about his own downfall.
When Kirk Douglas’ character, Chuck Tatum, puts a man’s life needlessly in
jeopardy for the sake of a good story and his own personal gain, he is on a path
to his own death.
David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) adopts a thriller structure in its account of
a serial killing spree which took place in San Francisco in the late 1960s. We
might regard All the President’s Men as a thriller too, rather than a drama, as its
mounting tension leads towards the climax we all know. Of course, no one died
in Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation, and the narrative ends before the
villain gets caught (the final scenes are found news reel footage of Nixon’s final
months). But the meticulous progress of the case is as compelling and nerve-
wracking as any serial killer thriller.
THE BIO-PIC
Many films about journalism have been true stories, or stories based on actual
events, and actual persons. Recent times have seen bio-pics about Truman
Capote as well as Veronica Guerin and Daniel Pearl. In Up Close and Personal
(Jon Avnet, 1996) Michelle Pfeiffer plays a character based on Jessica Savitch,
who became the first female network TV news anchor in the United States.
Warren Beatty told the story of John Reed (author of the classic Ten Days That
Shook the World) in Reds (1981).
Bio-pics and other ‘true’ stories about journalism are true, of course,
only in the sense that in all narratives, fictional or factual, the gap between
what actually happened and what is represented is wide, filled by the writer’s
creative licence, the producers’ demands for a well known actor who can carry
the movie to commercial success (Clooney, Gere, Redford, Jolie, Winslet),
and the inevitable narrative compressions required by a predominantly visual
medium working within the constraints of mainstream popular taste.
THE ACTION HERO MOVIE
Richard Ness titles his filmography From Headline Hunter to Superman,

a reference to the fact that many of the best known films about journalism
have been within the superhero action genre. There have been many versions
of Superman, on TV and in the movies; and Spider-Man too. Both of these
comic book superheroes are journalists in their day jobs. This is convenient in
plot terms, because it gives them access to breaking news, and thus allows them
to be on the scene quickly. Both Clark Kent and Peter Parker are somewhat
nondescript employees, doing their jobs of reporter and photojournalist with
quiet competence. But as they prowl around the newsrooms and editorial offices
they are in prime position to hear about and respond to the latest outrage by
the bad guys. The status of these characters as media workers also places them
in an ambivalent relationship to the truth, which intensifies the central mystery
around which the superhero genre often revolves – will his true identity be
revealed? In a scenario where the hero’s work colleagues and best buddies are
journalists, the urgency of this question is highlighted, because it is precisely
the work of the journalist to discover the truth. Spider-Man’s career is particu-
larly bedevilled by the brutal tabloid practices of the editor of Parker’s paper,
The Daily Bugle, J. Jonah Jameson. Jameson’s mistaken view of Spider-Man as
a criminal provides an important element of the plot’s tension, and plays into a
popular perception of the tabloid press as bigoted and irresponsible.
SOME OTHER GENRES
Journalists have also featured in many war movies, particularly in the context of
the post-Soviet conflicts in the former yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda.
Musicals about journalism are less common, although Chicago harbours
amongst its song and dance numbers a quite sophisticated critique of the role
of tabloid journalism in the construction of celebrity, and the damage this can
do to individuals. The Chicago-set His Girl Friday remakes The Front Page for
late 1930s America, and focuses on the journalists. Chicago shows the effects of
the popular journalism of that era on those who become its subjects, or victims.
There have been a few horror films made with journalists in their stories, such
as John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine (2008). Westerns are not a genre usually
associated with journalism, but, as noted above, two recent examples feature
journalists in contexts which highlight the birth of celebrity culture and
the role of the media in the construction of myth. We should also note the
inclusion of films about journalism within the upsurge of documentaries in the
mainstream movie market which has been evident since the late 1990s, such as
Control Room (Jehane Noujaim, 2004) and Gonzo (Alex Gibney, 2008).
NOTES
1. The Variety list of the top 390 box office earners of US films (http://www.variety.com/
index.asp?layout=chart_pass&charttype=chart_top_domestic&dept=Film) includes three
in our category of movies about journalism: All the President’s Men (number 359, with
$70,600,000 earned), Superman (number 112 – $134,218,018) and Runaway Bride (number
80 – $152,257,409). This list calculates only US box office receipts, and only goes up to 2001.
2. See Martin Conboy’s Journalism: a critical history (2004), and Joad Raymond’s The Invention
of the Newspaper (1996).
3. For a history of the American media and the formation of journalism in what would become
the United States, see Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media (2004). John Hartley’s Under-
standing Popular Culture (1996) is a thought-provoking account of the role of journalism in
the French Revolution.
4. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominick, 2007)
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_film.
6. Bruce Almighty shares some features with Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), in which Bill
Murray’s local TV weatherman becomes trapped in a parallel universe of infinitely repeating
days. Armed with the knowledge that every day, which begins with a report on the annual
ritual of groundhog day in a Pennsylvanian town, will be the same, but that in knowing
the future he has the power to shape it, he embarks on a campaign to win the affection of
his producer, played by Andie McDowell. Again, the contempt for local journalism with
which Murray’s character begins the film is transformed by the end into a celebration of its
centrality to communities.
7. From review by Lawrenson, E., Sight & Sound, volume 14, number 10, 2004.
8. Levinson’s later Man of the Year (2007), starring Robin Williams as a Jon Stewart-type
broadcaster who runs for the presidency, was less successful as a satire of the mediated
excesses of contemporary US politics.
 4
Journalism in Film: 1997–2008
I n the period from 1997 to 2008 seventy-one films were made about
journalism for cinema release in the UK1 (see Table 1). As noted in the
previous chapter, by films ‘about’ journalism I refer to films in which one or
more of the main characters is a journalist. Within this category there will be
primary and secondary representations, depending on whether the role of the
journalist is instrumental or incidental.
If that distinction is clear enough, let me note that, given the blurred nature
of the contemporary media environment, deciding who is and who is not a
journalist is less straightforward than was once the case. One of the features of
our age is the blurring of many social and cultural categories, including those
which mark out professions and distinguish them from each other, and from
other occupational categories.
Is a radio talk show host, or the folksy presenter who talks about him or
herself on radio and TV, a journalist? I will say yes, for the same reason that
the lifestyle columnist in print (as played by Steve Carell in Dan in Real
Life) is reasonably categorised as a journalist, even though he undertakes no
reportage, and rarely discusses anything to do with politics, economics or the
state of foreign relations. Steve’s Dan, like the kind of character who appears
in Oliver Stone’s Talk Show (1988), and again in The Brave One (Neil Jordan,
2007), reflects the emergence in the twentieth century of a journalistic culture
infused with licensed introspection and personalised reflection on the issues of
the day. It is the journalism of the ‘I’, the me, the subject, which increasingly
engages with its audience as participants in the form of callers to phone-in
shows, letter writers, emailers and text messagers.
Journalism originated as reportage – a medium of monitoring and surveil-
lance required for sound management and administration of social systems.
However, it long ago branched into opinion, commentary, analysis. It became
polemical, partisan, propagandistic. With the rise of mass culture it also
Table 1 Journalism in film, 1997-2008
Title Year Director Genre Male/ Primary/ Hero/ Subject
Female Secondary Villain
Frost/Nixon 2008 Ron Howard Drama Male Primary Hero Political journalism
Gonzo: The Life and Works
of Hunter S Thompson 2008 Alex Gibney Documentary Male Primary Hero Literary journalism
Quarantine 2008 John Eric Dowdle Horror Female Primary Hero TV documentary
How To Lose Friends and
Alienate People 2008 Robert B Weide Comedy (satire) M/F Primary Hero Style journalism
Sex and the City 2008 Michael Patrick King Comedy (romantic) Female Secondary Hero Lifestyle journalism
Vantage Point 2008 Pete Travis Thriller Female Secondary Hero TV news
Definitely Maybe 2008 Adam Brook Comedy Female Secondary Hero Features
Control 2008 Anton Corbijn Drama Male Secondary Hero Current affairs
Leatherheads 2007 George Clooney Comedy Female Primary Hero Sport/celebrity culture
REC 2007 Jaume Balaguero, Horror Female Primary TV documentary
Paco Plaza
Dan in Real Life 2007 Peter Hodges Comedy: romantic Male Secondary Hero Style column
Lions for Lambs 2007 Robert Redford Drama Female Primary Hero Political journalism
Perfect Stanger 2007 James Foley thriller Female Primary Villain Investigative journalism
Zodiac 2007 David Fincher Thriller Male Primary Hero Investigative journalism
Spider Man 3 2007 Sam Raimi Action Male Secondary Hero Print journalism
The Bourne Ultimatum 2007 Paul Greengrass Action Male Secondary Hero Investigative journalism
A Mighty Heart 2007 Michael Winterbottom Thriller Female Primary Hero Foreign correspondence
The Brave One 2007 Neil Jordan Drama Female Secondary Hero Talk radio
The Weather 2007 Gore Vestvey Drama Male Secondary Hero Weather news
The Hunting Party 2007 Richard Shepherd Thriller Male Primary Hero Foreign correspondence
Thank You For Smoking 2006 Jason Reitmnan Drama Female Secondary Hero Investigative report
Blood Diamond 2006 Edward Zwick Drama Female Secondary Hero Foreign correspondence
Interview 2006 Steve Buscemi Drama Male Primary Villain Celebrity journalism
Infamous 2006 Douglas McGrath Drama Male Primary Hero Literary journalism
The Good German 2006 Steven Soderberg Thriller Male Secondary Hero Foreign correspondence
Borat 2006 Larry Charles Comedy (satire) Male Primary Hero TV documentary
Superman Returns 2006 Bryan Singer Action Female Secondary Hero Print journalism
Scoop 2006 Woody Allen Comedy Female Primary Hero Investigative journalism
The Devil Wears Prada 2006 David Frankel Drama Female Primary Hero Style journalism
Capote 2005 Bennett Miller Drama Male Primary Hero Literary journalism
Good Night, and Good Luck 2005 George Clooney Drama Male Primary Hero Investigative journalism
Rag Tale 2005 Mary McGuckian Comedy (satire) M/Fe Primary Villain Tabloid journalism
Control Room 2004 Jehane Noujaim Documentary M/F Primary Hero 24 hour news
2046 2004 Wong Kar Wai Drama Male Secondary Hero Villain Columnist
Paparazzi 2004 Paul Abascal Thriller Male Primary Villain Celebrity photojournalism
Anchorman 2004 Adam Mckay Comedy M/F Primary Hero TV news
The Life Aquatic 2004 Wes Anderson Comedy Female Secondary Hero Feature journalism
Spiderman 2 2004 Sam Raimi Action Male Secondary Hero Print journalism
13 Going on 30 2004 Gary Winick Comedy Female Secondary Hero Style journalism
City of God 2003 Fernando Meirelles Drama Male Secondary Hero Photojournalism
How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days 2003 Donald Petrie Comedy Female Secondary Hero Style journalism
Shattered Glass 2003 Billy Ray Drama M/F Primary Hero Print journalism
Bruce Almighty 2003 Tom Shadyac Comedy Male Primary Hero Local journalism
Veronica Guerin 2002 Joel Schumacher Thriller Female Primary Hero Investigative journalism
The Quiet American 2002 Philip Noyce Drama Male Primary Hero Foreign correspondence
Chicago 2002 Rob Marshall Musical Male Secondary Villain Tabloid journalism
Spiderman 2002 Sam Raimi Action Male Secondary Villain Print journalism
The Life of David Gale 2002 Alan Parker Thriller Female Primary Hero Investigative journalism
Life or Something Like It 2002 Stephen Herek Comedy (romantic) Female Secondary Hero TV news
Black and White 2002 Craig Lahiff Drama Male Secondary Hero Print journalism
No Man's Land 2002 Danis Tanovich Drama Female Primary Villain Foreign correspondence
24 Hour Party People 2002 Michael Winterbottom Drama Male Secondary Hero Current affairs
Cat's Meow 2001 Peter Bogdanovitch Drama M/F Secondary Villain Media power
15 Minutes 2001 John Herzfeld Thriller Male Secondary Villain Tabloid TV
Kissing Jessica Stein 2001 Charles Herman-
Wurmfeld Comedy Female Secondary hero Features journalism
Almost Famous 2000 Cameron Crowe Drama Male Primary Hero Music journalism
In the Mood for Love 2000 Wong Kar Wai Drama Male Secondary Hero Print journalism
Three Kings 1999 David O. Russell War Female Secondary Hero Foreign correspondence
The Insider 1999 Michael Mann Drama Male Primary Hero Investigative journalism
Complicity 1999 Gavin Millar Thriller Male Primary Villain Print journalism
Runaway Bride 1999 Gary Marshall Comedy (romantic) M/F Primary Hero Print journalism
In the Garden of Good and Evil 1999 Clint Eastwood drama Male Secondary Hero Features journalism
True Crime 1999 Clint Eastwood Thriller Male Primary Hero investigative journalism
Celebrity 1998 Woody Allen Comedy (satire) Male Primary Villain Celebrity journalism
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 1997 Terry Gilliam Comedy (satire) Male Primary Hero Literary journalism
Deep Impact 1997 Mimi Leder Disaster Female Secondary Hero Investigative journalism
Velvet Goldmine 1997 Todd Haynes Drama Male Secondary Hero Investigative journalism
Mad City 1997 Costa-Gavras Drama Male Primary Hero TV news
jounlism in film: 1997–2008
Welcome to Sarayevo 1997 Michael Winterbottom Drama M/F Primary Hero Foreign correspondence
LA Confidential 1997 Cameron Crowe Thriller Male Secondary Villain Celebrity journalism
41
Tomorrow Never Dies 1997 Roger Spottiswood Action Male Secondary Villain Media power
became entertainment. As leisure and affluence increased, journalism became

the vehicle for monitoring and talking about culture, high and low, and about
the relationship of the individual to the collective, social world. Within the
news package, space was made for non-reportorial journalistic forms, linked to
straight news by the fact that they addressed the real, the actual, the factual.
This kind of journalism often sits next to more conventional journalistic forms,
but is distanced from its rules and standards. Talk show hosts, radio presenters,
lifestyle columnists are not generally expected to be objective or detached. On
the contrary, their subjectivity and projection of personality are key to their
success as media performers. The output of the radio presenter played by Jodie
Foster in The Brave One belongs to that more personalised journalism of the
self which, if it is far removed from the conventions of objective reportage, is
nonetheless part of the expanded, privatised, often feminised public sphere in
which women address women’s issues, to audiences comprising both women
and men.
And what of the weather man, or woman, as played by Nicole Kidman in
To Die For, Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and, in our 1997–2008 sample
period, Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man (Gore Verbinski, 2007)? Reporting
the weather is not the kind of journalism likely to win a Pulitzer prize, clearly,
but it has been a staple of the news package since the nineteenth century. Like
the musings of the lifestyle columnist, weather reports are among the most
frequently used services of any news outlet, and I have no hesitation in treating
the weatherman as a category of journalist in this book. In this I am following
the precedent set by previous writers on journalism in the movies, many of
whom refer to Nicole Kidman’s performance in To Die For as a classic repre-
sentation. Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, stuck in Poughkeepsie
with his camera crew and apparently condemned to repeat the same twenty-
four-hour cycle forever, is a weatherman whose comic predicament does not
prevent the subversion of commonly held assumptions about the triviality of
weather news, and of local journalism in general.
THE CULT OF REALITY
Weather news has been around for centuries. More recent are those forms of
reality culture in which journalism is hybridised and combined with forms
which deal in the representation of factuality rather than the creation of
imagined or made-up worlds, but are not widely recognised as ‘journalism’.
The best example of this is the reality TV format common in popular factual
TV all over the world. Reality TV began as an outgrowth of the fly-on-the-wall
documentary, itself a relatively recent cultural form, but one which is generally
recognised as journalism.2 Is reality TV thereby a hybrid form of journalism,
jounlism in film: 1997–2008 43
or a form of popular entertainment which has more in common with the game
show? Might one thus include The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), or My
Little Eye (Marc Evans, 2002), or Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008) in a
book such as this?
The latter is included, because its central character is a journalist who
becomes trapped in a house of horrors (and is thus, being a journalist, in a
narratively convenient but existentially precarious position to film the action
and leave a record of what happened, Cloverfield-style). The first two films
are, on the other hand, part of a sub-genre of movies made in the past decade
which engage with the fascinating cultural and existential issues raised by
the reality TV phenomenon, but still seem to me distant from the journalism
genre. Truman’s God-like producer in the sky is precisely that, a producer
who sees his show more as a soap opera than a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
The audiences who follow it live on TV are addicted to the unfolding narrative,
as they would be to that of the UK’s EastEnders at its melodramatic peak. They
are knowing spectators of a long-running drama which, though it involves one
‘real’ person, Truman, has no reality beyond the confines of Sea Haven, his
made-for-TV home. It is an invented, controlled, scripted reality.
A further exclusion concerns films about the communication practice
which since the start of the twentieth century has developed in parallel with
journalism and as an organised response to it: public relations, and associated
activities such as political campaigning. In Chapter 10, ‘King-makers’,
I discuss these films in some detail. They are not films ‘about’ journalism,
however, so much as films about the consequences of journalism on other
spheres such as politics and business. Rod Tiffen in his perceptive study of
News and Power (1989) argued that the effects of news media were to be seen
not least on institutions and organisations, and the responses of these organi-
sations to the emergence of a mediatised political culture requiring intensive
management and, if possible, manipulation. Films such as Wag the Dog, The
Contender (Rod Lurie, 2000), Primary Colors (Mike Nichols, 1998) and Man
of the Year (Barry Levinson, 2007) are built around this idea, and address
the effects of our contemporary media environment on the management of
politics. Journalists are not the subject of these movies, however, which are
more interested in exploring, usually through satire, the ways in which political
actors seek to influence and manage the news media. They are about the conse-
quences of modern journalism for non-news organisations. I exclude them
from the ‘about journalism’ list, therefore.
In Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2006), also a film about public
relations, a key supporting character is a journalist, and her investigative
work is central to the story of the downfall of an arrogant and cynical tobacco
lobbyist. It can therefore be categorised here as a film about journalism.
JOURNALISM ON SCREEN, 1997–2008:

A CONTENT ANALYSIS
Table 1 shows all the films about journalism made for cinema and released in
the UK between the years 1997 and 2008 inclusive (for reviews and synopses,
see Appendix 1). The list does not include films such as Edison (David Burke,
2005), released straight to DVD. Gavin Millar’s Complicity (2000) is included,
although poor critical reception ensured that it was released not in the UK as
a whole but only in Scotland where Iain Banks’ source novel is set (and it then
had limited theatrical release in the US).
With above exclusions, we find that seventy-one films were made about
journalism and released in cinemas in the 1997–2008 period. The peak years
for production were 2006–8, when thirty-one films about journalism were
released. Film-makers’ interest in the subject dipped in 1998 with just two
films released, and only two came out in 2000. I attach no particular signifi-
cance to these variations, given the small number of productions concerned.
It is at least noteworthy, however, that in the final four years of the period
under review more than thirty films were made with journalism at their
heart, suggesting a sustained and growing interest in the subject as the 2000s
advanced.
The director whose name appears most regularly in my list of films about
journalism (excluding Sam Raimi, who directed the three Spider-Man movies)
is Michael Winterbottom, with three films (Welcome To Sarajevo (1997);
Twenty Four Hour Party People (2004), about TV journalist and founder of
Factory Records Tony Wilson; and A Mighty Heart (2007). George Clooney
is also prominent, both as director (Good Night, and Good Luck; Leatherheads)
and actor (The Good German, Three Kings). Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie
portrayed journalists in two films apiece, as did Richard Gere and comic actor
Steve Carell.
Breaking the films down by generic category, twenty-six films were classified
as drama. These included Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (2008), Costa-Gavras’
Mad City (1997) and the pair of films made about Truman Capote and released
in 2005–06. Another common genre was the thriller (thirteen titles) – dramas
laced with suspense and which build to often violent resolutions, including
Clint Eastwood’s True Crime (1999), Veronica Guerin (Joel Schumacher, 2003)
and David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007).
As the above examples indicate, many of these films – eighteen in all – tell
stories which were presented to the audience as ‘based on true events’. Four
titles (How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (Robert L. Weide, 2008), The
Devil Wears Prada, Welcome To Sarajevo, The Hunting Party) were widely adver-
tised as loosely based on the real-life experiences of journalists, albeit disguised
with fictionalised names and other details. As noted earlier, ‘true stories’ are
never quite that, with even the most realistic of screenplays incorporating
numerous compressions and narrative short cuts, dramatic exaggerations and
aesthetic flourishes intended to maximise a story’s impact as cinema. Thus The
Hunting Party, based on an Esquire feature article by foreign correspondent
Scott Anderson about his adventures in post-war Serbia, changes not only his
name but major elements of the original, rendering it more Indiana Jones than
Woodward and Bernstein.
The frequency of true stories in cinema highlights that aspect of journalism
which has made it such a popular subject for film-makers: its inherently
dramatic, often dangerous qualities, be it the tension and suspense of Daniel
Pearl’s kidnapping and subsequent execution, Lowell Bergman’s struggle to
have Jeffrey Wigand’s whistle-blowing reported on NBC, or the battle of wits
between David Frost and Richard Nixon depicted in Frost/Nixon. Journal-
ism’s true stories are frequently more dramatic and compelling than the lurid
fictions about journalism presented in films such as Paparazzi (Paul Abascal,
2004) or A Perfect Stranger (James Foley, 2007).
Six of the films made about journalism between 1997 and 2008 depicted
action or superheroes: Spider-Man (three releases), Superman Returns,
James Bond and Jason Bourne (I include the Bond-vehicle Tomorrow Never
Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1998) because of its portrayal of a megalo-
maniac media baron and his use of media power to attempt to take over
the world – see Chapter 11). Several of the US scholars referenced in the
previous chapter have noted the link between superheroes and journalism
in the movies. Richard Ness’ filmography is titled From Headline Hunter
to Superman, and with Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006), alongside
the phenomenally successful Spider-Man franchise (nearly $3 billion at the
global box office), that connection clearly continues. Superheroes, as they go
about saving people from villains, tend to attract the attention of the media,
and thus provide rich material for the exploration of celebrity culture, the
ethics of crime journalism and other matters of public concern (the violation
of privacy by tabloids, for example – Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson
devotes his professional life to unmasking the Spider-Man, whom he wrongly
believes to be a force for evil in the city. This tension, with the journalist
presented as the source of injustice, has been central to the franchise ever
since its first incarnation). Superman Returns, meanwhile, provides in the
figure of Lois Lane an evolving portrayal of women in journalism which at
the same time as balancing the hero’s hyper-masculinity reflects prevailing
gender stereotypes.
Next to dramas, the most frequently used genre for films about journalism in
the 1997–2008 period was comedy, including romantic comedy, teen comedy,
satire and what we might call ‘retro’ – that recent sub-genre of comedy which
has postmodern fun with the conventions and quaintly incorrect prejudices of
Figure 6 Anchorman (Adam McKay, 2004). Source: BFI
the pre-feminist, pre-gay liberation, pre-civil rights past. Anchorman, with its
parody of a 1970s TV newsroom, belongs to this genre in being a comedy fully
aware of the feminist critique of sexism in journalism, and it both celebrates
and rejects that sexism in its affection for Ron Burgundy. It then delights in
his downfall at the hands of blonde beauty Veronica Corningstone (herself
a stereotype of hard-bodied blondeness, but refracted through the post-
Madonna lens, where the female body is wielded as a weapon in the sex wars
by knowing, powerful women).
A total of nineteen comedies of various types were made with journalism
at their core, often with serious underlying messages. In Borat, for example
(subtitled Cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of
Kazakhstan) Sacha Baron Cohen’s character moves from mocking his own
assumed country of Kazakhstan (in a manner condemned by many as racist)
to a merciless exposure of the racism, anti-semitism and general boorishness
of so much that is American. Using the mock-documentary, reality-style
format which had become familiar to audiences in the mid-2000s Borat is both
hilarious and disturbing in the picture it paints of a pre-Obama United States
where, in some places at least, attitudes appear to have progressed little since
the days of the Civil War.
A popular sub-genre in journalism movies remains that of the romantic

comedy. The screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s established the
dramatic compatibility of journalism and humour, often by fusing the farcical,
do-or-die atmosphere of the tabloid newsroom with quite sophisticated
treatment of the nature of the news business. Ever since, the film industry’s
leading men and women have appeared together in rom coms involving journal-
istic plots. In our sample period Richard Gere is the roguish columnist to Julia
Roberts Runaway Bride (Gary Marshall, 1999). In Life or Something Like It
(Stephen Herek, 2002) Angelina Jolie is the superficial TV news reporter who
receives advance warning of her impending death, playing opposite Edward
Burns as the sensitive cameraman who teaches her the real priorities of life. In
Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2008) Sarah Jessica Parker is lifestyle
columnist Carrie Bradshaw, wooed, then dumped, then wooed again by her
handsome but anonymous co-star.
The remainder of the 1997–2008 sample comprises two documentaries
about journalism: Alex Gibney’s Gonzo, about Hunter S. Thompson, and
Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room, a record of Al Jazeera’s performance during
the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There were two horror movies (Quarantine (John
Erick Dowdle, 2008), and the Spanish language film of which it was a remake,
REC (Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza, 2007), one disaster film (Deep Impact,
Mimi Leder, 1998), one war film (Three Kings), and one musical. Chicago (Rob
Marshall, 2002) is based on a stage show about the popular media’s tendency
towards the construction of criminal celebrity. Amidst the great song and
dance routines (and another interesting performance from Richard Gere as
a combination of lawyer and public relations man who uses the media to win
sympathy for his client, Roxie) is a 1930s-set tale of tabloid excess which speaks
to the news values and ethical lapses of the present-day popular media.
Categorised by subject matter, the seventy-one films in the sample were
dominated by the familiar themes of foreign correspondence, which featured
in eight titles, and investigative journalism, in twelve. As noted earlier, film-
makers’ interest in these categories of journalism reflects the inherently
dramatic and cinematic qualities of investigation and war news respectively.
Investigative journalists are a kind of quasi-legal detective, often up against
corruption, power and vested interests as they strive towards their end point of
exclusive exposure. Their stories are suspenseful, sometimes violent and often,
as in the case of Veronica Guerin, depressingly true. Foreign correspondence
on the other hand takes the film-maker to exotic locations, and allows him
to witness and publicise human suffering in ways which s/he may hope will
impact on public opinion and policy. Again there is danger and suspense, a
thrilling quality to these stories, the opportunity for redemptive and uplifting
tales of journalistic heroism in the face of violence and threat.
HEROES OR VILLAINS?
In so far as journalists on screen can be divided into heroes and villains (and this
is not always easy since, as film-makers know, the most interesting characters
tend to combine elements of both – Richard Gere’s columnist in Runaway
Bride begins the film as a villain, but ends it as a hero; Simon Pegg’s shallow
and selfish style journalist in How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, modelled
on the real-life Vanity Fair writer Toby Young, is hardly heroic, but nor is he
entirely a villain). It is the characters who are either investigative reporters
or foreign correspondents who are most likely to be portrayed heroically:
Daniel Pearl, his wife Marianne Pearl (A Mighty Heart); Michael Henderson
in Welcome To Sarajevo; Kate Winslet’s Bitsy Bloom in The Life of David Gale
(Alan Parker, 2004). Journalistic heroes tend to be those journalists engaged in
fulfilling the normatively approved functions of journalism in a democracy:
witnessing injustice, holding power to account, defending freedom. In
portraying these heroes, cinema performs its mythical function of dramatising
those normative ideals, and translating them into a popular cultural idiom.
Let us note here the perhaps surprising finding that journalists are portrayed
heroically in the large majority of the seventy-one films under discussion. In
fifty-eight of the titles listed in Table 1 (82 per cent) we are presented with
journalists who are, despite their flaws (which in the case of the lovable rogues
such as Richard Gere’s Ike are frequently attractive in any case), good, coura-
geous people devoted to their profession and to upholding its best traditions
and ideals.
Some observers have detected in recent films about journalism a tendency
to negative representations of the profession. James Caryn, writing in the New
York Times in 2005, argued that since the highpoint of All the President’s Men
and that film’s portrayal of the quiet heroism of Woodward and Bernstein it
has been all downhill for journalists on screen. As evidence he cites the Spanish
language film Cronicos (Sebastian Cordero, 2004, not included in this study,
since it was not released in cinemas in the UK), starring John Leguziamo as a
tabloid reporter who will stop at nothing to get his story. His character, asserts
Caryn, ‘embodies the reporter as seen in current films: he’s a sleaze’.3 In 2008,
Stephen Armstrong in the Guardian argued in similar fashion that ‘with the
odd exception, the 1,000 or so screen appearances by journalists mostly portray
them as hardworking forces for good. Recently, however, the screen seems to
have fallen out with the trade’.4
Neither of these readings accurately captures the positivity and lack of
cynicism seen in recent screen representations of journalism, which signify
nothing so much as the film-makers’ evident desire to praise and pay respect to
the principles, if not always the practice of liberal journalism. There is in many
of the 1997–2008 films a sincere, almost naïve adherence to the nobility of the
fourth estate, often set against the background of a post-9/11 world where
terror, torture and governmental mendacity loom large.
If it is true to say that the majority of past representations have been
‘positive’ in the sense described by Armstrong we should take note that the
past portrayals of journalism which are today most highly valued by critics
and commentators, including journalists themselves, feature some memorable
villains. Villains dominate three of the undisputed classics of the genre –
Citizen Kane, Ace in the Hole, and Sweet Smell of Success. Charles Foster Kane
begins his screen life as a victim, then becomes a youthful idealist, then a cynic
and a monster. Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole is the kind of journalist for
whom the term ‘reptile’ seems entirely appropriate, while J. J. Hunsecker
in Sweet Smell of Success is entirely beyond redemption. All are compelling
characters, but rotten to the core. Then there is Sally Field’s Regan in Absence
of Malice (Sydney Pollack, 1981), who betrays her source and causes a suicide;
Nicole Kidman’s Suzanna Stone, who has her husband murdered to advance
her career prospects; and Robert Downey Jr’s true crime TV journalist in
Natural Born Killers, who is happy to see people die at the hands of Mickey
and Mallory because it makes good television. Some of the best films about
journalism, in short, have portrayed the most villainous of journalists.
By contrast, in most of the films made between 1997 and 2008, such as A
Mighty Heart, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Welcome To Sarajevo, journalists
are portrayed as heroic, to the point of reckless disregard for their own safety
Figure 7 Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994). Source: BFI

Figure 8 A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2007). Source: BFI

(and for the well-being of their families and loved ones). Veronica Guerin is
portrayed by Cate Blanchett as a heroine, undisputably, in Joel Schumacher’s
account of her ill-fated investigation into organised crime in Ireland. This
heroism is contextualised by repeated references to the husband and children
who wait for her at home, fearful and uncertain of what will happen to her
next. In the end, her determination to uncover the truth costs her her life,
and her family a wife and mother. Her behaviour is portrayed as reckless, even
selfish, but heroic nonetheless. Though not as forcefully presented, Michael
Winterbottom’s portrayal of Daniel Pearl likewise leads the viewer to question
the personal cost, not only to himself but to his pregnant wife and unborn
child, of pursuing the story. That he is a courageous figure is never questioned.
Indeed, we might say that over the decade under discussion journalists have
become, in reality and in their representation in cinema, more heroic and more
troublesome to dysfunctional authority and abusive power than ever before.
The villains of the journalism genre in the years 1997–2008 tend to be
found, as they always have been, in movies about popular journalism, or what
used to be known as the tabloid sector. In our sample, there were only fourteen
films in which journalists were portrayed in negative terms, and in even fewer
as out-and-out villains, devoid of redeeming features. In the latter category is
Paparazzi, Paul Abascal’s crude revenge thriller about a movie star whose life
is ruined by a group of remorseless tabloid photographers. In 15 Minutes (John
Herzfeld) Kelsey Grammar plays an unscrupulous ‘true crime’ presenter of
Top Story, ‘the nation’s newsreel’, driven by the need for ‘bad news’. ‘We’re
a tabloid show’, he proclaims, while working with an alcoholic cop played
by Robert De Niro to be there on the scene when the heat is going down.
Grammar’s character can be compared to Robert Downey Jr’s in Natural Born
Killers, another tabloid villain.
Mary McGuckian’s Rag Tale presents a similarly unforgiving portrait of
the UK’s notorious ‘red top’ journalism, while Celebrity (Woody Allen, 1999)
and Perfect Stranger (James Foley, 2007) present what one might read as their
directors’ deep hatred of the celebrity journalism which surrounds them and
makes their lives miserable (as they may believe). Steve Buscemi’s Interview
(2006) has an embittered political journalist who lies and cheats his way into
his TV star interviewee’s confidence, and then her pants, only to be betrayed
by her in turn.
The balance of good and evil in journalism movies can be summarised,
therefore, as:
• foreign correspondents and investigative reporters, good;

• tabloid hacks, celebrity interviewers, paparazzi and other agents of the
gutter press, bad.
This dichotomy reflects the long-standing and deep-rooted public status of

these different sectors of the journalism industry, seen in His Girl Friday as
much as Chicago and LA Confidential.
There is a trend which complicates this polarity, however, and which reflects
the rise of feminism and enhanced female socio-economic power since the
1970s. Eight of the 1997–2008 movies had as their subject ‘style’ or lifestyle
journalism – the kind of journalism which fills the pages of Cosmopolitan and
Vanity Fair and addresses fashion, health and lifestyle, sexuality and celebrity.
How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, Sex and the City, The Devil Wears
Prada and 13 Going On 30, though very different in tone, each in its way reflects
the extent to which journalism in the early twenty-first century was under-
going a process of feminisation, both in terms of its content (more coverage
of fashion, lifestyle, and so on), and in terms of the respect accorded these
categories of content by a hitherto suspicious cultural elite.
MALE AND FEMALE
This brings us to what some might regard as the most surprising finding of all.
In thirty-two of the films made about journalism in 1997–2008 (45 per cent)
at least one of the main journalistic characters was a female. Women indeed
outnumbered their male counterparts in films about foreign correspondence
and investigative journalism, traditionally (and on celluloid no less so) male

preserves of the profession.
Chapter 7 discusses the representation of female journalists, past and
present, in detail, noting the paradoxical fact that cinema has since the 1930s
and the Torchy Blane series been a cultural space in which there have been
strong positive female characters (in the sense in which feminism would use
those terms). It is nonetheless striking that in the cinema of the 1997–2008
period so many of the lead journalistic roles were occupied by women, and
that these women were neither the ‘sob sisters’ nor the ‘superbitches’ of past
celluloid convention. Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart; Cate Blanchett in
Veronica Guerin; Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada;
Tea Leoni in Deep Impact – the list goes on, reflecting a period in which, if
women had not yet achieved professional parity within journalism, they had
made huge progress in the news room and, perhaps as important, had become
much more valuable as consumers and taste arbiters of journalism than in
the pre-feminist era. If journalism remained a male-dominated profession in
the 2000s it was also true that the news industry by then faced an audience
populated by women who were more educated, more affluent, more demanding
in all things than any previous generation, and who were entirely comfortable
with the thought of women reporters on the front line, or being beaten up by
Irish gangsters, or out-brutalising the brutes in the tabloid editorial board (as
occurs in Mary McGuckian’s Rag Tale).
They also, many of them, wanted to see women journalists in nice frocks
and shoes to die for, with little to worry about except the fashion sense and
personal income of their next suitor. By the 2000s films about journalism were
broad enough in their scope to permit both models of women’s identity – one
celebrating the feminine, the other the feminist.
The finding of substantial female representation in movies about journalism
should be qualified with the equally revealing fact that of seventy-one films
made about journalism in the 1997–2008 period only three were directed by
women – just over 4 per cent. The continuing scarcity of women behind the
cameras, as opposed to the evolving nature of their representation on screen, is
a feature noted in Martha M. Lauzen’s 2005 report on The Celluloid Ceiling.5
Lauzen observes that only 7 per cent of directors of the 250 top grossing films
in the US that year were women, a decline on previous years (the highest
number being 11 per cent in 2000). Women are even less involved as directors
in the making of films about journalism, taking the decade as a whole.
NOTES
1. Based on listings in Sight & Sound, which contains synopses and reviews of every film
released in the UK. There is a pleasing circularity in the fact that the period covered by this
chapter is topped and tailed with films about Hunter S. Thompson – Terry Gilliam’s 1997
adaptation of Thompson’s autobiographical text, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, released
in the autumn of 1998, and Alex Gibney’s documentary about Thompson, Gonzo, released
in the UK in December 2008. It is also fortuituous, if entirely accidental, that the very end
of the period saw the release of Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, about the television interviews
of the disgraced ex-president conducted in 1976. Howard made The Paper in 1994, a news
room farce/satire modelled on The Front Page. Frost/Nixon came along just in time to
reinforce what is one of this book’s key arguments – that the journalist is a cultural figure of
immense and growing importance in democratic societies, his or her role constantly under
scrutiny by the very best of our film-making talent (and sometimes by the worst).
2. For a scholarly history of the rise of reality TV, and its roots in other journalistic forms, see
Annette Hill’s two volumes, Reality TV (2005) and Restyling Factual TV (2007).
3. Caryn, J., ‘The decline and fall of journalists on film’, New York Times, 19 July 2005.
4. Armstrong, S., ‘From hero to zero’, Guardian, 12 May 2008.
5. Lauzen, Martha M., The Celluloid Ceiling: behind-the-scenes employment of women in the top
250 films of 2005 (://moviesbywomen.com/stats_celluloid_ceiling_2005.php).
Part II
Heroes
 5
Watchdogs
I n the real world, as in the cinema, the idea of the journalist-as-hero finds
its purest, most noble expression in the figure of the watchdog. Since a
recognisably modern form of journalism first developed in the seventeenth
century1 fuelled by the English civil war and other anti-feudal movements in
Europe and north America (culminating in the American War of Indepen-
dence of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789), the journalist in liberal
democratic societies has been expected to occupy the social and cultural space
between governing elite and governed non-elite; to act as a buffer, or bridge,
between those who wield power and those on whose behalf, in a democratic
polity, it is supposed to be wielded. In this respect the journalist is a deeply
political figure, called upon to be the champion of the people, their advocate
and representative. In this representative capacity the journalist is also the
watchdog, standing guard over the democratic constitution, the system of law
and order which underpins it, and the adherence of the powerful to those rules
which, in the defence of the public as a whole, a society has decreed should
govern its economy, politics and culture.
The watchdog function of journalism arises logically from news’ funda-
mental function of environmental surveillance. When, as occurred in early
modern Europe and north America between the early seventeenth and late
eighteenth centuries, the political environment becomes one characterised
by democratic structures and acceptance of the belief that the popular will
is sovereign, monitoring it, informing the people about it, must include
those zones and spheres of society where power resides and is exercised. The
struggle for democratic freedom was first and foremost a struggle against the
arbitrariness of absolute power, a rejection of the right of despots to govern in
their own interests without regard to the needs or desires of the people. The
propensity of power to corrupt was built into the various forms of democratic
constitution which emerged out of these struggles, informing such principles
as the separation of legislative and judicial power in the US, and the indepen-
dence of the judiciary in the United Kingdom. Democratic societies from the
outset put heavy stress on the preservation of mechanisms for ensuring ‘checks
and balances’ in the accumulation and management of power, including a ‘free’
media – i.e., a media which is institutionally independent of the state on the
one hand, and corporate and other power elites on the other. The importance
of a free media underpins the reverence with which the first amendment to
the US constitution is held, and the ferocity with which it is protected when
perceived to be under threat.
So journalists in a democracy must, if they are doing their jobs properly,
inform the people about what power is doing in their name, or to them, or to
others on their behalf. Journalists must watch over power, then, and sound
the alarm when fault is found. Journalistic scrutiny becomes at an early stage
in liberal capitalism’s development a central element in the self-regulation
of democracy; the main means by which dysfunction in the workings of the
system, or structural flaws in the system itself, can be identified, publicly
debated, and rectified. The news media in this regard form a self-reflective,
‘autopoetic’ system, to use Luhmann’s phrase in The Reality of the Mass Media
(2000), permitting abuses and corruptions of power to be exposed and debated,
correcting for errors.
Journalists are the communicative heart of what Habermas called the public
sphere (1989), notionally independent from party and furnishing citizens with
the information required to make sound decisions about who shall govern
them and how, and also providing the space for that information to be properly
considered, debated, contradicted, tested. The role of the journalist in a
functioning public sphere is to exercise critical scrutiny over the actions of
the powerful, the members of those elites whose activities impact on the life
of a society and its citizens. Authoritarian societies past and present have no
comparable conception of the journalist as watchdog, or scrutineer of power.
In such societies, and regardless of whether the authority to exercise power is
derived from some notion of divine right, or the nominally secular appeal to
class, the critical journalist is perceived as a threat to power and treated accord-
ingly.
For the five centuries and more which have elapsed since Gutenberg’s
invention of movable type, journalists have been imprisoned, exiled, executed
and assassinated by those who feel their power to be at risk from what they
write. Journalists remain at risk in those countries in which the need for a
public sphere, and for the critical, scrutinising journalism required to make it a
meaningful democratic mechanism, are not accepted by ruling elites. In Russia,
for example, recent years have seen the deaths of a number of journalists,
including the death by radiation poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the
execution of Anna Politovskaya.
wdogs 59
WATcHDoGS In THE movIES
Given the central importance of the watchdog role to the mythology of liberal
journalism, it is perhaps unsurprising that films with this theme at their heart
tend to be taken with great seriousness by the critical community. They can
also be viewed as core teaching texts of liberal democratic ideology, promoting,
warning their audiences, in popular cultural idiom, why this kind of journalism
is and should be important to them, how and why it is threatened, and why
it must be defended. They contain, if in a manner shaped by the subjective,
creative and imaginative powers of their producers, a society’s reflections on
its democratic health and fitness, and the role which journalistic media have
played. If cinema is a medium where dreams are manufactured and legends
forged, and in which film-makers articulate and enact their society’s central
myths for popular consumption, films about journalistic watchdogs have been
among the highest profile productions.
Watchdog movies often come with their status as ‘events’ clearly signalled.
They tend to involve big budgets, A-list stars with reputations for seriousness
and commitment to causes, and are accompanied by extensive debate in the
public sphere, inspired by their arrival. The three films discussed in this
chapter – All the President’s Men, The Insider and Good Night, and Good Luck
– each travelled with this baggage, marketed and reviewed as statements about
something bigger than Hollywood celebrity, and more important than mere
entertainment. They were mainstream films, all three, and played in multi-
plexes as star vehicles, but they also had the status of what are sometimes called
‘issue movies’, where it is acknowledged in critical discourse round the film
that it is ‘about’ something of relevance to political life and public debate.
movies about watchdogs are always concerned with the encounter between
journalism – the fourth estate – and power, an encounter usually staged on the
terrain of investigative journalism, that sphere of journalistic work focused on
the discovery and exposure of information which some would rather remained
secret. Watchdog movies are premised on the notion that information is itself
a form of power, and a weapon to be wielded in its pursuit and preservation.
Watchdog movies are about the struggle which takes place around information,
and the crucial role of the journalist in that struggle.
They are often ‘true’ stories, based on actual events. In All the President’s
Men the power under investigation, being watched over, is of the very highest
order – the executive, the President in the White House, the most powerful
person in the most powerful country on earth. There could be no purer
demonstration of the watchdog role in action than this true tale of how two
Washington Post staff reporters pursued an investigation which would lead,
in the end, to the downfall of a two-term landslide president in time of war
(the vietnam war was still going on when the Watergate break-in and subse-
quent investigation by Woodward and Bernstein occurred). The power being

watched over in michael mann’s The Insider is, by contrast, corporate – the
power of big business, Big Tobacco in particular – in the wealthiest country
on earth. The Insider is about watching over the financial power of capitalism.
Good Night, and Good Luck, thirdly, is about watching over the media itself, and
those working in it who would lend their status and influence to the communi-
cation of fear, anxiety and panic. clooney’s film, set at the height of the cold
War of the 1950s, is really about the war on terror of the 2000s and the role
of at least some journalists in colluding with or contributing to the climate of
paranoia which characterised those years.
ALL The PResIdeNT’s MeN
What Bonnie Brennen calls an ur-text of journalism movies, and probably

the best known example of a film in which the journalist is represented as a
positive figure watching over American democracy, is All the President’s Men
(Alan J. Pakula, 1976).2 This film adaptation of the book by the reporters who
pursued the story of the Watergate break-in and contributed substantially to
Richard nixon’s resignation in 1974 has become the leading example not just
of cinema’s portrayal of journalists-as-heroes, but of what the watchdog role of
journalism is all about.
Bob Woodward and carl Bernstein were relative novices at the Post and
pursued their investigation against the resistance of sources, the scepticism of
editors, the dismissals of professional peers, and the opposition of the politi-
cians who stood to lose from this story of corruption and abuse of office. They
persevered, as is well known to every student of journalism, and their story
has come to exemplify the positive ideal of American journalism, and of liberal
journalism in general – the fourth estate’s finest hour.
The film adopts a spare, semi-documentary approach to telling a story
which had, even by 1976, become mythical. The opening scene eavesdrops
on the Watergate burglars as they attempt to bug the offices of the national
Democratic committee in 1971, only to get caught in the act. Then it moves
to the newsroom of the Washington Post, a working environment of stark white
light, noisily clacking typewriters, desks covered in papers and documents.
The authenticity of this location is one of the film’s most admired features,
and still used in many journalism classes today as a guide to what news rooms
looked like in the days before computers, mobile phones and the internet.
Big, chunky phones ring noisily and incessantly, staff wander around in the
background, convening meetings and conversations, while Bernstein smokes
everywhere, even in the elevator (although Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of
a smoker is perhaps the least convincing aspect of the film – he looks like a
teenager trying to smoke so that he can be one of the big boys, and finding the
experience rather more unpleasant than he bargained for).
From this point on the film gives an account of how an apparently minor
crime story – a hotel break-in – builds into the biggest political scandal the
United States had ever seen. Hoffman and Robert Redford (Bob Woodward)
spend most of their time on screen laboriously putting together the pieces of a
jigsaw – ‘a puzzle’, Woodward says in desperation to a source at one point – from
snippets of information and small irregularities which gradually accumulate to
hint at a cover-up of political corruption. ‘They’re hungry’, says their editor in
justification of their doggedness to pursue this story despite opposition. And
determined. The film is a straightforwardly linear narrative of how an investi-
gative story is conducted, a master class in journalistic technique.
Each scene moves the viewer on to another piece of the jigsaw, like a police
procedural. The journalists are like detectives, taking evidence, checking and
double-checking their sources, comparing notes, building up their case. And
as every maverick detective has his sceptical boss who presents a well-meaning
but misguided obstacle to the progress of an investigation, so Woodward and
Bernstein have to fight against the doubts of their editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee
(Jason Robards), their more senior colleagues on the political desk (who resent
that these young upstarts have a head start on this most political of news
stories), and other news media. In the end, of course, they triumph, though we
do not get to see the moment of their victory. As the film ends in 1972, before
the re-election of nixon for a second term, Woodward and Bernstein have been
given the backing of Bradlee to pursue the investigation to its conclusion, and
we see them working at their desks in the news room, battering away on their
typewriters as a Tv screen shows actual news footage of nixon’s campaign
victory. The closing scene shows only a news wire churning out the headlines
of subsequent months and years – the beginning of the Watergate hearings;
the first convictions; nixon’s denials; nixon’s resignation. credits rolling on
a black screen.
The casting of Redford and Hoffman lends the film Hollywood glamour (both
were huge stars in the 1970s), but a minimalist tone is maintained throughout.
There is no musical soundtrack to add atmosphere, and no back story for the
two journalists. We know only that Woodward has been on the paper for just
nine months, while Bernstein has sixteen months ‘in the business’. We see
nothing of their private lives, except one interior of Woodward’s apartment.
As in Good Night, and Good Luck the story of journalists doing their job,
determinedly and professionally, is judged to be enough to carry the movie.
The Watergate investigation was so important, Pakula seems to be saying,
that character development and emotional depth would be distracting. Let’s
just see how it happened, interview by interview, telephone call by telephone
call. It is even less embroidered than clooney’s film, which despite its super-
ficial simplicity works hard with monochrome cinematography and artfully lit
cigarette smoke to evoke its 1950s ambience. All the President’s Men is as close
to documentary in feel and structure as it is possible to imagine in a mainstream
production starring two of Hollywood’s most eligible leading men.
The story, of course, is important enough to carry this narrative strategy,
and the two lead actors convincingly portray two very different personalities
who come together to make a good team. more than three decades later the
film retains its relevance and aesthetic power, and is recognised as a showcase
for what is considered exemplary in liberal journalism – a re-enactment, or
master class in the practice of investigation which is still used on journalism
programmes to illustrate how it should be done. For Financial Times editor
Lionel Barber, who worked on the Washington Post in the 1980s, the film
documents and also celebrates an era of print journalism which is now disap-
pearing due to financial and technological pressures, but should be remem-
bered as a time when ‘reporters were given days, often weeks, to research
stories. The editing process was exhausting: copy passed through at least four
pairs of hands’.3
All the President’s Men depicts the progression of a story from initial hunch
to publication in all its drudgery, the tedium and repetition of its narrative
progression justified only by the audience’s knowledge that, in the end, it was
precisely this slow, methodical, unglamorous rigour which allowed the story
to survive the political and corporate pressures to drop or bury it. The film’s
message is profoundly opposed to the view of journalism as a glamorous,
exciting business, showing instead that the path to uncovering an important
truth is long and difficult, and that short cuts are inadmissible. Bob Woodward
looks like Robert Redford, and that is a Hollywoodisation of the facts, yes,
but even Robert Redford, if he wants to write a story accusing a newly elected
White House administration of corruption, has, in the time before googling
became the preferred method of doing journalistic research, to spend hundreds
of hours checking library records, invoices, and other documents. In the days
before mobile phones and faxes, carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman)
has to get on a plane and fly five hours south to check some obscure invoices
which will later turn out to have a key role in piecing together the story. From
such drudgery, we see, the epochal exposé of a White House cover-up emerges.
All the President’s Men, then, has come to be regarded as a ‘how-to’ movie
by journalists and educators alike – a two-hour long tutorial in the principles
and practice of investigative journalism, where the quiet tenacity of the central
characters serves only to highlight how shocking and dramatic is the corruption
they have exposed at the heart of American government. The journalists, we
see, are not in the least political in the performance of their professional duties,
and would pursue their story in exactly the same way were it a Democrat in
the oval office. The investigation is conducted by the book with scrupulous
Figure 10 All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976). Source BFI
observance of such rules as ‘double sourcing’ (nothing can be printed that has
not been confirmed by at least one reliable source). There is no ‘whodunnit’
quality to the story, since there can be no doubt as to who the culprits were –
just a relentless pursuit of the facts of the case, upon which others will in due
course act. The film ends with snippets from congressional and other hearings
which took place after the main action of the movie is concluded, as if to say,
the watchdogs have done their work, now the forces of law and order will make
their judgment.
THE LEGAcy oF ALL The PResIdeNT’s MeN
For many observers the lasting legacy of the film’s simple message and under-
stated seriousness is the importance of investigative journalism in democratic
societies, at a time when competitive pressures and financial constraints are
reducing the amount of editorial resource devoted to the specialism. Journalism
scholars and practitioners alike have been critical of what they argue to be
the weakening of investigative journalism in media organisations. This most
expensive of journalistic endeavours (because of the time and person power
required to pursue it effectively, as depicted in Pakula’s film) is in serious
decline, goes the argument. The continuing value of All the President’s Men
lies, for many commentators, in the importance it allots to properly resourced,
editorially supported investigation, especially when the trail leads right to

the top.4 In october 2008 a Financial Times article (penned by editor Lionel
Barber) about the state of contemporary journalism in the US and the UK was
illustrated with a still from All the President’s Men, showing Robert Redford
addressing Dustin Hoffman in the Washington Post newsroom as they go about
their investigation.5 For Barber, as for many others, the film continues to
symbolise journalistic excellence with its portrayal of how the fourth estate can
change things for the better.
not all observers are so gushing in their praise, however. michael Schudson
challenges the myth of Watergate, as he characterises it:
That two young Washington Post reporters brought down the President
of the United States. This is a myth of David and Goliath, of powerless
individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might. It is high
noon in Washington, with two white-hatted young reporters at one end
of the street and the black-hatted President at the other, protected by his
minions. And the good guys win. The press, truth its only weapon, saves
the day. (1995: 143)
Schudson is not the only one to have questioned the myth of Watergate as
presented in All the President’s Men. nor is he wrong to point out the simpli-
fications, exaggerations and distortions made inevitable by the translation of
the facts into cinematic form. Richard nixon was brought down by legislative
oversight of his administration’s actions, assisted and encouraged but not
entirely caused by journalistic revelations (although who can say what would
have happened in the absence of the kind of critical scrutiny of nixon’s ‘dirty
tricks’ operation initiated by Woodward and Bernstein, and supported, as the
film shows, by editor Bradlee?).
Schudson also argues that the myth of the Watergate investigation is at
least partly responsible for the steadily more intrusive political journalism of
the post-nixon era, a journalism which achieved its greatest ‘success’ with
the humiliation of Bill clinton in 1998–9 (and which occurred after the above
article was written). Lionel Barber, meanwhile, attributes to All the President’s
Men (the book and the film) the unwelcome rise of ‘celebrity’ journalism.
FRom WATERGATE To monIcA-GATE, AnD THE cRISIS

oF InvESTIGATIvE JoURnALISm
In considering these qualifications to what is a revered film we should concede,

first, that no film about anything, based on true events or not, ever did anything
other than exaggerate, distort, misrepresent and manipulate the ‘facts’ of the
case to suit the storytelling demands of the cinematic medium. This obser-
vation is not intended as a criticism, but a recognition that ‘realism’ in cinema
can only ever be a relative term, an aspiration, and that to expect any film
account of actual events to be ‘true’ to real life in any absolute or objective
sense is naïve. The subjectivity of the choices made by writers, directors,
editors, actors, cinematographers and the rest of the many people involved in
making a film renders it an impression, an interpretation, an account, which at
best will capture some essential element of the reality being represented, but
never the full richness and complexity of a story, or anything like it. Despite
its considerable length and attention to detail, its quasi-documentary style and
its patient, low-key progress to a deliberately anti-climactic conclusion, All
the President’s Men is no less a construction than the book by Woodward and
Bernstein on which it is based, or the many other movies which have been made
about fictional scandals and cover-ups. It is shaped by personal subjectivity,
compromises made in the production process, the storytelling techniques
required to make a narrative feature film acceptable to the audience on whom
its commercial success depends.
I make these points, to repeat, not to criticise what is by near universal
consent an excellent piece of film-making as deserving of its ‘classic’ status as
any of the films discussed in this book, but to downgrade expectations of what
such a text can achieve. All the President’s Men is an adaptation of one, inevi-
tably slanted account of a sequence of events which could be narrated from
many other perspectives, and not necessarily in such glamorous terms. The
film is far from being a crowd pleaser in its style, but the involvement of two of
America’s leading male stars – Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman – as the
reporters places it firmly in the realm of Hollywood fantasy. For Lionel Barber
this A-list casting has had unfortunate ramifications.
In retrospect, the Watergate scandal was a curse as well as a blessing for

US journalism. All the President’s Men made celebrity a goal to which
many journalists now aspire.6
Redford and Hoffman were sex symbols. one could argue that this was an
asset for the film, in so far as it gave a complex and difficult story a recog-
nisably human face to the millions of people who were encouraged by their
involvement to go and see it in cinemas. It may not have had the same impact
as a cultural event without these actors. moreover, the sincerity of the two
lead actors, and their interest in the exploration of journalism in their work,
cannot be in question given their later and frequent involvement in films
about journalism (Redford directed and starred in Lions For Lambs (2007), for
example; Hoffmann was a Tv journalist in costa-Gavras’ Mad City (1997),
and a victim of tabloid frenzy in Accidental hero (Stephen Frears, 1992).
Barber’s more serious point is that All the President’s Men launched a trend
towards what he calls ‘celebrity journalism’ – the notion of the journalist-as-
star, more famous and self-important (perhaps) than the subjects of his or her
coverage. This is unfair, it seems to me. Was there ever a time in the history
of journalism when its practitioners did not seek celebrity? Were Walter
Winchell and Louella Parsons in the 1930s and 1940s not famous and admired
(or loathed)? Ed murrow and Walter cronkite in the 1950s and 1960s?
The portrayal of the character of J. J. Hunsecker in sweet smell of success,
modelled on Winchell, shows that the celebrity of some journalists and the
abuses to which it might be put was an issue even in the 1950s, long before
Redford and Hoffman became the glamorous personification of Woodward
and Bernstein.
We might revise Barber’s point to say that Pakula’s film, and the sexiness of
the lead performances at its heart, made journalists in the US and elsewhere
aspire to be famous for being good journalists, and for bringing corrupt power
to heel as Woodward and Bernstein so dramatically did. And if that is true, then
good. The film undoubtedly created a myth, from the movie-star casting of its
reporters to the suggestion made in the script that investigative journalism
was the principal, if not only cause of the scandal and its outcome. But it is a
functional myth, with a progressive, pro-democratic meaning, which if it has
inspired real journalists to attempt to follow in Woodward’s and Bernstein’s
footsteps need not be regretted. young journalists, like other categories of
professional, need role models, and this is what All the President’s Men provided
like no other work of popular cinema before or since.
FRom WATERGATE To monIcA-GATE
What of Schudson’s suggestion that there is a line of development from the

normatively approved scrutiny depicted in All the President’s Men to the less
welcome, because personally intrusive style of watchdog journalism seen in the
clinton-Lewinsky scandal, for example? Schudson’s essay on ‘Watergate and
the Press’ appears in a 1995 publication, before the Lewinsky scandal but after
Bill clinton’s ascendancy to the presidency. As such, he may be considered
prescient in noting that a particularly intrusive style of political reporting
had become more prevalent in western journalism, and was soon to become
much more so. We had, after all, never seen anything like the voyeuristic frenzy
of 1998–9.7 It is simplistic, however, to link this trend to the success of the
Watergate investigation, or to its representation in film. The significance of
Watergate was not in creating a vogue for political scandal, which is in itself
nothing new, but in proving that the watchdog role of the journalist could have
a truly cleansing impact on the highest levels of the executive government of
the most powerful country on earth. That this role was then extended to the
private lives of politicians cannot be attributed to Woodward and Bernstein,
nor should it be dismissed, as it so often is by scholars, as a degeneration of
the function.
The rise of intrusive political journalism can be viewed as part of the
broader decline in social deference which has characterised western societies
since, roughly speaking, the 1950s. In the 1960s in the US this trend had
not progressed so far as to threaten exposure of President Kennedy’s serial
womanising in and around the White House (Hersh 1997). In Britain, as late
as the 1990s, politicians were largely sheltered from intrusive coverage of
their private lives, unless they were implicated in criminal acts. In France this
remained true until the ascendacy of nicola Sarkozy and his much reported
romance of and marriage to carla Bruni.8 Politicians in all democratic countries
had alcohol and substance abuse problems, affairs, debts and much else, without
it ever becoming public knowledge through media coverage. Journalists, like
their audiences, largely accepted that these aspects of political life were, unless
directly impacting on public duties, out of bounds. That changed in the 1990s,
as politics and celebrity became more entwined on the one hand, and on
the other, the lines between public and private affairs dissolved in celebrity
journalism (see the scandals afflicting Silvio Berlusconi in 2009).9
Where some view this as an unfortunate trend, because of its coarsening of
the public sphere (and there has been that at times, for sure), I and others have
greeted it as a positive expression of what journalistic scrunity can mean in a
mass democracy.10 Take, for example, the case of charles and Diana, whose
marriage and (as it turned out) highly dysfunctional lives were exposed to
public scrutiny in the 1990s, fuelled by interviews given by Diana to writer
Andrew morton and celebrity Tv interviewer Bashir mann. In a country
where a substantial proportion of the public still believed in the 1950s in the
divine right of kings, the knowledge that aristocrats were fallible human beings
with marriage problems, eating disorders and personality flaws like the rest
of us was liberating. Henceforth, the monarch’s claims to exercise power and
authority in the UK were subject to a degree of questioning which must be
considered healthy by all democrats.
The excesses of celebrity journalism, and the extent to which political
journalism blurs the public/private line and crosses into the zone of prurient
voyeurism, can certainly be criticised on ethical grounds. The politician who
does not make ‘family values’ or ‘personal morality’ the foundation of his or
her identity should not be attacked in the media for behaviour which some may
question or even find offensive. He or she who does – new york state governor
Elliot Spitzer, for example – may reasonably expect to be vilified if found in
breach of those values. Where extremes do occur, they are less the consequence
of what Woodward and Bernstein achieved more than three decades ago and
much more to do with a media marketplace which has become steadily more
competitive over the years, and which is stoked into frenzied speculation by
the activities of public relations professionals, or spin doctors working in the
political sphere. Rod Lurie’s rarely seen and under-rated 2000 film based on
precisely this premise, The Contender, has a conservative congressman played
by Gary oldman manufacture a sex scandal in order to prevent a woman (Joan
Allen) being nominated as vice-president.
In addition to the factors of media competitiveness and political manipula-
tiveness, the availability of live, networked, always-on, globalised media means
that any scandal quickly becomes news, from where it can go on to become a
full blown crisis. The evolution of journalism’s watchdog role, its intrusion
into the private lives of elites, may on occasion mean an excess of voyeuristic
spectacle. That, however, is the price of an unprecedentedly combative and
adversarial journalism, and one which we would as citizens come to regret
losing were it closed down.
Good NIGhT, ANd Good LuCk
Three decades and six presidents on from the events depicted in All the
President’s Men, Good Night, and Good Luck was released. Like its illustrious
predecessor, George clooney’s second film as director was favourably
received by both critics and audiences as a well crafted study of the best of US
journalism (the film took $31.5 million at the US box office, and was nominated
for six oscars in 2006, athough it won none). Released in the United States
in 2005, the display of best practice on screen was this time read not as a self-
congratulatory master class in how to perform the watchdog function, but
as a critical comment on the current performance of the US news media in
relation to the ‘war on terror’ and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Where Pakula’s
film is the unadorned re-enactment of an honourable episode in the history
of American journalism, Good Night, and Good Luck is a psychological drama
about the journalistic confrontation with right wing populism, and how that
confrontation is negotiated in the face of corporate pressure to kowtow.
Reviewing Good Night, and Good Luck on its release, Philip Kemp described
it as a film which ‘celebrates a hero – a principled journalist who took a stand
against a malignant demagogue and helped bring him down’.11 For Geoffrey
mcnab, the film is also ‘a celebration of professionalism’ which ‘evokes a lost
era of journalism, long before the excesses of Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and
Fox news besmirched the reputation of the US media’.12 The inclusion of Fox
news in this triad of journalistic villains refers to the fact that it is the overtly
partisan, frequently jingoistic style of news corp’s US Tv news channel
which most observers read as the target of clooney’s film.
Where murrow and his colleagues are seen to stand up for what they believe
to be truth and objectivity in their treatment of the Radulovich story, at consid-
erable risk to themselves (and one of their team is dead by the end of the film,
having killed himself because of negative press coverage), Fox news has been
widely criticised inside and out of the US for its blatantly biased treatment of
the war on terror and its related conflicts. And indeed, to any observer of Fox
more used to the studied impartiality of Tv news as practised by the BBc and
the US terrestrial networks, the style of the channel’s coverage seems more
akin to the tabloid and red-top newspapers owned by news corp in the US
and the UK. Fox news presenters such as Bill o’Reilly make little effort to
hide their ideological and political preferences, and during the invasion and
occupation of Iraq seemed to view themselves as war-time propagandists rather
than objective reporters, far less watchdogs over executive power in the White
House. This writer recalls watching Fox news on a 2004 visit to the USA, at
the time when the Abu Ghraib scandal was dominating the news agenda there
and elsewhere, and being startled to hear the atrocious human rights abuses
inflicted by US soldiers on their Iraqi charges as ‘wrong doing by our boys’
and other, equally anodyne phrases. Likewise, those who dared to criticise
aspects of US policy in the middle East, or in relation to the detention camp
at Guantanamo were regularly pilloried by Fox news as unpatriotic traitors to
the cause of freedom and democracy. In marked contrast to the style of Sky
news in the UK, which has always sought to compete with the BBc and ITn
Figure 11 Good Night, and Good Luck (George clooney, 2005). Source: BFL
(the two providers of British public service broadcast journalism) on quality

and ethical grounds, Fox routinely banged the drum for the Bush adminis-
tration, right or wrong, and railed against its critics, justified or not.
The power over which journalists watch in Good Night … is not that of the
president, nor of corporate interests as in The Insider, but the power of fear
when it is used as a weapon, manipulated and exploited to justify the erosion
of civil liberties. In so far as big US business is seen here to exert pressure
on the cBS journalists (pressure which is in the end successfully resisted),
we are clear that the real enemy of freedom and democracy is Senator Joe
mccarthy, the figure head of the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.
The film depicts an era in the United States when even big firms such as Alcoa
were afraid of taking on mccarthy and his supporters, and risking their anger.
The drama of the Radulovich case may have been sufficient to propel the film
on its own, but against the background of director and star clooney’s known
views on the war on terror it was widely read as a reference to, and commentary
on the US media’s collusion with the climate of fear stoked up by the Bush
administration post-9/11. If there is a specific target of the script (which
clooney co-wrote), it is the Fox news presenters o’Reilly and Hannity.
As with All the President’s Men, there were some dissenters from the generally
positive reception enjoyed by clooney’s film. Jeff Jarvis refers to murrow in
a column written at the time as ‘a god of American journalism’. Good Night,
and Good Luck ‘conjures up murrow’s ghost just as America’s scandal-scarred
and budget-bruised journalistic institutions are taking on the mood of haunted
houses’. Jarvis, however, questions the reverence extended to murrow and his
generation, representing as they do, in his view, ‘a half-century of journalistic
haughtiness, self-importance and separation from the public’.13 That seems
ungenerous, if only because murrow’s was the preferred mode of journalistic
performance and delivery in those days. Irrespective of its elitist and patrician
style as seen from the era of Jon Stewart or michael moore, his authority and
‘haughtiness’ was crucial to puncturing the mccarthy bubble and ending an
unfortunate period in American political history.
The INsIdeR
one of the most serious health issues for a democracy is the corporate pressure
which exists on journalistic watchdogs to turn their gaze away from corruption
and wrongdoing. Good Night, and Good Luck treats this problem with reference
to the influence of advertiser Alcoa on cBS current affairs show see It Now,
where producer Fred Friendly must confront his executives on the importance
of not giving in (Alcoa did not wish to be seen to support cBS coverage of
the Radulovich story through its advertising because it was a major military
contractor, and risked losing business). corporate pressure on journalistic

watchdogs is the theme of another much praised film based on actual events,
michael mann’s The Insider (1999).
Adapted from a Vanity Fair article by marie Brenner,14 the film attracted
seven oscar nominations, and just over $29 million at the US box office.
Starring Russell crowe as tobacco company whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, it
tells the story of the efforts of cBS current affairs producer Lowell Bergman
(Al Pacino) to get Wigand’s explosive revelations into the public domain.
Pacino plays what reviewer nick James described as ‘a tenacious figure who
lives and breathes that near-mythical force for good: journalistic integrity’.15
This integrity is established in an opening segment where Bergman travels
to the middle East to interview a muslim cleric with affiliations to a terrorist
organisation. The sheikh’s representatives demand prior approval of the
questions which cBS will put to him. Producer Lowell Bergman, hooded
and blindfolded, refuses: ‘you’ve seen 60 Minutes. you’ve seen mike Wallace
(the programme presenter), so you know our reputation for objectivity and
integrity.’ And he gets his way. The interview is set up, senior presenter mike
Wallace gets to ask his questions the way he wants to, as gun-toting, leather-
jacketed Arab fighters stand by. viewed in a post-9/11 environment, this is a
poignant reminder of how things were in an earlier, more rule-governed age.
As the fate of Daniel Pearl would show (see chapter 6) the days when a US
media crew could travel to the middle East and make demands of islamic
fundamentalist fighters on the basis of appeals to journalistic ‘objectivity’ and
‘integrity’ would soon be over.
Bergman stumbles onto Wigand’s desire to blow the whistle on Big Tobacco
by accident, setting off a chain of events in which the producer first has to
persuade the whistle-blower to go on the record with his allegations, then
persuade his bosses and cBS executives to permit the resulting programme
to be transmitted. He succeeds in the first objective, but fails in the second, as
cBS corporate interests begin to conflict with those of the journalists.
mann’s film differs from those of Pakula and clooney in that it addresses
not only the ethical violations of a powerful sector of the American elite but the
ethics of a journalist who, like the lawyers seeking Wigand’s public deposition
in the pursuit of their claims against Big Tobacco, put their own definition
of the public interest above the private needs of their whistle blower. Both
Bergman and the lawyers insist that it is Wigand’s choice, and responsibility,
whether or not he testifies, but they make it very difficult for him to resist their
appeals and at the same time preserve any sense of personal honour.
Bergman’s ethical dilemma arises when his source is left abandoned by
corporate interests. As he puts it to mike Wallace when explaining his decision
to resign as 60 Minutes producer, no source will ever believe his promises
again. His integrity as an investigative journalist is fatally and permanently
Figure 12 The Insider (michael mann, 1999)
destroyed. And while the script is critical of the cowardice and self-interest of
cBS in the face of Big Tobacco, the film also asks the important question – is
any story worth the potential destruction of a news organisation like cBS (the
same dilemma arises in Good Night, and Good Luck)?
Unlike All the President’s Men, The Insider is a psychological drama bearing
all the stylistic flourishes of a michael mann movie. Ethical dilemmas
are personalised and we see the human cost of applying liberal journalistic
principles in situations where powerful interests are under attack. These are
men with families and private lives, unlike Woodward and Bernstein in Pakula’s
film (or murrow and Friendly in Good Night, and Good Luck for that matter).
Despite a number of speeches about the ethics of investigative journalism
and references to ‘the legacy of Edward R. murrow’, this is not a procedural
quasi-documentary but a thriller. no one gets killed in The Insider, and as
with All the President’s Men we know the ending before the film starts, but
the tension builds as courage leads to betrayal, and betrayal leads back to the
courage of Bergman in effectively giving away his ‘scoop’ to the competition.
By doing so, he fulfils his obligation to Wigand, and forces the broadcast of the
damaging allegations, but destroys his own career at cBS. At the conclusion
of The Insider, then, the whistle-blower can claim a victory of sorts, and claims
amounting to billions of dollars in compensation were subsequently lodged
against the tobacco companies. The personal cost to Wigand was enormous,
however, as it was to Bergman.
In Good Night, and Good Luck Ed murrow and his team emerge triumphant
from their tussle with corporate interests, and get to report their story more
or less as they would wish. The script sheds light on some of their own profes-
sional deficiencies, but in the end it is Senator mccarthy who goes down. The
Insider, on the other hand, is the story of how US corporate interests – the
big tobacco companies in particular – successfully smothered an attempt by
journalist Lowell Bergman to expose the research evidence that the risks of
cancer caused by smoking had been known about by the companies for many
years. In terms of cinema’s myth-making function, The Insider is an articu-
lation of the normative values of investigative journalism, and a critique of the
performance of these, both by the media (cBS’s concern with profit) and big
business power (their attempt to stifle Wigand). The Insider thus emerges as
a film principally about the tensions between news and business, or between
the role of journalism as watchdog over power (corporate power, in this case),
and the function of journalism as commodity in the infotainment sector of the
media. The last act is peppered with exchanges between Bergman and Wallace,
Bergman and the cBS corporate lawyer, Begman and the cBS senior executive
officer, about which takes precedence – cBS corporate, or cBS news. As
the company lawyers intervene to have the Wigand interview removed from
the story that will go out, Bergman asks in exasperation: ‘Since when has the
paragon of investigative journalism allowed lawyers to determine the content
of 60 Minutes?’ Reviewer mark Kermode observed that:
one is tempted to compare it to All the President’s Men, but that hardly
does service to The Insider’s brash effrontery. After all, everyone knew
that nixon was corrupt and had resigned by the time Alan Pakula’s
movie hit the screens. He was, therefore, a sitting duck, while mann’s
target (the tobacco corporations) is still powerful and on the move.16
concLUSIon
The three films discussed in this chapter are widely regarded as among the best
ever made about journalism. All were critically and commercially successful,
engaging some of the most high-powered writers, directors and actors working
in mainstream cinema. The seriousness with which they were made, and the
resources poured into them, allow us to say with some confidence that the
heroic status of the journalist as watchdog is genuinely valued, and that threats
to that status continue to be viewed with dismay and suspicion. In these films,
as in few others, the scrutinising, watchdog function of journalism is placed at
the very heart of democratic societies, its performance itself scrutinised and
evaluated. If, as we have seen, it might be argued that All the President’s Men is
a somewhat idealised account of the Woodward-Bernstein investigation, or that

Good Night, and Good Luck overstates the supience of the US media towards
the Bush administration – it was released, after all, in the year after michael
moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 beat spider-Man II at the US box office – that such
films have been made at all, and have been received with such appreciation
by audiences all over the world, is a cause for modest celebration of the civic
potential of popular cinema. Each of these films was made on the premise of a
shared social consensus – the belief that independent, courageous, critical and
well-resourced journalism matters in modern democracies. Today’s student
journalists could do worse than watch these movies for sound instruction on
how to perform their watchdog role.
noTES
1. The early history of journalism in England is explored in Raymond Joad’s The Invention of
the Newspaper (1996). martin conboy’s Journalism: a critical history (2004) is also recom-
mended for further reading. Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media (2004) tells the story of
the origins of US journalistic traditions in the struggle for independence.
2. She defines the ‘ur-text’ as ‘a seminal text that illustrates a specific structure of feeling
regarding the construction of contemporary journalistic practices’ (Brennen 1998: 115).
3. Barber, L., ‘Why journalism wins my vote’, Financial Times, 11/12 october 2008 (http://
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35dadeac-9662-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html).
4. For a recent collection of scholarly and practitioner essays on the history and contemporary
practice of inestigative journalism see De Burgh (ed.) (2008).
5. Barber, L., ‘Why journalism wins my vote’, Financial Times, 11/12 october 2008 (http://
www.ft.com/cms/s/0/35dadeac-9662-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html).
6. Idem.
7. For a discussion of the cultural significance of monica-gate see mcnair (2002).
8. In 2005 the nicolas Sarkozy and his first wife, cecilie, broke the mould in French political
journalism when they were reported in the context of an alleged affair she was having. Paris
Match’s unprecedented front-page coverage of the story that summer changed French
political culture forever, bringing it into line with patterns already established in the United
States and Britain. For a journalistic account of this episode, see mcnair, B., ‘Revealed (at
last): French politics is a hotbed of sexual scandal’, sunday herald, 28 August 2005.
9. For a recent study of the relationship between politics, media and celebrity, see michael
Higgins’ Media and Their Publics (2008).
10. See, for example, my Journalism and democracy (2000), and catharine Lumby’s Gotcha: life
in a tabloid world (1999).
11. Kemp, P., sight & sound, volume 16, number 3, 2006.
12. sight & sound, volume 15, number 11, 2005.
13. Jarvis, J., ‘Good night to murrow’s legacy of power’, Guardian, 24 october 2005.
14. Brenner, m., ‘The man who knew too much’, Vanity Fair, may 1996.
15. James, n., ‘no smoking gun’, sight & sound, volume 10, number 3, 2000.
16. sight & sound, volume 10, number 3, 2000.
 6
Witnesses
C oming a close second to the watchdog in the hierarchy of cinematic

heroism is the representation of the journalist as witness to events, a
term which can be viewed as merely descriptive – the journalist monitors and
surveys the environment, and thus inevitably witnesses events happening – or
as a more symbolic statement of social function, connoting a particular kind of
integrity and trustworthiness.
To ‘bear witness’ is not just to see, but to provide evidence that something
has happened, to testify on events in a way that carries conviction and credi-
bility, because of the status of the witness, the scrutiny to which that testimony
has been subjected, and the circumstances within which it is delivered.
Witnesses testify in court, to judges and juries. Friends and family members
bear witness that a couple have been legally married, or divorced, or that a
child has been baptised in a particular religious denomination. Journalists
testify to the court of public opinion that such-and-such has occurred in the
world, furnishing the information, or evidence, upon which publics and their
representatives go on to act. To act as a witness is not to judge the rights and
wrongs of events – judgement is usually excluded from the practice of objec-
tivity, although journalists bearing witness to some recent conflicts have, as we
shall see, challenged this presumption – or to pronounce guilt on the various
actors involved in a given situation, but to assist in the process of establishing
if indeed a crime (legal or moral) has been committed, after which sanctions
and punishments may well be forthcoming.1
The role of witness is in the first place purely functional, then, but because
information is a weapon the bearer of new information – the witness – becomes
also a player in the power games which underpin events. The witness, like the
watchdog, may be in possession of information which can threaten others.
Some witnesses in some court cases require police protection, because their
testimony threatens the powerful, be it a local gangster or a big corporation
(Jeffrey Wigand in The Insider, for example). So too the journalist, in his or
her capacity as witness, risks the wrath of the powerful as well as those, be
they powerful or not, who stand to be damaged by the information which the
witness brings to the public domain. In these circumstances the witness is often
required to show extraordinary courage, to be heroic, to resist the pressure not
to testify.
All journalists are potentially witnesses, in this sense. The investigative
journalists of the previous chapter were positioned as witnesses in what were, in
effect, media-initiated trials of the Nixon administration, the McCarthy witch
hunts and Big Tobacco respectively. Before they can be witnesses, however,
investigative journalists are engaged in a particular kind of practice involving
discovery and exposure of things which are hidden. There is another kind of
journalist – the reporter, or correspondent, and the foreign correspondent
in particular, and the foreign correspondent who covers wars and conflict
especially, whose status as witness is more direct and literal.
Of all the stories which foreign correspondents routinely cover, stories
of death and dying, particularly when they involve the deliberate taking of
human life must be ranked as the most important. Part of the function of the
journalist-as-witness is to alert us to things happening which we do not know
about but should do, in the hope that we will then put pressure on our govern-
ments to intervene. Of supreme significance in this context is surely conflict,
war, and the associated taking of human life – the tragic, timeless and universal
story which it falls upon the war correspondent to deliver.
This book was written at a time of war – the ‘war on terror’, the ‘clash of
civilisations’, the global jihad and the response to it. This war followed not long
after the conclusion of the wars which decimated the former Yugoslavia, which
followed in turn the Cold War, or ‘New Cold War’ of the 1980s, when the US
and its allies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other,
pursued a global conflict for ideological, economic and military domination by
proxy wars fought in central America, Africa and elsewhere. The new Cold War
followed, indeed developed out of, the uneasy peace settlement of the Second
World War, and the raising of what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain.
These conflicts, and the different technological and ideological environments
within which they were fought, have presented journalists with very different
challenges in their role as witnesses.
As ideologies dissolve and reform, and geo-strategic politics shift,
journalists have been required to shift their perspectives in turn.2 At the
same time, journalists have been required to report events overseas – to bear
witness to them – against the background of rapidly changing news-gathering
and production technologies, on the one hand, and evermore intensive news
management practices by the parties to conflict on the other. The former –
portable cameras and editing equipment, satellite communications – has
winsss 77
tended to expand the zone of journalistic operation in conflict situations,

aiding the correspondent’s work, while the latter has been the response to that
increased freedom by the relevant authorities.
The FOreIgN COrreSPONdeNT IN CINeMA
Films about war correspondents are a prominent sub-genre of journalism

movies. Journalists are usually permitted to be present in conflict zones, albeit
with conditions attached. dramas involving foreign and war correspondents
thus allow stories about war to be told – they provide a point of view on conflict,
not based on actual combat but on its observation and the attempt to translate
it into the language of news. This latter element provides a recurring theme of
movies about war journalism – the appropriate role of the journalist in conflict
situations – to be objective and detached, or subjective and committed? To
remain neutral in the matter of who is right and wrong in a given conflict, or to
take sides and declare a stance?
Bearing witness to conflict and war was one of the first ‘killer applications’
of what we now call journalism. early correspondents wrote home about diplo-
matic disputes, inter-state relations, wars and battles. This information was
crucial to governments as they sought to manage their relations with other
states, or to protect their trade interests. Correspondents became the prime
source of public information about ‘faraway places of which we know little’.
The information provided by war correspondents was particularly important,
given the high costs of waging war, and the importance of managing public
opinion in democratic states. governments in countries such as the US and
the UK have been required to win popular consent before they embark on
overseas conflicts. The level of consent extended is dependent on several
factors, not least the perception of the legitimacy of the war effort, which in
turn is largely informed by the dispatches of correspondents on the scene.
The same relationship of cause and effect applies to humanitarian crises such
as famine or drought in Africa. It was, famously, the series of heart-breaking
TV reports from refugee camps broadcast on the BBC in 1983 by Michael
Buerk which triggered the global humanitarian campaign to assist ethiopia,
including Live Aid and all that came after.
The foreign correspondent, like the investigative reporter, often puts him
or herself in danger. In conflict situations the reporter may be in the line of fire,
or close to it, risking life and limb to bear witness to the progress of the battle
or the war. This fact makes the correspondent’s role not merely important in
the democratic life of a society, but fraught with danger and rich with dramatic
potential. The correspondent is thus a glamorous, sometimes sexy figure, ripe
for cinematic treatment, and indeed literary. One of the earliest and most
famous of fictional journalistic characters is evelyn Waugh’s William Boot,

the central protagonist of his satirical novel Scoop (1938). Boot is a reluctant
foreign correspondent in Africa, believed to have been based on the late
Bill deedes, who covered Africa in the 1930s for the Daily Express. graham
greene’s Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American (1955) is a foreign corre-
spondent in Vietnam, and the subject of two films to date.3 In the most recent
of these, released not long after the September 11 attacks, Fowler is played
by Michael Caine as a cynical observer of American covert action overseas.
reading The Quiet American, as this author did for the first time in 2008, one is
struck by its resonances with the current era, and the views a journalist based
in, say, Baghdad in 2003–8, might hold about the legitimacy of US efforts to
impose its will overseas.
The role of the foreign correspondent in time of war is difficult and poten-
tially dangerous, as noted. If a country is at war, do the news media of that
country, and the individual correspondent, have a responsibility to the nation
state, which may be in mortal peril, or to the principles of objectivity and
integrity which normally govern the reporter’s work, and which also matter to
the health of the democratic state? Can the journalist be simply a reporter of
conflict, or is there a requirement to participate, and if the latter, in what ways?
ForEIgn CorrESponDEnT – The SOLdIerS OF The

PreSS
When a state is engaged in ‘total war’, as happened twice to the US and the
UK in the twentieth century, the expectation is clear: the journalist is part
of the war effort, his reportage subordinated to the needs of the state – an
unapologetic and enthusiastic propagandist. No British or American journalist
was expected (or permitted) to be objective in respect of Nazi germany in the
1939–45 conflict, and few citizens of those countries would find that surprising
or objectionable. To put it another way, objectivity was not considered to
be incompatible with willing service for the nation in the face of the fascist
threat. In Alfred hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) Joel McCrae plays
Johnny Jones, a crime reporter sent to europe on the eve of World War Two.
In typical hitchcockian manner the reporter becomes embroiled in espionage
and treason, and has to become in effect a combatant in the coming war against
nazism.
Commenting on the image of the war correspondent presented in this film,
richard Ness observes that in the decade after the screwball comedies and
their assortment of journalistic rogues he [the war correspondent] ‘provided a
new, more noble image for the screen reporter’ (1997: 241). Journalists became
the ‘soldiers of the press’ in the great war effort. In this film the reporter begins
winsss 79
Figure 13 Foreign Correspondent (Alfred hitchcock, 1940). Source: BFI
the story as a classic journalistic hero of the romantic, pre-war type – roguish,
somewhat untrustworthy, cynical, but once engaged in his quest for the truth,
a reliable and dedicated force for good. he deals only in ‘facts’, and it is this
task which enables the audience to enter into the thriller dimension of the story.
The journalist becomes a spy, a licensed investigator whose news-gathering
work becomes inseparable from the struggle against the Nazis. The journalist
is a hero, fighting against the Nazis and their appeasers.
Not all wars are so consensual as the 1939–45 conflict, of course. In most
cases, government decisions to go to war spark debate and opposition from at
least some in the public. In this context, where war is a negotiable matter of
public policy, the journalist’s objectivity must be seen to be applied in the tradi-
tional manner, without the taking of sides. Some of the most bitter disputes
between the media and political authority have arisen from a difference of view
as to how subject to the rules of objective reportage a given conflict is. during
the first gulf War of 1991, western journalists were subject to rigorous controls
on where they could go and what they could report. The consequences of the
application of these rules structure much of the narrative in david O. russell’s
Three Kings, where two female journalists use different methods to gain access
to good stories – one sleeps with george Clooney’s character Archie, the
other (reportedly inspired by Christiane Amanpour) appeals to her status as a

journalist working for a leading global news organisation.
Similar issues of access and control of media arose in relation to coverage
of the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003. The second gulf
War, launched in March 2003 by a coalition led by the US Bush adminis-
tration and the New Labour government of Tony Blair, was initially reported
in images reminiscent of 1991 – a hi-tech military campaign against a much
inferior adversary, leading to swift capitulation by the principal bad guy,
Saddam hussein. As in 1991, although to an even greater degree, war corre-
spondents were managed in such a way as to preserve the illusion of liveness
and spontaneity, while ensuring coverage consistent with Coalition military
goals. The hundreds of journalists permitted to cover the war on the ground
were required to be ‘embedded’ with active service units, and thus in practice
were obliged to see themselves as combatants, in spirit if not in deed.4
SAlvADor – The JOUrNALIST AS PrOPAgANdIST
The role of the foreign correspondent in time of conflict is potentially

controversial, then. And while those in authority have tended to be critical of
journalists for a perceived lack of patriotism, for many on the academic side of
journalism studies it has been a conservative, propagandistic role. The writings
of Noam Chomsky and ed herman, for example, implicate the mainstream
news media of the US in the propaganda effort of what they term the National
Security State, and particularly in the domestic opinion management required
by foreign policy.5 A key case cited in evidence by Chomsky and herman is the
role of the media in the wars of Central and South America which dominated
the late 1970s and 1980s. The Chomsky-herman thesis is that US policy in
el Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile and other countries in that region was driven
not, as claimed by successive US administrations, by support for democracy
and freedom, but by the need to defend US economic interests in the region,
which were perceived to be under threat from socialist and communist revolu-
tionaries backed up by the Soviet Union and Cuba. As Steven Soderbergh’s
Che shows (2009), this was not an inaccurate perception, although the scale of
poverty and inequality in Latin America may be thought to have more than
justified left-wing liberation movements of the type led by guevara in the late
1960s.
In practical terms, fear of Soviet-led communism meant US support, overt
or clandestine, for some of the most unsavoury and brutal regimes ever seen
anywhere in the world, which were regularly involved in the organisation of
death squads, torture and massacre of their opponents. The US media, in this
analysis, acted as the propaganda wing of that effort, playing down the abuses of
winsss 81
‘friendly’ regimes and exaggerating the threat posed by such as the Sandinistas
of Nicaragua. Journalists, editors, proprietors were in effect mobilised as, or
volunteered to be, agents of the national security state.
If Chomsky were to write a screenplay based on this perspective, it might
well look like Salvador, made by Oliver Stone in 1984. Based on the actual
experiences of US freelance correspondent richard Boyle, who co-wrote the
screenplay, Salvador tells the story of a gonzo-esque figure with a chaotic
personal life and a fondness for substance abuse, who travels to Central
America in search of a story he can sell to make some money. It is 1980, and
ronald reagan has just been elected president. Memories of US intervention
in Vietnam and Cambodia are still fresh. While this experience bolsters Boyle’s
credentials as a war correspondent, his character is also cast as an outlaw –
fond of drink and drugs, an unreliable partner for any woman, and someone
who sees his work as a route to good times as much as anything else. This
stereotype of the war correspondent reflects the danger of the job, and the
sense that anyone who would do it has to be a bit crazy. In Michael Winterbot-
tom’s Welcome To Sarajevo Woody harrelson’s US TV news reporter has a
similar, if less extreme persona, which is contrasted at various moments in the
movies with the cold detachment of the British journalist Michael henderson.
el Salvador is also where Boyle’s girlfriend lives, and, as we soon learn, his
son (whom he has never seen). As the film opens, Boyle is a likeable, if insub-
stantial figure, a party animal who sees journalism as a means to an end. heroism
Figure 14 Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1984). Source: BFI

is far from his mind as he crosses the border with his hard-drinking buddy
(Jim Belushi) into the war-torn country, where he is immediately confronted
by the violent realities of an ideologically driven civil war. From here on we
observe Boyle lose his naiveté, and his illusions, as he witnesses innocent
peasants being brutalised by regime soldiers and death squads, and suspected
opposition elements tortured and killed. Boyle takes an existential journey,
which we follow as viewers, from apolitical innocence into what Chomsky
and herman would characterise as the cynical realities of US imperialism.
gradually, we are made aware that the atrocities of the fascistic government of
el Salvador take place with the covert backing of the US government, despite
the presence of a liberal US ambassador in San Salvador.
Two scenes are pivotal, in that they articulate the film-makers’ ideal of the
journalist’s role as witness in such conflicts. In one, Boyle (James Woods) is
taken by a photojournalist colleague (John Savage) to el Playon, a site where
the death squads dump their victims. The transition from a drunken, jovial
Boyle downing tequila shots with his buddies to a man transfixed by the horror
of thousands of dead bodies decaying in the tropical sun is chilling, both for
him and us, as viewers. The photographer, who has been much longer in the
country and will later be killed witnessing a battle, evokes the memory of one
of the most distinguished photojournalists, robert Capa, as he explains to
Boyle how he perceives his role.
You know what made photographers like robert Capa great, rich? They
weren’t after money, they captured the nobility of human suffering. It
was more than the bodies, richie, he got why they died. You got to get
close, rich, to get the truth. You get too close, you die.
Within the notion of journalist-as-witness, the photojournalist is an especially

compelling figure. he (or, rarely, she – see Chapter 7) takes the photograph,
which becomes the silent, permanent testimony of what has occurred, usually
without editorialising or literary embellishment. Capa’s famous photograph of
the Spanish Civil War combatant at the moment of death, head pushed back
by the impact of a bullet, is iconic. Savage’s character references it here, as he
photographs the birds of prey picking on the corpses of the dead. he is the
witness to this atrocity, and Boyle is humbled. From here on in, he knows that
it is time to get serious about his job.
Later in the film Boyle bears witness to the deaths of four US nuns who
have been doing humanitarian work in el Salvador. We have seen them raped
and murdered by men we presume to be linked to the right-wing death squads,
but US officials and journalists are happy to agree that this is the work of
left-wing insurgents, thus reinforcing the US government line that this is a
legitimate war about resisting the communist threat in America’s backyard.
winsss 83
Boyle angrily rejects this whitewash, and launches into a tirade against the
complicity of the US. This occurs after a scene in which we see him argue
with representatives of the ‘official’ US media at a party. This scene, contextu-
alised by newsreel footage of president-elect ronald reagan warning about the
danger of communism in Central America, functions to present a Chomskyan
analysis of mainstream media coverage to a group of sinister, or merely stupid
US embassy officials, CIA agents and journalists. As the pro-regime journalists
sip their cocktails and praise Salvadorean democracy, Boyle launches into an
attack on their complacency.
democracy! What kind of democracy is it when you have to vote, and if

you don’t vote you’re branded a commie subversivo. People would vote
for donald duck, or genghis Khan, or whoever the local cop tells them
to, because if they don’t [throws a photograph of a torture victim on the
table] this is what happens.
Salvador was financed by hemdale Film Corporation and shown in mainstream

cinemas throughout the world. Although it made only $1.5 million at the US
box office on initial release, it was nominated for two Oscars and stands to this
day as the most radical indictment ever made of the performance of the US
media in 1970s and 1980s Central America.
The film also captures a period in the history of foreign correspondence
which would shortly end – the era of the New Cold War (as Chomsky called
it, in reference to its similarities to the original Cold War depicted in good
night, and good luck). This was a period in post-war geopolitical history when
heroes and villains were easily identifiable, from whatever position one took.
reagan’s America was a world where good and evil were concepts equating to
the US and the USSr (‘the evil empire’), capitalism and communism, west
and east, democracy and dictatorship. From the opposite perspective, America
was cast as the force for evil in Central America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere,
and the forces of the left, such as the guerillas of el Salvador and Nicaragua,
viewed as progressive radicals. Salvador reflects that bi-polarity, and dares
to endorse the left-wing analysis by portraying the US as unambiguously
wrong, and as complicit in the most atrocious acts imaginable. Boyle’s corres-
pondent bears witness to these atrocities, and then comes to the conclusion
that it is his side – Us (i.e., the US government), and not Them – which is
in the wrong.6
WElComE To SArAjEvo – NeW WOrLd dISOrder ANd

The JOUrNALIST AS BYSTANder
The Chomsky-herman propaganda model underpinned a critique of US

news coverage of foreign affairs in the 1970s. It served well in the 1980s
when the world was divided into two monolithic blocs, and journalists were
under pressure to endorse a view of global politics structured around and by
clearly distinguishable, and mutually incompatible ideological positions. even
if it was very possible for some rebellious and maverick journalists such as
richard Boyle to challenge the Cold War paradigm, the mainstream media
and their employees were much more likely to internalise and work within it,
as were journalists on the other side. Foreign news in those days was, often,
propaganda, whether by journalistic intention or not. News was selective and
slanted, with a view to portraying the other side in the worst possible light, not
least because this was what journalists on both sides believed to correspond to
the objective truth. Journalists both east and west believed in the enemy other.
The propaganda model is less helpful, however, when reviewing the perfor-
mance of the media in the post-Cold War world, not just in countries such
as the UK with strong public service journalism traditions (and where, as a
consequence, the propaganda model’s assertion of straightforward ideological
domination of news by self-interested economic elites was never adequate) but
also in the US itself. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and acknowl-
edgement by the communist parties of the Warsaw Pact that the game was up,
what President Bush the first declared as a ‘new world order’ came into being.
This period lasted nearly twelve years, between the fall of the Wall in
November 1989 and the World Trade Center attacks of September 11 2001,
during which the east-west bipolarity of the cold war was replaced with
something altogether more confusing and blurred. Marxism-Leninism as
practised in the Soviet Union and its allied states was exposed as bankrupt,
and Marxism itself, in so far as it predicted or called for the replacement of
capitalism by something called communism (or even socialism), fell out of
favour with all but a marginalised minority of leftist ‘radicals’, who now looked
quaintly old-fashioned. Fukuyama called it ‘the end of history’ (1992), which
it clearly was not, but it was certainly the end of a particular phase in human
history, which had dominated all political and cultural formations, including
those of the news media, since the end of the First World War.
The positive dimension of the new world order was seen in the global
response to Saddam hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when a broad
coalition of countries – including Arab and muslim states, those of europe
and Asia, both capitalist and communist, right and left – united under the UN
banner to intervene against Iraq. here, for the first time since World War Two,
dictatorship was resisted with effective international force. Saddam hussein
winsss 85
had virtually no defenders, and governments of all ideological and theological

stripes endorsed the action of the US and its allies to eject him from Kuwait.
As the 1990s progressed, however, and the unforeseen consequences of the
collapse of Soviet power began to be felt, a less welcome feature of the post-Cold
War era emerged – new world disorder. Marxism-Leninism, for all its negative
features, had contained a number of primitive forces in the countries over which
it gained sway, in particular racism and ethnic conflict. Yes, it took totalitarian
control to suppress these impulses (which were never seriously tackled at the
ideological level), but suppressed they were, in the USSr, Central and eastern
europe, and Yugoslavia.7 With the end of state socialism, the ugliest forms of
nationalism and ethnic hatred were unleashed, leading to conflict and war. The
violence reached its greatest intensity in former Yugoslavia, where Serb and
Croat nationalists fought with muslims, introducing the term ‘ethnic cleansing’
to describe their policy of intimidating, evicting and massacring those whom
they saw as ethnically incompatible with a ‘greater Serbia’. War correspon-
dents were called upon to witness these conflicts, and arrived in numbers in
the Balkan region in the early 1990s. What they found was very different from
the relative clarity of the Cold War, but a replaying of more ancient enmities,
when friends and enemies were indistinct, atrocity and amorality were every-
where, and no-one, least of all journalists, really knew why it was happening.
The films made about the conflicts in former Yugoslavia depict journalists lost
in ideological confusion, forced into the position of bemused bystanders.
In danis Tanisovic’s no man’s land (2001) the late Karin Cartlidge plays a
courageous if somewhat arrogant TV news presenter caught up in the fratri-
cidal absurdity of the Bosnian civil war. Its black comedy uses satire to make its
points, but the themes are deeply serious, as one would expect from a Bosnian
director himself forced to curtail his studies in 1992 due to the civil war. no
man’s land won the 2001 Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. Satire and
cynicism towards the UN and other international bodies also infuses Michael
Shepard’s The Hunting party (2007), about three journalists who set out to
capture a fugitive Serbian war criminal.
Made five years earlier, Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome To Sarajevo covers
the same period as danovic’s film, focusing on the 1992 siege of Sarajevo.
Winterbottom’s film takes the true story of ITN correspondent Michael
Nicholson, who covered the Bosnian conflict and went on to adopt an orphan,
Natasha. This, like no man’s land, is a film about the journalism of conflict,
but also (and perhaps principally) the dilemma faced by journalist-as-witness
to the human impact of civil war and, in this particular case, ethnic cleansing.
The majority of the film’s running time is concerned with the human cost
of war. Welcome To Sarajevo is a cinematic howl of rage at the horrors of the
wars in former Yugoslavia, and the inability or reluctance of the international
community to stop them. Winterbottom presents a polemic against the abuse
Figure 15 Welcome to Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997). Source: BFI
of human rights, and our collective complicity in permitting such abuse at

the heart of ‘civilised’ europe. Soundtrack music by late 1980s ‘Madchester’
bands such as the happy Mondays and the Stone roses reminds us that
Sarajevo is, or was, a modern industrial city not very different from what one
would find in the north of england in the early 1990s. At the end of the film, as
some normality begins to return to the traumatised city, we see a ‘Miss World
– Siege of Sarajevo heat’ played out before the assembled media. These are
people like you and I, the film says. girls in bikinis, guys trying to catch their
eye. help them be normal again.
Like Salvador, the film raises the issue of the journalist’s role in such
circumstances. Can he – should he – report on these abuses inflicted against
civilians, under the noses of UN troops and western leaders, with objectivity
and professional detachment? Or should he get involved, not necessarily in
the ideological struggle, which is confused and impenetrable to the outside
observer in any case (unlike the situation in el Salvador a decade earlier), but
in the lives of the people he is covering? BBC war correspondent Martin Bell
was compelled by his experiences reporting the siege of Sarajevo (in the course
of which he was wounded by shrapnel from a Serbian grenade) to write a book
challenging the normative ideal of journalistic detachment in coverage of wars
where civilians are the victims of atrocities (1996). In Winterbottom’s film,
inspired by Michael Nicholson’s real-life adoption of Natasha, Michael is in
bed with his wife at home, reflecting on how he has ended up bringing emira
winsss 87
back to the UK with him: ‘She [emira] thought I should help. I realised I
could, and there didn’t seem to be any reason not to.’
With reference to this simple logic, backed up by the scenes we have seen of
atrocity and terror directed against the children of Sarajevo, reportorial objec-
tivity and detachment are cast aside. Later, Michael insists on filling his reports
with footage of orphans under fire as a means of attracting viewers’ and policy-
makers’ attention to his priority – getting the children out of the besieged city.
The manipulation of the visual power of TV news media is justified in some
circumstances.
This alerts us to the film’s main issue: the extent to which the war correspon-
dent’s status as witness can be exploited to make tragic events visible, first on
the news agenda, then in public debate and governmental priorities. Michael is
witness to an unfolding human tragedy – the plight of the orphaned children
– and uses the agenda-setting power of ITN to bring it to the attention of the
world. As with Michael Buerk’s famous reports from ethiopia, the journalist in
this case alerts us to a wrong about which we might otherwise be ignorant, and
is an essential first step in prompting governmental intervention. To perform
this role in Sarajevo (as in other war zones), where snipers lurk and drunken
paramilitaries are never far away, is indisputably heroic. And if it requires
graphic TV news images to be effective, then this is, we might conclude, a
justification for their inclusion. Susan Moeller’s Compassion Fatigue (1999),
which reflects in its title a 1990s debate about the allegedly negative impact
on western public opinion of graphic images of war, famine and catastrophe,
argued that:
TV audiences have in general very little understanding of events in the

developing world or of major institutions or relationships. This is in part
the result of TV coverage which tends to focus on dramatic, violent and
tragic images while giving very little context or explanation to the events
which are being portrayed. (1999: 17)
In Welcome To Sarajevo, Michael begins the film with a position close to

this, and a sneery disregard for the values of ‘news as entertainment’, even as
he searches for the right shot of tragedy to frame his story. In the end, however,
it is the unique power of the television image which he enlists to help him help
the victims of the siege.
9/11 ANd AFTer
Already in the 1990s war correspondence was being transformed by the

emergence of globalised, always-on media. The launch of Cable News Network
in 1980 and its subsequent expansion had, by the mid-1990s, already produced
the phenomenon of ‘real-time news’, as seen in the first gulf War of 1991.
There and then, for the first time, it was possible for TV viewers sitting at
home, or in their hotel room, or anywhere that had access to CNN, to watch
events in Kuwait, Iraq, Israel and elsewhere unfolding live. real-time news
was literally that – news as a representation of something that was happening
at that moment, as opposed to the report of an event which had happened at
some time in the past.
Jean Baudrillard provoked intellectual and public ridicule when he
proclaimed in a book of that name that The gulf War Did not Take place
(1991). he meant, of course, not that people did not die in the expulsion of
Saddam hussein from Kuwait, nor that violence was not used, but that the
war was experienced by hundreds of millions of people all over the world in a
manner more akin to a simulation in a video game than an actual war – that the
gulf ‘war’ was experienced by those who fought it, and by those who watched
it on TV, as a virtual conflict, fought largely with the aid of computers, satel-
lites and public communication channels such as CNN.
Postmodern philosophy aside, the gulf War of 1991 was the first to be
globally consumed through live TV news coverage of everything from Cruise
missiles in flight to civilians being dug out of bombed buildings. The arrival of
this means of reporting warfare produced a major new challenge for govern-
ments in democracy: assuming that one did not wish to censor CNN and the
other real-time news channels which followed it, how could decision-makers
make policy and implement it in conditions where every casualty of war was
potentially a presence on TV screens in every home in the land? War has
always been hellish. Only in the 1990s did the nature of that hell enter our
comfortable late capitalist homes, through our TV screens, and thus have
the capacity to shape how citizens viewed the decisions of their governments
to wage war. After 1991 the genie of real-time news coverage was released,
changing audience expectations of what could be reported, and what should be
reported, forever.
Few films were made for the cinema about the 1991 gulf War, and only one
made in english featured the role of the correspondent in the conflict. Three
Kings (david O. russell, 1999) starred george Clooney and was notable for
its engagement with the impact of a new kind of globalised, real-time media
presence. As noted above, the film contains what one reviewer rather ungener-
ously called ‘a misfired parody of CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour’.8
By September 11 2001, a decade after the first gulf War, real-time news had
been joined by the internet, and the early manifestations of a globalised news
culture characterised by interactivity and participation. Although numbers of
users remained small at the start of the millenium, there were ‘bloggers’ and
an expanding blogosphere of linked commentators and reporters. People were
winsss 89
growing used to taking digital photographs on their cell phones and cameras,
and learning how to upload them to the internet, where they became acces-
sible to the global internet community. The communication environment had
changed radically, and the first organisation to weaponise the new technology
and the networks it brought into being was al-Qaida.
The attacks of September 11 on New York and Washington represented a
dramatic escalation of a terrorist tactic first seen in the 1970s and 1980s, when
groups such as the IrA and the PLO mounted ‘spectacular’ acts of terrorism
designed to seize the attention of TV news organisations and shape the news
agenda in their favour. What al-Qaida did on September 11 was to raise the
global impact of such tactics to unprecedented levels by a combination of
astutely symbolic targeting and a sophisticated awareness of how the media
operated in the twenty-first century. The 9/11 attacks were captured live on
camera by professional news organisations based in New York, as well as by
onlookers with cameras. The resulting footage went on twenty-four-hour news
channels, as well as terrestrial bulletins the world over, and also the internet. As
a result, 9/11 presented to billions of people all over the world something they
had never seen before – thousands of people, dying in real time, before their
eyes; a real-life snuff movie, on a scale never imagined. Many more people had
perished in previous conflicts, but never had their death agonies been acces-
sible to TV and internet users, live and uncensored. Oliver Stone’s World Trade
Center (2007) was, in comparison to the actual news coverage of the day, pallid.
The main impact of the September 11 attacks was a consequence of their
mediated nature – to instil fear and panic, not merely in the citizens of the
United States and elsewhere, but in their governments, leading to the ‘war on
terror’, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the human rights abuses of Abu
ghraib and guantanamo, and much more that has been criticised, such as the
US Patriot Act and the mooted introduction of identity cards in the UK. For
the islamists, however, the success of the attack demonstrated the potential
for using emerging globalised communication networks as weapons in their
global jihad. Thereafter, we were all the potential targets of islamic terrorism –
ordinary people going about their business in Bali, Madrid, London, glasgow,
Mumbai, and journalists as they reported on these events. The immediate
damage done by an attack was magnified exponentially by the psychological
impact of watching news about them on news and internet channels. In this
context, no-one was exempt from the effects of televised atrocity. Atrocity,
moreover, carried out in such a way as to maximise news coverage and audience
horror – grisly decapitations and tortures worthy of any medieval inquisitor,
captured on film and then uploaded to Al Jazeera or some other outlet, where
the images would be transmitted in whole or in part. So common did the
tactic become that by 2004 media organisations and commentators in the UK
were publicly debating the ethics of showing the material, even edited. did it
encourage further such killings, if they were shown even in heavily censored
form? did it amount to providing terrorists with the ‘oxygen of publicity’?
A mIgHTy HEArT – The JOUrNALIST AS TArgeT
The film which best captures the new status of the journalist-as-target is A
mighty Heart, directed by Michael Winterbottom and released to critical
acclaim in 2007. Five years after the first case of a western journalist being
targeted for ritual execution by jihadis – that of Wall Street journal reporter
daniel Pearl – Winterbottom’s film seeks to emphasise what it is that the foreign
or war correspondent does, or should be doing, and why he (or she) should be
considered above the conflict by all combatants. In a scene at the beginning of
the film, Pearl (dan Futterman) explains to someone who is questioning his
motives for reporting islamist groups in Pakistan: ‘That’s why I’m a journalist,
to let people know.’
When, after daniel’s kidnapping, his wife Mariane (also a journalist, played
by Angelina Jolie) goes to meet a Pakistani government minister, the latter
blames Pearl for what has happened.
minister: Why does he want to meet these people? This isn’t the business
of a journalist.
mariane pearl: Forgive me for correcting you, but it is absolutely the
business of a journalist.
The journalist is a witness, and thus should not be a target. At various points
in the film, including in the course of a televised interview, she undertakes to
try to secure the release of her husband, Mariane stresses daniel’s honesty in
his journalism – ‘I never saw him tell a lie’ – and his desire merely to discover
and report the truth, including the truth about radical islamism. These efforts
to engage the kidnappers with an appeal to liberal journalistic values were,
of course, unsuccessful, and daniel Pearl was beheaded on camera in early
February 2002. On the other hand, Mariane Pearl was not to know the nature
of the enemy she was dealing with, and such tactics had never been used on a
western journalist before.
The central role in A mighty Heart is not daniel Pearl’s but Mariane’s,
and Angelina Jolie’s performance was widely praised for its authenticity
and realism. According to UK film critic Mark Kermode (not an easy man
to please), in a BBC documentary about Jolie screened in 2008, ‘I believed
so completely in her portrayal of Mariane Pearl that I forgot I was watching
Angelina Jolie’.9 In the same programme Jolie explained her attraction to the
figure of Mariane Pearl.
winsss 91
Figure 16 A mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom: 2007). Source: BFI
I admire her so much as a woman, and how she handled that situation,
with so much that was going on in the world, and the still continuing
threat of terrorism, this woman went through the worst of it, but still has
this tolerance and this understanding.
In the film, her professional status as a foreign correspondent is significant,

since it falls on her to define in some key speeches the nature of that role
to the Pakistani minister and others, and to defend it despite the trouble it
has brought upon her and her family. It is less important to the human story
which dominates the narrative, however, than her role as wife to the kidnapped
daniel.
CONCLUSION – A SALUTe TO The WAr COrreSPONdeNT
If the period of ‘new world disorder’ – 1989–2001 – can be seen as one of

ideological re-alignment and blurred boundaries in which the journalist is
positioned as a bemused bystander, the post-9/11 years have seen a re-assertion,
if in different form, of the Cold War notions of good and evil, and the idea
that there is a clear and unambiguous enemy against which we should unite.
This enemy is not defined in terms of left/right, or socialism/capitalism, but
medieval theology against liberal modernity. And since liberal journalism, as
we are discussing it in this book, is very much both a product and a condition of
modernity and the enlightenment project, reporting militant islamism within
a framework of objectivity has not been possible. As A mighty Heart shows,
and despite the efforts of courageous figures such as daniel and Mariane
Pearl, the extension of objectivity and balance to islamic fascism is no more
appropriate or practical than it would have been to the Nazis. The journalist,
especially if he is jewish and American, as Pearl was, cannot appeal to a jihadi’s
sense of self-interest, far less fairness, in seeking reliable information for a
story which will then present the jihadi case to the world. The post-9/11 era
is, in this sense, closer to the context within which war correspondents did
their job in 1939–45. radical islam has not the firepower or strategic capability
of hitler’s reich, but it is equally offensive to the liberal democratic world-
view and mindset, and has tended to be treated that way by all except a few
maverick reporters. Attempts to portray the ‘positives’ of islamism have not
been persuasive, and are regularly undermined by appalling tales such as that
of the two boys publicly hanged in the Iranian city of Masshad for homosexu-
ality in July 2005, or that of the sixteen-year-old girl stoned to death in Somalia
in October 2008 for alleged adultery.
This is not to say that there are not many journalists who aspire to report
the war on terror with a degree of detachment and critical scrutiny of both
sides. everyone knows about Abu ghraib, and movies have been made (and
widely seen) about events there and elsewhere. Such coverage is never without
risk, even in a liberal democracy, and I will end this chapter with the sobering
statistic, cited in A mighty Heart, that more western journalists died during
the invasion of Afghanistan than did Coalition troops. In November 2008,
newspapers in the UK were reporting on the circumstances behind the death
in Somalia of BBC news producer Kate Peyton, killed by gun fire in the streets
of Mogadishu as she was preparing to go on an assignment. The inquiry
investigated the performance of her employer in taking the necessary steps to
maximise her safety, and it made a number of criticisms. But like foreign corre-
spondents down the years, Kate appears to have understood that her’s was a
particularly dangerous occupation. She, like so many foreign correspondents,
was an exceptionally brave individual who gave her life in the service of her
role as witness to an inhuman war. Whether in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq or
anywhere else, the days when mainstream journalists could be depicted, as in
Salvador, as submissive propagandists, were over.
winsss 93
POSTSCrIPT – The CITIzeN WITNeSS
recent years have seen the rise of the ‘citizen journalist’, and the role of user-
generated content in news coverage of stories such as the Mumbai terror
attacks of November 2008. This trend had not, as of this writing, produced a
feature-length film in the cinemas. That it would in due course was, given the
movie-makers’ desire for new and exciting stories of heroism, probably inevi-
table. Perhaps a future edition of this chapter would have to include reference
to dramas about the increasingly important role of the non-journalist, the
amateur news-maker who Twitters and flickrs and blogs and emails text and
pictures about events going on to the globalised public sphere, events in which
he or she is personally involved. Perhaps the next conflict story, as commen-
tator Jeff Jarvis predicted in the aftermath of the Mumbai events, ‘will be seen
live and at eye level’ by millions, even billions of people. Increasingly, it is the
civilians who report on what is being done to them, as it is being done.
NOTeS
1. For a recent scholarly discussion of the nature of the witness in the age of mass communi-
cation, see the essays assembled in Frosh and Pinchevsky (eds), media Witnessing (2008).
2. For a study of the role of the foreign correspondent in the post-Soviet 1990s, see McLaugh-
lin’s The War Correspondent (2002). Allan and zelizer’s edited collection on journalism After
September 11 (2002) explores the challenges faced by journalists in an environment defined as
‘war on terror’. Maltby and Keeble’s Communicating War (2007) incorporates the experience
of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. The first directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1958, the second by Philip Noyce in 2002.
4. See Seib (2004) for a discussion of coverage of the invasion of Iraq.
5. See volumes one and two of their political Economy of Human rights (1979) for the evidence
which they present to support the ‘propaganda model’, as they call it. Chomsky’s manufac-
turing Consent (1988) summarises the argument.
6. roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire (1983) told a similar tale in relation to Nicaragua, this time
with wholly fictionalised journalists. Stone’s film is the more visceral and uncompromising,
however.
7. Sasha Baron-Cohen’s screen journalist, Borat, with his parody of Soviet-era attitudes to
sexuality, ethnicity and disability in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, is not far off the mark.
8. hoberman, J., ‘Burn, blast, bomb, cut’, Sight & Sound, volume 10, number 2. The Amanpour
character is ‘hardboiled yet overemotional … [she] swears like a drill sergeant but can be
reduced to tears by the sight of oil-soaked birds. She is regularly confounded by Clooney yet,
as immediately recognised by both Iraqis and American brass, several times saves the day.
her compassion is crucial.’
9. The Culture Show, BBC2, 27 November 2008.
 7
Heroines
W omen journalists feature in several chapters of this book, as inves-

tigative reporters, foreign and war correspondents, editors, tabloid
hacks (or hackesses, if such a term exists), producers and media executives.
By devoting an entire chapter at this point to the representation of women
in journalism, I have no desire to separate them off from the more general
issues I am concerned with, or to ghettoise them. Such a chapter is justified
simply because women themselves – as practitioners, scholarly observers and
consumers of journalism – have for a long time discussed the place of their
sex in the news media, often critically.1 Women present a distinct category of
movie journalist who, if not necessarily or always heroic, are generally accepted
to have been stereotyped and marginalised in the history of cinema.
One consequence of women’s improved socio-economic status within
advanced capitalism is that women are more often represented in the media in
ways which reflect feminist ideas about sexual equality in the workplace, in the
domestic environment, in the bedroom, in the culture. From the post-feminist
perspective of the times in which we live, moreover, cultural producers (male
and female) can also acknowledge without being accused of sexism the capacity
of women, shared with men, for badness and villainy. I will consider villainous
images of female journalists in this chapter, within an examination of how
their representation has become at one and the same time more numerous,
more diverse and, I will argue, more positive. In particular, I will explore what
cinema has to say about femininity and its articulation within a sub-sector
of the media industry which has traditionally been downgraded as a journal-
istic variant of ‘women’s work’ but is now taken with increasing seriousness
both in commercial and cultural terms. I refer to the rise of style journalism
– a term often used in conjunction with ‘dumbing down’, ‘infotainment’
and ‘middlebrow’.2 In a context where more and more women are starring in
the movies as crime reporters, foreign correspondents and other once-male
oins 95
preserves of the profession, I will argue that the growing visibility of style
journalism in films such as The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) and
Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2008) is evidence not of journalism’s
decline into infotainment but a reflection of the enhanced socio-economic
status of women within the cultural economy, and the associated elevation of
female tastes and desires within the industry.
WOMen In jOurnalISM
The conventional narrative about women in liberal journalism goes something

like this: historically, women have been subordinated in art and culture, and in
journalism especially, which has been a male-dominated profession from the
beginning. The reason for this is that patriarchal societies have, as a condition
of their existence, until very recently (and in some societies more recently
than others) excluded women from full and active participation in most areas
of public life, including the production of art and culture.3 journalism is a
form of writing, and also of artistic production, but its accessibility to women
living in patriarchy has been limited by the fact that it often requires access to
the corridors of political, corporate and cultural power, and the power elites
who make key decisions. Political journalists must be able to mix and mingle
freely with (largely male) politicians, whenever and wherever they do their
networking. In the film Rag Tale (Mary McGuckian, 2005) there is a scene in
which media baron richard Morton and his wife, deputy editor M. j. (jennifer
jason leigh), host a dinner for a group of the Prince of Wales’ advisers.
Morton wishes to impress them in his drive to win a peerage. The protocol sent
to Morton in advance instructs women to leave the table before the business
discussion begins. This may be satirical exaggeration of the sexism which
structures the ultra-conservative monarchy, but the point is valid – in many
circles of the establishment in Britain and elsewhere, women are still regarded
as less than equal.
War correspondents must be able to mix and mingle freely with (largely
male) soldiers, in a culture where women are, even in the twenty-first century,
prevented by most armies from taking front-line roles. Crime reporters must
be able to associate with the low life of a city which, given the masculine nature
of most criminal sub-cultures, is easier for men than for women. joel Schum-
acher’s Veronica Guerin (2003) tells the true story of how one female crime
reporter paid the ultimate price for persisting with her investigation in a
brutish world of male gangsters.
For these reasons journalism has been less accessible to women within patri-
archy than, say, the art of poetry or novel-writing. Deborah Chambers and her
co-authors observe that ‘during the nineteenth century societal attitudes in
the united States and Britain discouraged women from journalism. Generally
regarded as a “craft”, even a rough and tough craft, journalism was deemed
usuitable for educated ladies’ (2004: 16). joseph Saltzman notes that in the
nineteenth century ‘most female journalists were not permitted to write on
important topics. Front-page assignments, politics, finance and sports were
not usually given to women. Top newsroom positions were for men only’.4 Of
Sweden, Marlene Djerf-Pierre writes that ‘newspaper journalism was clearly
gendered in the early years of the twentieth century, with certain positions and
areas of coverage designated for men and women, respectively’ (2007: 84).
as late as the 1950s very few women indeed worked as journalists in the
mainstream news media, as opposed to the recognised female realms of
magazines such as, well, Women’s Realm. Women journalists majored in
areas of social life where they could legitimately be dominant, or at least
authoritative, as women – in general, matters to do with child-rearing and the
domestic, as well as fashion and the decorative arts. Women were accepted
in newspapers and periodicals as long as they were content to be domestic
correspondents and ‘agony aunts’, dispensing words of wisdom to the female
readers of magazines.
There were, of course, a few – very few – exceptions: lee Miller, one-time
model and muse of surrealist photographer Man ray, was a photo-journalist
in wartime europe, famously photographing herself in Hitler’s derelict
bathroom; travel writer Freya Stark; and Sara jeanette Duncan, who wrote
for the Canadian press in the early twentieth century.5 But the significant
erosion of patriarchal structures in western journalism began only some time
after World War Two, with the onset of second-wave feminism and the sexual
revolution. In the 1960s British journalist Katharine Whitehorn became one
of the first women to break out of the domestic zone of competence and report
and comment in depth on the male worlds of politics and business. White-
horn’s interviews, columns and features were a key attraction of the Observer
until 1996, and she is now acknowledged as a pioneering figure.
Further landmarks in the advance of women in journalism include the first
female TV news reader in the uK, angela rippon, for the BBC in 1975; the
rise of anna Ford, who became ITV’s first regular female anchorwoman in
1978; the appointment of the first female editor to a uK national newspaper
in 1988. In 1983, young Ba journalism graduate Christiane amanpour joined
Cnn as an assistant, going on to become one of the world’s leading foreign
reporters just as real-time news was becoming established. Today amanpour
is a world-renowned figure, perhaps the most famous of celebrity journalists,
male or female. as a recent profile put it,
with the rich timbre of her voice and her accent – amanpour has an
Iranian father and grew up in Tehran and london – when the Cnn
oins 97
journalist arrived on screen, she was decidedly different from the

journalists americans were used to seeing on television. She was a
woman, for a start, and not a bland midwestern blonde. She was the first
big star to come out of Cnn.6
But certainly not the last. amanpour’s success signalled the emergence of a
generation of female journalists working at the top of their profession, including
– indeed especially – in traditionally male sub-sectors of the business such as
war and foreign correspondence. While amanpour strode the world for Cnn,
Kate adie became a celebrity foreign and war correspondent for the BBC,
placing herself at the scene of the uS bombing of libya in 1986, and the Tien
an Mien Square massacre in 1989. adie, like amanpour, suffered a certain
amount of backlash from commentators who criticised the ‘parachuting in’ of
such celebrities to war zones. This view informs the character of jane living-
stone in Danis Tanovich’s No Man’s Land (2002), played by Karin Cartlidge as
a posh, pucker, but extremely tough and determined reporter.
Since adie and amanpour there have been many more female foreign corre-
spondents, some of whom have paid dearly for their dedication to the job. The
fates of such as Kate Peyton, anna Politkovskaya and Veronica Guerin confirm
that, in some things at least, women are now equal to men in the journalistic
profession, and that gender is no predictor of who lives and who dies in the
zone of conflict.
The extent of progressive change in the status of women in journalism is a
matter for debate, but that there have been at least some advances on a number
of indicators is beyond dispute. Female students in my journalism classes can
today be encouraged by the example of women editors, present and past, in
several uK national newspapers, from the red-top Sun and News of the World
to mid-market and elite titles such as the Express and the Sunday Telegraph,
women news executives and senior producers in broadcast outlets such as the
BBC, women who are internationally respected foreign and business corres-
pondents, political columnists and broadcast anchors. not sufficient, some will
argue, and they may be right in so far as news rooms are still far from female-
and mother-friendly working environments. Some professional specialisms,
such as political reporting and photojournalism, particularly in conflict
zones,7 are still dominated by men. There is still, one might say, institutional
sexism deeply ingrained within journalism. There can be no serious cause for
doubt that the trends are on balance progressive, however, and that given the
numbers of female students of journalism one now sees in universities, this
will continue.8
SOB SISTerS Or SuPer BITCHeS? WOMen, jOurnalISM

anD THe MOVIeS
Women have been the victims of sexual discrimination in the journalistic

profession. Female journalists, it is further argued by students of the journalism
movie, have generally been represented in cinema in ways which reflect and
reinforce the ideological assumptions underlying that discrimination. These
assumptions mainly concern the appropriate field of competence, or news-
gathering remit, of the female journalist – the domestic realm, as noted above,
and the human interest-oriented, emotionally fraught, ‘soft’ news agenda.
Within journalism there has traditionally been a zone of ‘women’s work’, and
films about journalism have reflected this.
Second, films have reflected assumptions about the qualities a woman needs
to have if she is to be successful in the overwhelmingly masculine world of
journalism. She must be more manly than the men, tougher and more ruthless.
In being so, however, she is somehow less than a ‘real’ woman. This, for joe
Saltzman, is the ‘dichotomy never quite resolved’ in representations of women
journalists.9 ‘How to incorporate the masculine traits of journalism essential
for success – being aggressive, self-reliant, curious, tough, ambitious, cynical,
cocky, unsympathetic – while still being the woman society would like her to
be – compassionate, caring, loving, maternal, sympathetic’.
The impact of these assumptions is that women until quite recently have
been largely absent from movies about those types of journalism deemed most
worthy and important to a democratic society, such as political journalism,
foreign correspondence and investigative reporting – what one might call
the commanding heights of the public sphere, where prestige and power are
concentrated, and from which women have historically been excluded.
Similarly, they have rarely been represented as editors or news room
managers, reflecting their subordinate positions within professional struc-
tures. Where women have been visible in films about journalism, it has usually
been as secretaries and other types of minion, supporting their male colleagues
in the news room. In Sweet Smell of Success, for example, j. j. Hunsecker’s
secretary faithfully types his slander-mongering columns (until the point
comes when she has had enough, and rebels). In Mary McGuckian’s Rag Tale,
which does contain three substantial roles for women journalists, a clutch of
female secretaries form the chorus to the largely male editorial team. none of
this could be said to misrepresent the facts of office life in an average twentieth
or indeed twenty-first century news room. nor could the relative absence of
women war correspondents in movies of the pre-feminist era be read as ‘bias’.
This is how things were.
Where women have been represented as journalists in the movies they
have often been portrayed in ways consistent with tendencies found in other
oins 99
cultural spheres: as highly sexualised, beautiful bodies, preferably with

blonde hair, covering human interest stories and ‘fluff’ (see angelina jolie in
Life or Something Like It, for example; or Christina applegate in the comedy
Anchorman, which subverts the stereotype). Women are often represented as
beautiful but hyper-ambitious, toxic femme fatales who have sacrificed their
femininity for professional advancement, as in the case of To Die For (Gus Van
Zant, 1995) where nicole Kidman plays an amoral career climber who stops
at nothing, even the murder of her own husband, to achieve her professional
goals. joe Saltzman observes that ‘female journalists in popular culture are
seldom shown as fully developed human beings’.10 loren Ghighlione agrees
that ‘the contemporary news woman, while regularly cast as a tough, talented
pro, often bears the burden of being depicted as an emotionally empty Super
Bitch or Super Whore’.11
These are stereotypes, yes, but have they any foundation in reality? Yes
again, in so far as women in journalism, like women in politics, women in law
enforcement and women in science have, in order to be successful, often had to
go against the grain of what patriarchal society expects a ‘good’ woman to be –
that is, a mother and home-maker. a woman cannot ‘have it all’, it is often said
– career and family, satisfying job and home life with children. Something has
to give. Feminists in recent times have acknowledged the genuine dilemmas
women face in reconciling the public world of work, which they have fought for
and gained steadily increasing access to, with the private world of family and
child rearing. Movies about journalism have often explored those questions,
if usually through the lens of male script writers and directors, and without
any overt engagement with feminist discourse, which did not really become a
feature of mainstream culture until at least the 1980s. When rosalind russell
in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday struggles with the choice between a life
of cosy domesticity with her new fiancé and a resumption of her career as a
reporter she dramatises a real issue for women in journalism, as relevant in the
late 1930s when the film was made as it is now.
FeMale jOurnalISTS In FIlM: FeMInIne Or FeMInIST?
Cinema has been part of the cultural apparatus of patriarchal oppression,

then, representing women in journalism not only as they have been and are
(discriminated against and structurally subordinate to men), but as they are
perceived to be by wider society and, recalling the function of film as myth, as
it is perceived that they should be. representations of strong female journalists
often end with the woman’s acceptance of and return to ‘proper’ femininity.
But not always. If film has been, overall and on balance, a conservative
medium in relation to sexual politics it is now possible, precisely because of the
achievements of those politics, to undertake a more nuanced, post-feminist

reading of how women are represented in journalism.
By ‘post-feminist’ I do not mean a period after feminism, but an ideological
environment in which there is, first, recognition, implicit or explicit, of the
genuine advances which women have made in journalism in recent times, as in
other traditionally male-dominated professions; and second, that the images
of women journalism produced for cinema in the past can be re-read as more
than sexist stereotypes and caricatures. That said, stereotypes and caricatures
are at the heart of all story-telling, and we should not be surprised that women
are victims of the compressions made by film-makers in their efforts to reduce
complex reality to ninety minutes of engaging celluloid. Male journalists
too are often reduced to stereotypes in film – the drunken hack about which
Howard Good wrote an entire book (2000); the unprincipled tabloid reptile
documented by many of the uS scholars in this field; the noble heroes of
Watergate.
Saltzman, Ghiglione and others who have specialised in this area note
throughout their writings the paradox that, sob sisters, super bitches and sexist
assumptions notwithstanding, female journalists have often been depicted as
strong, tough, assertive, intelligent and independent. rosalind russell’s Hildy
in His Girl Friday, one of the earliest and most highly regarded examples of
the women-in-journalism sub-genre, displays many strengths (as well as some
stereotypical traits expressive of the times in which it was made) which a
modern-day feminist in a contemporary newsroom would not be ashamed to
emulate.
These qualities are only ‘manly’ if it is assumed that masculinity has a
monopoly on them. Once the feminist idea that women and men are equal (if
different) is accepted, along with the idea that women can be just as strong,
tough and determined as men when it comes to work and life, then we are
free to judge characters such as Hildy johnson for what they are – feminist
icons ahead of their time, bestriding the silver screen long before the discourse
of feminism became widespread in western culture. We can suggest that at
least some examples of the female journalist in film can be read as progressive,
spearheading a feminist view of women in work which would much later
become mainstream. There were always strong, powerful women working in
journalism, notwithstanding the deep-rooted sexism of the profession. More
often than might be expected, the movies took these women and placed them
at the heart of popular culture.
Saltzman explains why this should have been so: just as the leading men of the
movie industry have always been drawn to journalistic roles for their perceived
importance and glamour, as well as the richness of the parts which journalistic
stories often generate, women have found the portrayal of journalists working
in a largely man’s world challenging and satisfying. Precisely because the news
oins 101
room and other arenas where journalism has been practised, such as the front
line in a war zone, are such masculine environments (and a recent film like
Rag Tale has us believe that this is still the case, at least at the more popular
end of the newspaper market) women have risen to the challenge of playing
characters who can compete within them and win. notes Saltzman, ‘motion
pictures offered the meatiest roles for female actors and created the perfect
battleground of the sexes’.12
HIS GIRL FRIDAy anD THe STrOnG FeMale rePOrTer
One of the earliest acknowledged classics in the genre of movies about

journalism features a woman reporter, Hildy johnson. Hawks’ film is based on
Ben Hecht’s successful stage play of 1928, The Front Page, which established
the romantic rogue stereotype of the journalist (see Chapter 9). His Girl Friday
turns one of the play’s two leading male characters into a woman, and sets her
against editor and former husband Walter Burns (Cary Grant) in a battle of
verbal wit and competing journalistic ethics. at the beginning of the film Hildy
arrives in the news room, having retired from journalism, to introduce Walter
to her new fiancé, Bruce Baldwin, an insurance salesman from albany, new

York. The story then focuses on Walter’s struggle to win Hildy back as a staff
reporter, in the face of her disgust at what she sees as his corrupt and cynical
tabloid news values. This is not a struggle in which the male editor has it easy.
Hildy johnson provides evidence from popular culture of loren Ghiglione’s
assertion that ‘news women of the 1920s and 1930s were not only as talented
but just as tough as their male counterparts’.13 ness agrees that ‘the journal-
istic profession provided one of the few working environments where a battle
of the sexes could be waged on nearly equal terms. While women were only
rarely afforded positions of power as editors or publishers, on the level of basic
reporters they were able to hold their own against their male counterparts’
(1997: 72). That said, she was represented as a woman working reluctantly, if
courageously, in a man’s world, experiencing the tension of ‘achieving journal-
istic success by denying her womanhood’. In His Girl Friday Hildy seeks
Walter’s blessing for her intended new life of domesticity with Bruce in albany
but the narrative trajectory makes it clear that, deep down, as Walter puts it,
‘you’re a newspaper man’.
Hildy johnson was modelled on adela rogers St johns, a reporter for
the Hearst organisation. She was of a screen type labelled the ‘sob sister’ by
some cultural historians, referring to the fact that female reporters in the
early twentieth century tended to be given the ‘sob stories’ – stories which
had strongly emotional angles judged appropriate for a woman to report.14 In
american popular cinema the most prominent early representation of a female
journalist was the character of Torchy Blane, played by Glenda Farrell, who
featured in eight successful films of the 1930s.15 For Saltzman the term ‘sob
sister’ is not appropriate to Blane, however, or indeed Hildy johnson. Blane,
he notes, ‘went after fast-breaking, sensational stories as aggressively as any
newsman. She was no sob sister, no gushy old maid, no masculine-looking
lady’.16 a more contemporary, and comic reference to the notion of the ‘sob
sister’ is contained in Anchorman (adam McKay, 2004), the judd apatow-
produced retro-chic pastiche of 1970s TV news. When Veronica Corning-
stone, ‘the little lady of the news desk’ played by Christina applegate, arrives
at ron Burgundy’s San Diego news room expecting to be taken seriously she
is immediately assigned the soppy human interest stories, such as the story of
a cat fashion show (she has her revenge, it should be noted, at ron’s expense.
This is a post-feminist film set in a pre-feminist world, fully aware of the sexist
limitations of the stereotype Veronica represents, and prepared to have fun
subverting it).
Women journalists have sometimes been viewed as ‘sob sisters’, then (and
there will probably be some news rooms, even in the second decade of the
twenty-first century where they still are), and represented in this way in film.
But they have also been portrayed in film as tough and determined. The
strength and sassiness of Hildy johnson is, decades after she first graced the
oins 103
silver screen, a radical and empowering posture. and she is not alone. Women
in the media have frequently been represented by the media as strong and
powerful figures.
WOMen jOurnalISTS In THe POST-War era
ness observes that the dominance of war films in the 1940s produced
a shift in the role of women in journalism films. While they had [during
the war] been on a nearly equal level with men, the era of Rosie the Riveter
relegated them to more domestic tasks. Those few female war correspon-
dents who appeared on screen were forced into domestic roles … The
ground lost by women in the journalism genre during this period would
not be regained for several decades. (1997: 241)
The female journalist re-emerged as a major figure only in the 1980s, reflecting
the slow but steady progression of women within the journalistic profession in
the wake of second-wave feminism.
In the period from the 1980s up to 1996 women played a number of notable
lead roles in films about journalism, including both heroic and villainous
representations, and some that were somewhere in between. In Absence of
Malice (Sydney Pollack, 1981), Sally Field played an investigative reporter
whose ethical laziness leads to a life-threatening crisis for the subject of one
of her stories, a small businessman played by Paul newman. In To Die For,
by contrast, possibly the most villainous journalist ever presented in cinema,
male or female, nicole Kidman is ferociously ambitious local TV weather
girl Suzanne Stone. So desperate is she for success in network TV that she
engineers the murder of her own husband at the hands of a besotted teenager.
Directed by Gus Van Zant, whose progressive sexual politics are well known,
To Die For has not generally been read as a misogynistic work, but does
exemplify a negative stereotype of the female journalist (and the female media
worker more broadly) as a super-bitch lacking in scruples, prepared to sleep
with anyone and do anything to get to the top.
Faye Dunaway plays another kind of frequently seen media bitch in
Network (Sydney lumet, 1976) – a network executive determined to turn the
‘quality’ TV news show presented by anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) into
infotainment. In The Insider the company lawyer who prevents the transmission
of jeffrey Wigand’s whistle-blowing interview on 60 Minutes is a woman (Gina
Gershon), and clearly signalled as a key villain of the piece (although male
executives at CBS are also singled out). jennifer jason leigh’s M. j. in Rag
Tale belongs to the same sub-species, although she becomes a tragically sympa-
thetic character in the end.
less toxic women feature in Broadcast News (james l. Brooks, 1987), where
Holly Hunter and joan Cusack play TV news producers working hard to
maintain journalistic integrity in the face of company pressure to ‘dumb down’
the news and make it more human interest-oriented. Here, interestingly, the
traditional association of journalistic dumbing-down with the feminine is
subverted by the fact that it is William Hurt’s new boy in the newsroom, photo-
genic and handsome, who cries the fake tears which symbolise the corruption
of news with commercial values.
WOMen In jOurnalISM, 1997–2008
In the period 1997–2008, women were depicted as war correspondents in

Three Kings and No Man’s Land; as investigative reporters in Veronica Guerin
and The Life of David Gale; and as a political journalist in Lions for Lambs. In
The Life of David Gale (alan Parker, 2002) Kate Winslet plays Bitsey Bloom, a
‘hard-nosed reporter turned crusader’.17 Cate Blanchett is a features writer in
The Life Aquatic with Steve Vissou (Wes anderson, 2004).
Women, as we have seen, have in the past been represented on occasion
as serious journalists, as exemplified by the sassy intelligence of rosalind
russell (who so easily outmanouevres Cary Grant’s Walter). The number of
these heroines has increased, however, as the content of their representation
has changed to reflect an evolving sex-political environment and culture. lois
lane in Superman Returns is not the lois lane played by Margot Kidder
opposite Christopher reeves. She is a Pulitzer-prize winning single mother,
tough and resourceful, no pushover to be whisked away on the night air by
a masterful man of steel. She is, in short, a particular kind of feminist, and
an expression in representations of journalism of the positive changes which
have affected the lives of real women. Young women in the multiplex audience
expect to see young women who embody their aspirations in the fictional news-
rooms of Hollywood, and Hollywood has met that expectation.
Mainstream movie-makers have also internalised the feminist critique
of journalism’s sexism, in films such as Anchorman (2004) which immersed
themselves in the clothes, sexual politics and social attitudes of the 1970s,
replaying their politically incorrect attitudes to sexism, racism and life in
general in a manner that was affectionate and nostalgic, but from a position three
decades later in which it is acknowledged that such attitudes are unacceptable
(at least in polite company). In Anchorman Will Ferrell plays anchorman ron
Burgundy, a self-styled ‘lover of the ladies’ who drinks large whiskies just
before his show commences, has a wide range of amazing abilities in all walks
of life, such as playing jazz clarinet, and who regards women as accessories and
potential bed partners rather than colleagues. He is the caricature of the male
oins 105
celebrity journalist, in love with himself and his own importance, and ruthless
in his determination to maintain his position. The arrival in his news room
of a new female colleague – blonde, beautiful and talented Veronica Corning-
stone, played by Christina applegate – is thus a threat to ron, and he responds
accordingly. But this is a post-feminist text, in that after all the ribbing endured
by Christina applegate’s character, it is she who emerges triumphant and ron
who is exposed as a failure.
a GlaSS CeIlInG?
On the basis of the films released since 1997 the world as represented in movies
about journalism can be argued to be reflective both of the advances women
have made, and the lingering stereotypes and assumptions which constitute,
as some critics have asserted, a kind of glass ceiling. In some films, female
news readers are pretty and blonde (although angelina jolie’s somewhat
stereotypical role in Life or Something Like It is more than redeemed by her
performance as Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart). On the other hand, the
equation of ‘pretty and blonde’ with subordinate and stupid can no longer, if
it ever could, be assumed. Both Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett are blonde
and (in the opinion of most cinema-goers) pretty in their movies, but they are
certainly not weak, or inferior to the men around them. If anything (and this
is certainly true of Blanchett’s Veronica Guerin) they are tougher than some
men would like them to be. Kirsten Dunst’s demure and deferential sub-editor
in How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (see below) is in this context an
exception to the pattern of strong women journalists visible in the movies
since 1997.
The enduring sexist assumptions which act as a kind of ‘glass ceiling’
limiting the progress of women in journalism can be seen in joel Schum-
acher’s Veronica Guerin. Based on a true story which has come to symbolise
the heroism of journalists in general Cate Blanchett plays Guerin, who was
murdered by organised crime elements in Dublin in 1996, as a courageous and
determined investigator. Guerin takes beatings and abuse as well as her fair
share of obfuscation from the police, in order to get the story she believes has
to be told. She is in the best tradition of the journalist-as-watchdog, and pays
for this dedication with her life. She is unmistakeably a heroine. Throughout
the film, though, there are references to the family in the background – her
husband and her son, who are also threatened by the criminals. at one point,
shots are fired at her house. Viewing these scenes the viewer finds himself
asking (or this viewer did): what right does this woman have to put her loved
ones at risk in this way, and her young son in particular? She can be as brave
as she likes, and take any risks, because she is an adult and has the right to
choose, but her family are unwilling participants in the drama. She puts their
happiness and well-being at risk, as much as her own. In short, her character
is consistent with that stereotype of the female journalist which portrays her as
more ruthless and self-determined than any man.
This is one reading of the film, and notable because it is unlikely that
Michael in Welcome To Sarajevo or any of the male journalists portrayed in
similarly heroic circumstances would have their apparent disregard for their
family responsibilities framed in this way, and made to seem like individual
selfishness. When Michael brings emira home to stay with him and his wife,
the latter expresses some surprise, perhaps mild hesitation, but then there
is nothing but serene acceptance of the potential impact of his decision on
a family. One cannot help but admire Veronica Guerin in the film, and nor
can one help but ask was it worth it, not just to her, but to the son who lost a
mother, and the husband who lost a wife?
Daniel Pearl’s actions in A Mighty Heart, which also lead to the loss of a
husband and a father in circumstances which might reasonably be seen as
reckless, are never subject to this kind of moral judgement. jolie plays Mariane
Pearl’s deepening sense of desolation at the loss of her unborn child’s father
with skill, but there is barely a hint of reproach that she should have been
placed in this position by her husband’s hunger for the story which will kill
him. We have progress, then, in that Guerin exists and is immortalised on film
for her courage, but reaction too, in so far as the director seems to be asking if
this is really the appropriate work for a woman in Guerin’s position.
THe rISe OF STYle jOurnalISM In THe MOVIeS
recent decades have seen significant progressive changes in the structural

position of women within society, and within the journalistic profession. These
have been reflected in cinema where there have been more portrayals than ever
before of women performing traditionally masculine journalistic roles – war
correspondent, investigative journalist, and so on. But feminism has also meant
a re-evaluation and re-assertion of femininity, and what used to be dismis-
sively referred to as the journalism of ‘women’s issues’ – that is, coverage in
magazines and newspapers of domestic matters, fashion and human interest.
recent films about journalism, such as The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the
City, have reflected these changes.
Traditionally, as noted above, the writing and reporting which women do
has been viewed as less important than that of men, precisely because it has
dealt with the (presumed) feminine realms of the domestic and the emotional.
That prejudice has eroded as the socio-economic and political status of women
has advanced and their particular concerns have been elevated in importance.
oins 107
The public sphere has been privatised, bringing with it a progressive recog-
nition that the concerns of the individual and the family – the personal – are
indeed political, and worthy of journalistic effort and attention.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as women became more
literate and emerged into the consumer market in greater numbers, a women’s
version of the ‘new journalism’ became visible in the mainstream news media.
Mass, popular journalism was being born at this time in newspapers such as
the Daily Mail in the uK, and part of that trend was a journalism specifi-
cally addressed to and written by women in their capacity as home-makers and
emerging consumers. In the uS, by 1900 around 7 per cent of journalists were
women (2,193).18 anne Varty’s anthology, Eve’s Century, makes available some
of the journalism written by women in that period (2004).
The satirist Dorothy Parker pioneered a more recognisably ‘feminine’
journalism of fashion and style, at the same time as presenting her work
as having aesthetic value.19 Born in 1893, Dorothy Parker wrote essays and
columns for the first incarnation of style magazine Vanity Fair in the 1920s,
and is today recognised as a pioneer of style or celebrity culture. While sticking
with sterotypically ‘feminine’ subjects in her writing, Parker developed a public
persona which was rare for a female writer and which ‘evolved through her
journalism and was disseminated through the sophisticated style magazines
of new York’ (Hammill 2007: 3). Parker ‘used her petite, pretty, feminine
appearance to disarm, and to lend additional impact to her satire’ (Ibid.: 5),
which was so biting and sharp that it survives to this day in the form of
numerous aphorisms.20 With her maverick, left-of-centre politics, she antici-
pates the persona of contemporary columnist julie Burchill, also renowned for
her sharp wit and take-no-prisoners approach to her subjects. But as Hammill
observes, even although Parker was a best-selling writer of plays and essays,
she remained a marginalised, cultish figure in american literary life until the
late twentieth century. In 1994 she was played on screen by jennifer jason
leigh in alan rudolph’s film, Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle.21
Women have continued to write in women’s magazines, of course, which
since Helen Gurley Brown invented ‘Cosmo’ girl in the 1960s have steadily
become more ‘frank’ in their treatment of female sexuality, and more reflective
of woman’s changing position within the workforce. The domestic realm,
matters of the heart and sexuality remain important dimensions of women’s
journalism, increasing their visibility within the public sphere as women have
ascended the socio-economic hierarchies of liberal capitalism. The journalism
of style, be it addressed to matters of fashion, sexual manners, or health and
fitness, has acquired respectability and prominence. Style journalism is still
viewed as part of the feminine, but its status has radically altered. Today, to
work on a magazine such as Vogue is regarded as evidence of professional
journalistic success – still glamorous and sexy, yes, but also now worthy of
a serious woman’s efforts. In the post-feminist world the stigma which once
attached to such journalism and to those who wrote it is over-written with an
appreciation of its cultural value.
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
This trend has been reflected in a wave of films about ‘style’ journalism –
the journalism of fashion, culture and celebrity exemplified by the contents
of magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. Such films frequently contain
within them debates about the relative worthiness of gossip columns, or
fashion spreads, or celebrity interviews, and they are often critical, but such
journalism is no longer presented as laughable, even when it is portrayed in
teen comedies such as 13 Going On 30 (Gary Winnick, 2004), and How To Lose
a Guy in 10 Days (Donald Petrie, 2003). The position of women in late patri-
archy has changed, and with it the status of women working within the lifestyle
and entertainment spheres of the media.
even in films such as Sex and the City, The Devil Wears Prada and How To
Lose Friends and Alienate People, men are still a powerful, sometimes dominant
presence. In the latter, jeff Bridges’ portrayal of Claydon Harding, modelled
on Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, reproduces the unquestioned authority of
the male editor over a largely female staff. The women do much of the work,
but in this case, as in many others, a man takes the key decisions. Claydon is
the undisputed boss at Sparks, although his magazine is targeted at a female
audience obsessed with fashion and film stars such as the airhead-ish Sophie
Maes. Claydon has a dutiful wife, who appears from time to time, dressed in
pink and with two adorable girl children in tow.
The lead character in How To Lose Friends … is a male journalist, Sydney
Young, loosely based on the author of the book on which the film is based,
Toby Young. He it is who joins Sparks as an unknown and a novice, who locks
horns with his immediate boss, laurence, and then succeeds to his senior
job as Culture editor, all with the apparent minimum of effort. The lead
female role, played by Kirsten Dunst, is presented as an aspiring, intelligent,
would-be novelist who has somehow, by her own account, allowed herself to
be diverted from her ‘real’ vocation in life – to be a writer – by this trivia.
She has her status and integrity undermined by falling for the aforementioned
laurence, whose wife, meantime, is only seen from the rear, in two brief scenes
where she too is the foil for the joke. In the end, Dunst’s character has to be
rescued by Sydney who finds her at an open-air screening of her favourite
film, La Dolce Vita. even in How To Lose Friends …, however, among the more
conservative of recent films about journalism in its adherence to sexist stereo-
types, the traditionally stigmatised zone of style and celebrity is re-evaluated,
oins 109
rehabilitated and intellectualised. The film is not a ‘feminist’ text, then, or even
a post-feminist one, but it embraces one of the lessons of the post-feminist era
– that style journalism is a valid object of interest, a fascinating subject, an
honourable trade.
The Devil Wears Prada also contains this meaning, although it addresses the
subject of style journalism from a much more female-centred and feminist-
informed perspective. Here, the fictional editor played by Meryl Streep
is reportedly modelled on anna Wintour, editor of Vogue magazine and by
reputation a towering figure. andy Sachs, a novice entering a world of which
she knows little is played by anne Hathaway. like Sydney in How To Lose
Friends …, she is at first dismissive of the legitimacy of style journalism, which
she sees as a mere stepping stone to something more serious. Before long,
however, she is forced to engage in an internal debate about the validity of
her job.
Miranda Priestley is the advocate of the value of fashion and style journalism,
as in a scene where she berates andy for laughing off the seriousness with which
she is asked to judge which colour of blue belt to accompany a designer dress.
Miranda: Something funny?

Andy: no, no, nothing, it’s just, you know, both of those belts look exactly
the same, and I’m still learning about this stuff, and eh …
Miranda: This, stuff? Oh, I see. You think this has nothing to do with
you. You go to your closet, and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy
blue sweater [you’re wearing] because you’re trying to tell the world
that you take yourself too seriously to care what you put on your back,
but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not
turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerillion. You’re also blithely
unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar lorenzo did a collection of
cerillion gowns, and then – I think it was Yves St laurent, wasn’t it
– who showed cerillion military jackets? and then cerillion quickly
showed up in the collections of the major designers, and then filtered
down through the department stores, and then trickled on down to
some tragic casuals corner where you no doubt fished it out of some
clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and
countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made
a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact
you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this
room, from a pile of stuff.
oins 111
COnCluSIOn
as this book went to press, cultural commentators were observing the huge
success of movies marketed for women, such as Mamma Mia (Phyllida lloyd,
2008) and Sex and the City, and predicting more of the same in years to come.
These were not feminist movies in a directly political sense, and were criticised
by some feminists for their endorsement of certain stereotypes traditionally
deemed sexist. Sex and the City, for example, is essentially a film about finding
your man and getting him to buy you things. Other critics, however, claimed
these movies as evidence of a cultural landscape in which women had now,
and not before many years of radical campaigning had prepared the ground,
advanced sufficiently in the struggle to reform and even abolish patriarchy that
they were now able to sit back and allow themselves to be pampered a little (I
simplify, of course, but this is the essence of the case for a feminist reading of
Mamma Mia and the like – we’ve done the politics and won, now let’s wear the
frocks and sing along to Dancing Queen – you know we want to!).
Sex and the City is a film about a female journalist, and the vehicle for the
story of four professional women living and working in new York. Carrie’s
journalism is of the confessional type which has become more prominent
in recent years, written by and for women (though men are by no means
excluded from enjoying it). It deals with love and sex and fashion, as does
the TV series. The movie version succeeds as cinematic entertainment, and
although it has little to say about the practice of style journalism, or the role
of women within the journalistic profession, that the film was made at all,
and its huge success (nearly $0.5 billion at the box office), confirm the trend
established by the Devil Wears Prada. ‘Women’s journalism’ has acquired a
cultural significance which reflects the raised status and spending power of its
core market, the post-feminist generation of working women with money to
spend, time to play, and the confidence to celebrate their femininity through
guilt-free conspicuous consumption. In the hierarchy of taste within which
the journalism of fashion and style has traditionally been subordinate to that
of manly subjects like war and economics, journalism by and for women has
been elevated.
The feminist movement remains divided around how to interpret this
turn in the culture, just as it is divided over how to interpret the rise of style
journalism. One of the leading scholarly works on women’s journalism,
acknowledges that there has been progress on the position of women within
the journalistic profession, while cautioning that this ‘does not necessarily
indicate their empowerment within media structures’ (Chambers et al., 2004:
10). Indeed not, but these authors go on to make the more problematic (it
seems to me) argument that the rise of women in journalism has coincided
with ‘a market-led, depoliticised “post-feminist” redefinition of news …
a post-feminist discourse is linked to a devaluation of serious news, such as

foreign affairs’ (Ibid.: 13).
This is precisely the criticism made of talk shows, lifestyle journalism and
other categories of public media seen as ‘women’s work’ by male commen-
tators. It endorses that patriarchal narrative of cultural decline (where decline
equals feminisation) when it explicitly condemns the ‘new girl’ writing of such
as Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City), who are blamed for failing
to bolster the professional credibility of the female columnist. This ‘new

girl writing’ has inspired and sanctioned the rise of a whole new feminine,
but covertly anti-feminist, journalistic form in the twenty-first century
in which it is now permissible for women to expose their own and other
women’s personal insecurities and vulgar habits, sexual conquests and
defeats, and abuses of substances and people. (2004: 217)
This cultural pessimism misreads the trends and understates the political
progress of which they are an index. just as the success of the film Mamma
Mia is a celebration of girlie things in which the most radical feminist can
now safely indulge, so Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada represent
in cinematic terms a feminised culture which recognises the importance of
clothes, fashion and romance to the modern woman, who works but also wants
to shop and look sexy. Both films speak to a cultural environment in which
what women want matters more than it ever did, commercially and politically,
and which a high-powered women’s journalism has developed to service.
nOTeS
1. The most recent and comprehensive study is contained in Women and Journalism, edited by
Deborah Chambers et al. This collection reviews the history of women in the profession, and
then addresses themes such as ‘Women war correspondents’ and confessional journalism.
The website of the Institute for the Study of Journalism in Popular Culture (www.ijpc.org)
contains joe Saltzman’s essay on ‘Sob sisters’. M. Djerf-Pierre’s 2008 essay in Nordicom
Review discusses the position of women journalists in Scandinavia.
2. Faye Hammill’s Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars is a recent and rare
book-length study of the ‘middlebrow’, and includes chapters on the journalistic work of
Dorothy Parker, anita loos and other women who struggled to be taken seriously as writers
because of their gender and subject matter.
3. Germaine Greer’s 1981 book The Obstacle Race traces the marginalisation of women within
visual culture (marginalised in every capacity except that of models and muses, of course),
and notes that the resources required to design and construct signature buildings, or to
stage the elaborate sets used by renaissance sculptors and painters, were denied to female
artists such as artemisia Gentileschi, who were thereby ‘hidden from history’ until late
twentieth-century feminist historians such as Greer rediscovered them.
4. Saltzman, j., ‘Sob sisters: the image of the female journalist in popular culture’, IJPC, 2003.
oins 113
5. For an essay on Duncan’s work, see Hammill 2004.

6. Goldenberg, S., ‘“Somehow I don’t feel it in my gut”’, Guardian, 1 December 2008.
7. Coverage of a 2008 exhibition of work by female photojournalist Susan Meiselas observed
that ‘ever since [the 1930s, when robert Capa defined the sub-genre with his images of the
Spanish Civil War] conflict photography has been seen, essentially, as a man’s job’ (abrams,
Melanie, ‘From the fringes to the frontline’, Guardian, 17 april 2008). The report noted
that even then, in the early twenty-first century, seventy years after lee Miller blazed the
trail, only seven of seventy-nine Magnum reporters were women.
8. research data and other material on the status of women in journalism is contained on
the website of the Fawcett Society (www.fawcettsociety.org.uk). Chambers et al. argue that
‘women are still concentrated in sectors considered to be “soft” news, such as those with
an emphasis on “human interest” stories, features and the delivery of a magazine-style of
journalism. In television – where spectacle counts – emphasis on the decorative value and
even the sexualisation of women journalists is overt’ (2004: 1). This is true, in respect of
figures such as Kirsty Young in the united Kingdom and her equivalents (young, attractive,
frequently blonde women) in other countries. To this day, the news media frequently run
articles alleging that female presenters and journalists are selected not for their professional
ability but for their looks, often at the expense of less photogenic men. The ‘sexualisation’ of
TV news in particular is linked with a broader marketisation of news, in which appearance
and presentation are considered to be more important than content.
10. Idem.
11. Ghiglione, l., ‘The american journalist: fiction versus fact’, unpublished essay on IJPC,
www.ijpc.org/ghigline.htm. See also Ghiglione, l., Saltzman, j., ‘Fact or fiction: Hollywood
looks at the news’, www.ijpc.org/hollywoodlooksatthenews2.pdf.
12. Saltzman, j., ‘Sob sisters: the image of the female journalist in popular culture’, IJPC,
2003.
13. Ghiglione, l., ‘The american journalist: fiction versus fact’, unpublished essay on IJPC,
www.ijpc.org/ghigline.htm. See also Ghiglione, l., Saltzman, j., ‘Fact or fiction: Hollywood
looks at the news’, www.ijpc.org/hollywoodlooksatthenews2.pdf.
Saltzman records that the term ‘sob sister’ dates back to 1907 and the trial of millionaire
Harry K. Thaw for a crime of passion. The trial was reported by four female reporters,
who became known as the ‘sob sisters’, meaning ‘big-hearted but soft-minded, emotionally
generous but intellectually sloppy’ (2003: 2).
15. Howard Good has written a book-length study of Torchy Blane in Girl Reporter (1998).
16. Saltzman, j., ‘Sob sisters: the image of the female journalist in popular culture’, IJPC,
2003.
17. She is compared to james Stewart’s campaigning journalist in Call Northside 777 (Henry
Hathaway, 1947) in a review by richard Kelly, Sight & Sound, volume 13, number 4, 2003.
18. Cited in Saltzman, j., ‘Sob sisters: the image of the female journalist in popular culture’,
IJPC, 2003.
19. Faye Hammill’s study observes that Parker’s writing negotiated the tensions between
femininity and public display in early celebrity culture, and that ‘her journalism mediates
the discourses of sophistication, sentiment and Modern love’ (2007: 29).
20. For example, when asked to make up a sentence with the word ‘horticulture’ in it, she
replied after some thought, ‘You can drag a horticulture, but you can’t make her think’.
21. leigh played a Parker-esque journalist in another film made around the same time, The
Hudsucker Proxy (Coen Brothers, 1994).
 8
Artists
I t is part of the mythology of journalism that every journalist secretly wishes

to be a novelist, and has an unpublished typescript or two in his or her desk
drawer. There is some truth in this notion, which arises from the fact that so
many journalists perceive their profession to be in some sense less worthy than
that of the true man or woman of letters, the genuine artist. Journalists often
harbour inferiority complexes, and even those who have succeeded in rising to
the upper ranks of the profession may see themselves as under-achievers who
have missed their true calling in life. In the hierarchy of cultural distinction,
journalism lies below literature in the minds of many of those who practise
either or both.
The rise of New Journalism in the 1960s, Tom Wolfe persuasively argued,
was a product not least of the ambition of some journalists to be regarded by
their peers and their publics as more than hacks, and to acquire the status
of literary figures in a cultural marketplace where literature was annointed as
Art and journalism was so often regarded as Trash. Hunter S. Thompson is
described in one recent profile as ‘a writer who wanted to be a novelist but
wound up revitalising journalism while simultaneously despising it’.1 His
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perhaps the best example of the ambivalence
created by the status gap which exists between journalism and creative writing,
the lingering sense even amongst the greatest of journalists that what they are
doing is less worthwhile as cultural practice than the work of the novelist or
poet. Is it a novel, or a work of reportage? Is it both, and does it matter?
By the ‘art’ of journalism I refer to the literary (or ‘New’) journalism of
Wolfe, Capote, Didion and Kapuscinski, and before them, to the book-length
reportage of George Orwell, John Reed and John Hershey. More recently, we
have seen the emergence of the Norwegian Asne Sierstad, whose books on
Afghanistan and Chechnya have achieved bestseller status all over the world.
Indeed, non-fiction publishing in general, including forms which may cross
iss 115
over into journalism but are regarded as distinct genres, such as autobiography
and memoir, has risen in the best seller lists. This is part of what one might call
a ‘cult of factuality’, or reality, by which I mean a widespread public interest in
the real, as opposed to the made-up, the imagined, the fictional, which charac-
terised late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalist culture.
Linked to that trend has been a public debate pursued in literary supple-
ments, culture shows on TV and radio, and even in self-consciously
postmodern comedy shows such as The Simpsons, about the nature of the
real and its representation in culture. In the past it was generally accepted
that journalists deployed facts to write news, while fiction writers called on
their sensibilities and aesthetic skills to create art. Both journalist and artist
addressed the real on some level, but there was generally recognised to be a
clear separation of the two. The rise of a cult of factuality (seen also in the
reality-TV phenomenon) has highlighted the status of Truth, and what kind
of representation is required, and best suited, to access it. The question ‘Is it
Art, or is it Journalism?’, similarly, has been the subject of more than one of the
films made about journalism since 1997.
THe ART Of JOuRNALISM
Although journalism and art have always been linked, albeit uneasily, the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen the subjective and creative
dimensions of journalism given much greater recognition and legitimacy than
ever before. In a world where the limits of objectivity and related concepts
such as journalistic detachment are widely acknowledged both by profes-
sionals and the critical community, the idea of journalism-as-art is no longer
controversial, be it in the context of a feature-length documentary by Scottish
director Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, 1999; Touching the Void,
2003),2 or a big-budget Hollywood exploration of the journalistic writing of
Truman Capote (Capote, Bennett Miller, 2005; Infamous, Douglas McGrath,
2006).
This chapter sits here in the ‘Heroes’ section of the book because journal-
istic artists are often celebrated cultural figures, even celebrities. 2008 saw the
cinema release of a feature-length documentary about Hunter S. Thompson,
one of the greatest journalistic celebrities of the late twentieth century. This
followed Terry Gilliam’s 1998 adaptation of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas (1998), and not one but two films about Truman Capote released in
the same twelve-month period in 2005–6.
These journalists were celebrities, yes, but were they characters to be
admired and emulated? I would answer yes, if only on the basis of those of my
students, colleagues and friends over the years who have advanced their names
as examples and role models, despite the alcoholism, the drug problems, their
unlikableness as human beings, their premature deaths. Those journalists who
have been recognised as artists have often been anti-heroes. Just as eastwood’s
Man With No Name was such an anti-hero, I will claim the likes of Thompson,
Capote and their journalist-artist peers as cultural icons signifying, on balance,
positive rather than negative characteristics.
The notion of journalism-as-art inevitably requires engagement with the
interplay between objectivity and subjectivity, and problematises the status of
the journalist as a detached, reliable observer of fact-based reality. What is
true, and what is invented in the book-length journalistic texts of Thompson
and Capote? That such questions have even to be asked makes some question
the integrity of such journalists, and of those like Michael Moore who present
themselves as journalists but are then accused of producing mere polemic,
or worse, propaganda for their favoured causes. Journalists who lay claim to
the status of auteurs and artists are often, for that very reason, controversial
figures and, if not quite villains, less than heroes of the type who populate The
Insider or Good Night, and Good Luck. They are inspirational figures, however,
attractive and compelling, even as their personal behaviour may appal (this is
certainly the case with Capote and Thompson).
Then again, heroes in any walk of life are usually more complex and ambiv-
alent characters than their public profiles suggest. And that, often, is precisely
the point of what these journalists write – to question the viewpoint which
sees the world in black and white, and Reality and Truth as easily accessible
phenomena. To bring this idea to the heart of the public sphere is transgressive
and boundary-breaking, and thus might in itself be judged an heroic act.
ART fOR JOuRNALISM’S SAKe
Christopher Hitchen’s foreword to a collection of the journalism of Karl Marx

(2007) begins with an anecdote encapsulating the tension that has always
existed between the practices of journalism and Art (where art has a capital
‘A’).
Commenting acidly on a writer whom I perhaps too naively admired,

my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask: ‘Wouldn’t you say,
Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?’ This lofty school-
master stressed the last term as he meant it to sting, and it rankled even
more than he had intended. Later on in life, I found that I still used to
mutter and improve my long-meditated reply. emile Zola – a journalist.
Charles Dickens – a journalist. Thomas Paine – another journalist. Mark
Twain. Rudyard Kipling. George Orwell – a journalist par excellence.
iss 117
Somewhere in my cortex was the idea to which Orwell himself once gave
explicit shape: the idea that ‘mere’ writing of this sort could aspire to
become an art, and that the word ‘journalist’ – like the ironic modern
english usage of the word ‘hack’ – could lose its association with the
trivial and the evanescent.3
Hitchens was not the first, nor the last, to find the commonplace critical
dismissal of journalistic writing troubling. from very early in the cultural
history of capitalism a divide opens up – a taste distinction, to use Bourdieu’s
term – between writing which is regarded as aesthetically worthy, and that
which is viewed as mechanical and workmanlike – as ‘hack work’, lacking
in literary merit. As John Carey persuasively argued in The Intellectuals and
the Masses (1992), the establishment of this hierarchy of literary value may
be viewed as a response to the growth of a mass reading public following the
educational reforms of the nineteenth century, and the subsequent need to wall
off the tastes and interests of the great unwashed from those of the educated
and monied elites who had hitherto monopolised both the production and the
consumption of writing. Buying into this view, and aspiring to the social cachet
associated with being an artist rather than a mere producer of news, many
journalists came to despise and devalue their own work, and to see it as much
less important and worthwhile than the writing of ‘literature’, especially of
novels, which by the late nineteenth century had become the dominant literary
form. Journalism came to be viewed not as a respectable pursuit in itself, but a
stepping stone, a bridge to something better than hack work. Michael Wolff’s
2008 biography of Rupert Murdoch recounts how the Australian media baron’s
father, Keith, having been expected to become a clergyman in late nineteenth
century Melbourne, ‘instead becomes a journalist’ and thereby turns himself
into something of a social outsider. This because ‘at the turn of the century,
journalism is nobody’s idea of a profession’ (2008: 64).
The widespread perception has been and remains (if it is now in decline,
not least thanks to films such as Capote and Infamous) that journalism is of
intrinsically lesser value than literature, and no group has held that view more
strongly than journalists themselves. In explaining the rise of what he termed
New Journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, Tom Wolfe argued
that many journalists harboured an inferiority complex about their status, and
wished for nothing more than to be thought of as ‘real’ writers (Wolfe and
Johnson 1975). This crisis of literary identity, he observed, was one of the
driving forces in the emergence in the twentieth century of a form of journalism
which explicitly united reportorial and literary techniques in pursuit of truth.
Wolfe’s essay on ‘The New Journalism’ is rightly seen as a key moment in
the development of what we might characterise as the fight back, since it both
recognised and championed the growing number of journalists who applied
the techniques of creative writing to their reportage. Wolfe and others had
been doing it since the 1960s; Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin and others from the
1950s. But as Hitchens’ examples remind us, the links between journalism
and fiction writing were already established long before that, in the nineteenth
century, in the work of Charles Dickens for example. In addition to his prolific
fiction output, Dickens wrote more than 350 articles comprising over a million
words of journalism in the form of reportage, columns and other short pieces
(Tulloch, 2007).
Dickens was himself one of those who regarded journalism as of lesser
value. John Tulloch notes with reference to Dickens that ‘one obvious reason
for the low status of english journalism has been its perceived lack of creative
control by the author compared to the control allegedly associated with the
“artist”’ (2007: 61). The journalist typically contributes material to a content
brief usually set by an editor, and to a style, length and general format deter-
mined by the publication in question. He or she lacks creative autonomy,
certainly by comparison with the novelist holed up in his garret somewhere,
penning the great book. And of course there is truth in this comparison. The
journalist is an employee, a wage slave, at least until s/he acquires the status
to initiate his or her own ideas for articles, to write or speak in his or her own
voice, and to be paid a salary in excess of the norm for his or her colleagues of
a similar age.
It was, of course, always inaccurate to juxtapose all journalists as publish-
ing’s proletarians selling words by the bushel, and literary writers as artists
with absolute freedom. These are stereotypes which mask the huge variety of
potential statuses accessible to a writer of either fact or fiction (or both, as
the literary journalists sought to become). All writers must sell their work if
they are to make a living from it, and all publishing has, since the invention of
the commercial printing press in late medieval europe, had the character of a
marketplace within which the writer must operate, selling a literary persona,
and the books and pamphlets within which it is contained.4 Within both
journalism and literature there are gradations of status, levels of autonomy
to which the writer may aspire, based on qualitative judgements of his or her
artistry as a writer, or marketability as an author (not always the same thing,
as in the autobiographical memoirs of TV and sports stars who employ ghost
writers to translate their anecdotes into book-length narratives).
Key to both practices is facility with the written word, the ability to commu-
nicate meaning through language, to convey truth not merely through the
accurate reportage of key facts, but in the evocation of atmosphere, feeling and
mood. Journalists tell ‘stories’, just like novelists and playwrights. News stories
can be analysed in terms of their narrative structure, their tone and register,
the way in which characters are drawn and plots resolved. Jack Lule has written
a book about ‘the mythological role of journalism’ which approaches news
iss 119
as ‘eternal stories’ with deep anthropological meanings for a society (2001).

from this perspective journalism is just another form of story-telling, a form
which happens to be ‘true’ where novels and other literary forms are imagined
or invented. Journalism is narrative, presenting the ‘facts’ of a situation in a
structure which has beginning, middle and end.
Conversely, much that is presented as literary invention is based on actual
events, or inspired by incidents drawn from a writer’s experience. ‘Write what
you know’ is standard advice for a creative writing student, reflecting the core
truth that all art, including the literary variety, must be based on experience.
The purpose of literature, or one of its purposes, is to tell the truth about
human experience in an original and insightful way. Great literature is no more,
perhaps, than the application of an outstandingly creative and sensitive mind to
the mysteries and complexities of the real, combined with the capacity to shine
a light on the apparent banalities of the everyday in a way that makes them
seem fresh and vital, and that reveals elements we had not perceived before.
Literature and journalism, if this is accepted, are just different pathways to
the same destination – that of understanding the real, recognising complexity,
accepting the relativity of truth.
It can be argued that the marketing power of the concept of objectivity,
which developed only in the late nineteenth century (borrowed from the world
of natural science) and was applied to journalism in an environment where
there were many news accounts competing for attention,5 prevented this accep-
tance of the underlying similarities between good journalism in particular and
good writing in general. The two types of text had different cultural functions,
different uses and exchange values in the growing media marketplace, and thus
different socio-economic statuses. That this was linked to a hierarchy of taste
in which objective journalism was deemed inferior to subjective art can be read
as part of liberal humanity’s affection for all things judged to be somehow
beyond the realm of bureaucratic and organisational rules, and thus in some
sense ‘free’.
This attitude changed in the twentieth century, for a number of reasons.
first, one might argue, it was simply unsustainable in a world where writers
of the stature of Dickens, Hemingway, Greene and Orwell wrote journalism,
and where broader and broader swathes of the population were accessing
writing of quality through popular news and periodical media (such as those
run and contributed to by Dickens). The elitism of the view that there was
something called ‘literature’, easily separable from popular modes of writing
such as journalism, began to creak as the twentieth century got under way, and
as new mass media such as cinema, radio and then TV emerged to challenge
the ‘high culture’ platforms of the past. Graham Greene, one of the century’s
greatest novelists, wrote film reviews for the London Times, the Spectator and
Sight & Sound,6 as did many other acknowledged literary artists. In those
circumstances it was probably inevitable that the largely arbitrary, socially

constructed line between high and low culture would begin to be eroded.
THe ePISTeMOLOGICAL CHALLeNGe TO OBJeCTIVITy
If the connections and similarities between journalism and art were becoming
more obvious in the early twentieth century, thus challenging the objectivity/
subjectivity binary, also of importance in the emergence of a more self-
consciously literary journalism was the epistemological revolution in scientific
method, and the erosion of the concept of objectivity as commonly under-
stood. Developments in natural science, such as the discovery of relativity in
physics, of the uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics, problematised
the hitherto dominant view of detached observation, and reportage of that
observation as the only scientific method available to the objective observer.
It was not that reportage was declared redundant (just as laboratory experi-
mentation remained central to natural science, reportage and the standards
associated with it were and remain at the core of journalism of quality), but
that ideas about the nature of reality, and of how to retrieve reliable accounts of
reality from inherently subjective observers, had to adapt to a world in which
the concept of relativity had been accepted, and the role of observer viewpoint
had acquired enhanced significance.
The impact of these advances was felt also in philosophy, and in the growth
of analogous concepts such as that of cultural relativism: the idea that the
meaning of human behaviour can only be understood in the context within
which it occurs. In journalistic terms this meant that there was, in principle,
more than one objective or true account of events available for extraction
by a reporter; that how things looked depended on one’s viewing position,
which could change, and which was shaped in part by individual history and
context. This idea could not form and spread until it had been accepted in the
realms of science and philosophy which had traditionally provided journalism
with its epistemological models. Journalism had long looked to science for
legitimation of its truth claims. Objectivity functioned as the seal of approval
on journalistic endeavour from the point at which it become necessary to
market news as a commodity. As science abandoned simple notions of objec-
tivity, so over time did journalists. The notion of Absolute Truth, of a pure
knowledge which could be extracted from the coarse ore of reality, gave way to
acceptance of truth as something which could legitimately and in good faith
be contested, debated, argued over, between sides which might both believe
that they were telling the truth, because this was how events and issues looked
to them.
iss 121
THe RISe Of PuBLIC ReLATIONS
Another factor driving the decline of a certain notion of objectivity around this
time was the rise of a parallel profession, or craft, or trade known variously as
public relations, public affairs or press counselling.
While public relations, defined as the practice of managing communication,
and its meanings as understood by various publics has a long history, it begins
to be recognised as a professional communication practice only in the first
decades of the twentieth century.7 Only then, as mass democracy became a
political reality and mass media correspondingly expanded their reach and
influence, did the importance of managing meaning and thus influencing
public opinion become apparent, and a profession emerge to carry out the work
of what Walter Lippman called without apology ‘manufacturing consent’.8 for
Lippmann and others, the complexity of twentieth-century life would require
not merely competent, objective journalism to help the newly enfranchised
citizenry make sense of it, but another kind of communicator able to make
sense of things for the journalist.
facts may be ‘spun’, to use contemporary vernacular, at the same time as
they are given the necessary shape and structure for use by journalists. Truth
may be manipulated, constructed, bent and twisted. And thus we have another
reason to be suspicious of those claiming to be the purveyors of pure objec-
tivity, or uninterested truth. Not only are meanings the product of particular
viewpoints on the ‘facts’; they are moulded to suit particular interests. And
with that understanding already clear to journalists nearly a century ago, the
line from objectivity to subjectivity in reportage, from professional detachment
to passionate propaganda, was not difficult to cross.
TWO BOOKS THAT SHOOK THe WORLD
In the early twentieth century American journalist John Reed published what
was undoubtedly intended as a work of, if not propaganda then eulogy, and
which can be read now as one of the pioneering works of self-consciously
produced ‘literary journalism’: Ten Days That Shook the World, his eye-witness
account of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Reed was a foreign corre-
spondent, a reporter, and also a revolutionary socialist who believed in the
power of journalism to change things. Presented with the opportunity of a real
live socialist revolution in Russia, he travelled there and put together a book-
length account of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power. In his preface
he observes that while ‘my sympathies were not neutral … in telling the story
of those great days I have tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious
reporter, interested in setting down the truth’ (2007: 13). In his introduction
to the Penguin edition, historian A. J. P. Taylor acknowledged the book as a

political classic, and warned that Reed’s account was not a detached or objective
account of the revolution, but one in which the drama was heightened, and
‘imaginative detail’ added. ‘Much of Reed’s book is fiction’, he observes. The
book became the source of a subsequent mythology of the events it describes,
including a Soviet government-sponsored film directed by Sergei eisenstein
in 1927.
John Reed’s short life became the subject of Reds, directed by Warren
Beatty (who also played the lead role) and released to huge critical acclaim
in 1981 (it won three Oscars, for Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and
Cinematography). Described by Peter Biskind as ‘one of the most audacious
and politically literate movies ever to come out of Hollywood’,9 Reds told the
story of Reed’s relationship with fellow-socialist and journalist Louise Bryant,
and his epic project to both report on and participate in the experience of
the Russian Revolution. As is typical for mainstream movies, Reds played
fast and loose with the facts of the Reed-Bryant story, emphasising its tragic-
romantic elements, but as Biskind’s Vanity Fair article notes, for a movie made
by a top Hollywood studio at the onset of the Ronald Reagan presidency and
what would soon come to be known as the ‘New Cold War’ it is a remarkable
achievement, reclaiming a period of American left history that had been
ignored and forgotten by mainstream cultural producers.
figure 19 Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981). Source: BfI

iss 123
In its 195-minute running length the aesthetic dimension of Reed’s

journalism, and his qualities as a writer, are rarely the primary focus of the
film, but throughout there is substantial engagement with the question of
the journalist’s responsibility to the facts of a situation when he is politi-
cally committed. Should he be an enthusiastic participant in the events being
reported and, if so, does he risk becoming a propagandist? And if so, can this
ever be justified? In the scenes at the end of the film, when he is trapped in
Russia and under pressure to work in the service of the Communist party,
Reed begins to assert his liberal credentials as an independent figure. While
the senior party figure Georgy Zinoviev presents the Leninist approach to
journalism – that there is no such thing as ‘freedom’ of the press, no such
thing as objectivity, which is a bourgeois ideological myth10 – Reed sticks to his
guns, becoming increasingly disillusioned. He dies a broken man in Moscow
in 1920, Bryant by his side (which really did happen).
Reds has the distinction of being the only big-budget Hollywood movie
ever made which dares to make a sex symbol of an American Communist.
It also rescues from the margins of history a key work of twentieth-century
journalism, and one that pioneered the long-form literary style of later
decades. Ten Days … can be read by unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists as
an inspirational, rabble-rousing account of their movement’s greatest revolu-
tionary triumph, and by historians as a documentary source for the October
events. It is also, for we journalism students, a pioneering experiment in the
interplay of detachment and participation, of objectivity and subjectivity,
which acknowledges the capacity of the reporter’s emotional involvement to
generate a kind of truth that mere reportage on its own cannot. The structure
of the film, in which Jack Nicholson plays a key supporting role as playwright
eugene O’Neill, places journalism alongside literature and invites us to
consider them aesthetic equals in their capacity to evoke and comment on
the real.
Of particular importance in Reed’s book is its stress on the epistemological
value of authorial participation, of emotional engagement with the material
about which one is, as a journalist, striving to be accurate and honest. This
principle had always been accepted in fiction, but had not really been considered
as relevant to journalism, except perhaps in the context of the research under-
taken to prepare a story. Ten Days … is an acknowledgement of the inevitable
partiality of the journalistic observer, and a plea for the value of the reportage
which such partiality permits. Reds takes us beyond Reed’s book, to the point
where partiality becomes mere propaganda and, in Beatty’s account of Reed’s
final months, something to be resisted.
IN COLD BLOOD
The seeds of what Tom Wolfe called ‘New Journalism’ were already being
sown, then, in the early twentieth century, if not before (was there ever a time,
indeed, when the techniques and tricks of the creative writer were not being
applied by journalists, and vice versa, whether either group admitted to it or
not?). It was not until the 1960s, however, and the emergence of a distinct
group of journalists who, like Wolfe, rejected the inferiority complex which
had surrounded their profession and proclaimed the literary qualities of good
journalism that its status as Art began to be widely accepted. Before this,
recalls Wolfe, ‘no-one was used to thinking of reporting as having an aesthetic
dimension’, and certainly not in the context of popular journalism.
There was no such thing as a literary journalist [his emphasis] working

for popular magazines or newspapers. If a journalist aspired to literary
status – then he had better have the sense and the courage to quit the
popular press and try to get into the big league.(1975: 21)
Thirty-five years later Wolfe’s essay remains essential reading for all students
of a journalism that, if no longer ‘new’, does have an aesthetic dimension in
so far as it aspires to the qualities of art, while remaining in the service of
reportage; and who are prepared to believe that the application of ‘artistic’
tools are the path to a deeper, higher truth than mere objectivity alone can
enable.11
Truman Capote was a key figure in the New Journalism movement
described by Wolfe, mainly because of his long-form ‘non-fiction novel’. In
Cold Blood was published first in the New Yorker magazine and then as a book
(Capote 1966). unlike John Reed’s Ten Days …, In Cold Blood (subtitled ‘A
true account of a murder and its consequences’) is not a political book, nor a
work of propaganda for anything other than the author’s own interpretation
of events, but it is closer to Reed’s reportorial approach than to anything we
might view as ‘objective journalism’. At nearly 100,000 words in length, it is
novelistic in form, divided into four chapters (the four New Yorker pieces)
with sections of dialogue, description and authorial intervention. It is a
murder mystery – who killed the Clutters, and why? – but one constructed
from personal research and observation, as well as official documents and other
sources of information familiar to journalists. Capote writes in his acknow-
ledgements that ‘all the material in this book not derived from my own obser-
vation is either taken from official records or is the result of interviews with the
persons directly concerned’. In Cold Blood is a ‘true crime’ story, as the genre
is popularly known, but written with all the skill of a recognised literary genius
who employs his powers to create a work which quickly became a classic not
iss 125
just of late twentieth-century journalism, but late twentieth-century literature.

In doing so, Capote highlighted the problematic nature of the distinction
between the two.
CapOTe AND INFaMOuS
We wait for nearly a century of cinema history for a film which explores in
depth the subject of journalism-as-art, and then two come along at once. Not
only that, but both films are about the same journalist, Truman Capote. even
more remarkably, both are about the same piece of journalism, a series of
feature articles published by New Yorker magazine in 1965 about a hitherto
obscure murder case in Kansas, and a subsequent work of non-fiction entitled
In Cold Blood. Would you credit it?12
Both Capote and Infamous take as their subject the potential unreliability of
the journalistic narrator, and the validity of using literary techniques (Capote
was already an established novelist, short story and screenplay writer when he
embarked on the project which became In Cold Blood) to convey a more intense
truth than conventional reportage alone could achieve. We are shown, for
example, how Capote never uses tape recorders when interviewing the killers of
figure 20 Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005). Source: BfI

figure 21 Infamous (Douglas McGrath, 2006). Source: BfI

iss 127
the Clutter family, or others involved with the case, but reconstructs conversa-
tions from memory. He has, he claims, a photographic memory. But he would
say that, wouldn’t he, and how from this distance would we be able to prove
otherwise? Journalists embellish things, after all. Maybe he made up some, if
not all of the intimate details that make In Cold Blood so gripping. In Capote
we see the author confess to fictionalising his written description of a visit to
the mortuary where the bodies of the murdered family are laid out. His point,
though, is that the details do not matter as much as the essence of the scene,
which he insists he has captured accurately. In going along with this argument,
we accept that truth is indeed a largely subjective matter, constructed not just
from facts and figures but moods and feelings, from impressions as much as
observations.
Both of the Capote films are remarkable for their interest – given the
popular medium in which they work – in the complex matter of where the
boundaries exist between Journalism and Art, if indeed they exist at all.13 Both
films dare to make the radical suggestion that the gap between fiction and fact
is narrow, even as both narrativise and inevitably fictionalise the ‘true’story of
how Capote came to write In Cold Blood. Infamous goes rather too far, in my
view, when it has Capote kiss an imprisoned, muscle-bound, guitar-strumming
Perry played by Daniel Craig – an incident for which there is precisely no
evidential basis. Capote, on the other hand, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s
Oscar-winning performance, gives the author a more commanding physicality
than he is reliably reported to have had. No matter. The relative nature of truth,
its constructedness, is embedded in both films, and we must accept them on
those terms or not at all. Neither account is absolutely ‘true’, nor do we expect
it to be. Both tell different untruths, eroding our faith in their narrators, just
as the narrator who is their subject comes to be seen as unreliable. unreliable
narration is, indeed, their subject. Why apologise for artistic licence in films
about a journalist-artist who crossed the line between the two practices with
such bravado? There is no single Truth, only the account of what happened,
inflected by the creative imagination of the author, and which may recreate a
deeper, more authentic truth than that contained in the police documents and
court files.
Capote’s In Cold Blood – what he deliberately called his ‘non-fiction novel’
– was one of the first examples of a journalism which consciously, and without
apology, blurred the traditional dividing lines between fact and fiction. In
Cold Blood was itself made into a film in the 1960s,14 and both Capote bio-pics
explore the process of researching and writing it, inviting their audiences to
reflect on the balance it strikes between reportorial objectivity and personal
subjectivity. Both ask the question: is In Cold Blood a work of journalistic
reportage, or novelistic imagination? Which is the pathway to the greater truth
– objective accuracy in reportage, or sensitivity and subjectivity – creativity, in
short – in rendering the facts as feelings and emotions to which we can relate
and empathise as fellow human beings? Are the two qualities reconcilable
within a single text?
Asking these questions in the mainstream movie multiplex in 2005–6,
as Miller and McGrath were able to, was the culmination of a long process
encompassing almost the entire twentieth century in which liberal capitalist
societies gradually came to accept that there was more to journalism than
the detachment of the reporter; that ‘truth’ was a quality not reducible to
factual accuracy; that there was a valuable dimension of truth to be gleaned
from the application of novelistic techniques to reportage; that the boundaries
between fact and fiction were indeed breaking down. Such boundaries were
always porous, and scholars have been critiquing the ‘myth’ of journalistic
objectivity for decades,15 but such was the legitimising power of the concept
for journalism as a profession that it could not be fully acknowledged until
the end of the century, when the awareness of something loosely called
‘postmodernism’ or ‘cultural relativism’ had emerged into public discourse,
problematising the notion of Absolute Truth as an entity extractable from
reality by the application of appropriate reportorial techniques. By then,
capitalist societies had acquired both the vocabulary and the philosophical
tools to grasp that the truth of ‘what really happened’ in a given situation
is much more complex and difficult to ascertain than the confident appli-
cation of something called ‘objectivity’ might suggest. The dedication of such
a quantity of film-making resources to telling the story of a dead American
writer and his book about a tragic 1950s murder case reflects the impact of
that awareness.
FeaR aND LOaThING
Operating in the same zone of epistemological relativity and generic ambiguity

as Truman Capote, but with a very different style and aim, was the inventor of
what came to be known as ‘gonzo’ journalism, Hunter S. Thompson. When
Capote published the first instalment of In Cold Blood in September 1965,
Thompson was a rising twenty-eight-year-old features writer for the National
Observer. There is nothing in his letters of the time to suggest that Thompson,
who was a notoriously macho writer, found anything to like about the effem-
inate, homosexual Capote, but in their attempts to cross the fact/fiction
boundary with a journalism saturated in literary technique they undoubtedly
have much in common.
Thompson was a typically frustrated fiction writer of the kind written about
by Wolfe in ‘The New Journalism’. He regarded his 1962 novel The Rum Diary,
based on his experiences as a reporter in Puerto Rico, as inferior and hardly
iss 129
worthy of publication, and he was probably right (the novel was eventually
published in 1998, by which time anything written by Thompson had acquired
a market value). The first volume of his letters, The proud highway (1997),
makes it clear that from an early age his ambitions were novelistic rather than
journalistic, and that his model, or hero, was ernest Hemingway, another
journalist who saw fiction as the more worthy form. Where Hemingway
successfully made the leap from reporter to novelist, however, Thompson by
his own account stumbled on another path to literary greatness, defining his
own journalistic sub-genre – gonzo.
Reported by one source to have its roots in Boston bar culture, and referring
to the last man standing after a heavy drinking session, the adjective ‘gonzo’
describes a form of journalism which took the literary elements of the New
Journalism identified by Wolfe and embodied in Thompson’s 1966 book hell’s
angels, and then added something else – not merely authorial presence at the
scene of the events being reported; not only active participation in those events
(as dramatised by Warren Beatty playing John Reed in Reds); but provocation
by the reporter of those being observed and reported on. The consequences of
this participation-provocation would then be described in prose heavily influ-
enced by alcohol and other drugs, undermining the reliability of the narrator
but heightening the descriptive power of the prose and the force of its author’s
message. Thompson was clearly an angry man in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as
a man more or less permanently stoned. His journalism reflected this unapolo-
getic hedonism, as well as the ethos and lifestyle of the youth sub-culture going
on around him. His style was transgressive and anti-authority, yet controlled
and efficient, spawning countless imitators. To this day, Thompson’s florid
phrasing and stream of consciousness narration inspires journalism students
to attempt emulation, if rarely with the success of the original.
Hanging over Thompson’s work is the question: is it journalism, or art?
fact or fiction? Where Wolfe welcomed the emergence of a journalism which
used literary devices, and Capote talked about the non-fiction novel as a valid
literary form whose time had come, Thompson invited the reader not to worry
about such distinctions. There was no such thing as objectivity, in his view, but
neither did it matter if his most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
was an objective, true account of a weekend spent covering a motorcycle race
in the southern desert city, or a series of drug-fuelled impressions recording
the end of the American Dream and the onset of the Nixonian nightmare (as
Thompson characterised it). Thompson happily drew attention to his own
unreliability as a narrator, while insisting that there was some kind of essential
truth in his account of events. One had to be stoned to understand America
and see it for what it was, was his point, or at least to be able to live in it with
any dignity. But was the product of this approach journalism, and why would
Thompson be so concerned to label it as such?
figure 22 Fear and Loathing in Las Vagas (Terry Gilliam, 1998). Source: BfI
In his foreword to The proud highway William J. Kennedy describes

Thompson as ‘a journalistic fictionist’ (Thompson, 1997: xvii). The first
genuinely ‘gonzo’ piece, ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’,
was where he discovered, as Kennedy puts it, ‘that confounding sums of money
could be had by writing what seemed to be journalism, while actually you were
developing your fictional ouvre’. Thompson created himself as a character in
his own writing, and it was never entirely clear if this character was real or
imagined. In claiming to be a journalist, however, Thompson also laid claim to
the privileged cultural status of factuality.
Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seeks to capture
this heightened reality, or sur-reality, by means of special effects and close
adherence to Thompson’s written text. Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro
play Thompson (or Raoul Duke) and his ‘lawyer’ with their usual skill (Depp
truly looks the part, and became a genuine friend of Thompson as a result of
the production). But something is lost (or so it seems to this writer) in the
translation from page to screen, as if by faithfully playing out Thompson’s
scenes to a late 1990s audience, including the most misogynistic and cruel
episodes, the script misses out on the late 1960s/early 1970s context of the
original material. Separated from their original time and place by three decades,
the satirical force of the transgressions of Duke and his lawyer is blunted.
Fear and Loathing … is a flawed adaptation of a great book, but stands as
a late twentieth-century recognition of the power of Thompson’s journalism,
iss 131
and clear evidence of our fascination as a culture with those journalists who
boldly stray across the fact-fiction boundary.16 The success of first the book,
and then the film of the book, followed by the ever-expanding industry devoted
to excavating Thompson’s career which followed his suicide in 2005 signal our
readiness to see the world not through the eyes of the objective reporter alone
(and gonzo has never replaced conventional journalism, merely challenged its
self-proclaimed monopoly on truth) but also through the eyes of the artist
in journalist’s clothing. Through the unique perspective of the aesthetically
gifted, sensitive individual, we approach a truth which the best and most
diligent of BBC News or CNN reporters may miss.
By 1975, as Alex Gilbey’s documentary shows (Gonzo, 2008), Thompson’s
best work was done, and the rest of his life was spent mainly as a celebrity
columnist and then, towards the end, on the effort to make money from his
unpublished writings such as The Rum Diary and the letters (the latter are
essential reading for their awe-inspiring picture of a hugely prolific young
writer finding his voice). And why not? His ten years of greatness made him
not merely a celebrity journalist, but a legend and icon. Most will agree that he
was entitled to make something of that status while he remained alive and in a
position to benefit from it. He died in 2005, at his own hands, with a shotgun,
in the manner of his literary hero ernest Hemingway and for broadly the same
reasons – alcoholic burn-out, masculine melancholia, fear of growing old.17
CONCLuSION
The interest of contemporary film-makers in journalism-as-art (and of

documentary-makers in cinema as a journalistic medium) does not signal the
end or death of objectivity as a guiding principle of journalism. far from it.
Objectivity – what it means, why it is important, how to go about applying it in
one’s work – are essential starting points for the twenty-first century journalist.
S/he, even more than the journalist of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, inhabits an almost infinitely complex media environment, where
news is globalised, networked, decentralised; where the boundaries between
professional journalist and amateur blogger, social networker or citizen
journalist are porous and shifting. This is an environment of exponentially
expanded and accelerated information flow, where the provenance of news and
thus its reliability and veracity are not always clear. In such an environment
quality standards become more important than ever, both as a branding tool
for news organisations, and as a guarantee that user-generated content (uGC)
and other forms of journalism provided by non-journalists can be relied upon
to tell the truth (in so far as there is truth available to be told). In the past
journalists sifted and sorted reality, ordering and structuring events in the form
of news, making them intelligible to an audience. Today, allegiance to at least

the aspiration to objectivity permits us all, whether producers or consumers of
news and journalism, to sort and sift through the immense quantity of infor-
mation which circulates on the internet. People may lie about their objectivity,
or fake it, as some in the journalistic profession have always done, and it is
necessary to maintain vigilance when using the expanded, globalised public
sphere as a news source. But in adherence to the concept of objectivity we have
at least one criterion by which to measure the quality of information.
What the cinema of journalism-as-art tells us, however, is that while striving
after objectivity may be a necessary condition of ‘good’ journalism, it is not
sufficient to guarantee a (or the most) truthful account of events. The telling of
a journalistic, fact-based story, no less than that of a fiction, while founded on
observation and accurate reportage of what is observed, may acquire greater
truth value when subject to the interpretative, sense-making powers of the
observer.
NOTeS
1. Wise, Damon, ‘Gonzo’s back’, Guardian, 6 December 2008.
2. Kevin Macdonald subsequently directed State of play (2009), about a journalist investi-
gating political corruption, released after this book was completed and thus not available for
inclusion in the main narrative. The film, starring Russell Crowe, was adapted from a 2003
uK television production.
3. Hitchens, C., ‘The Grub Street years’, Guardian, 16 June 2007.
4. for an account of The printing Revolution in early Modern europe and its impact on the
commodification of culture, see elisabeth eisenstein’s 1983 book. She shows how the devel-
opment of a reading public in europe created a demand for literary personality, a cult of the
individual author which had not existed before
5. This is the account provided by historians such as Michael Schudson (1978) and Dan
Schiller (1981) with specific reference to the united States, where the expansion of the
telegraph and the proliferation of news agencies across a vast territory required the devel-
opment of standards for judging the quality of news – one of these being ‘objectivity’.
6. for an essay on a particular episode arising from one of these reviews, when Greene and his
publisher were taken to court for alleged libel, see Keeble and Wheller (2008).
7. for a more detailed account of the history of public relations see my Introduction To political
Communication, 4th edition (McNair 2007).
8. from Lippmann’s public Opinion, pp. 314–15, first published in 1922 (1954).
9. Biskind, Peter, ‘Thunder on the left’, Vanity Fair, March 2006.
10. for a discussion of Marxist-Leninist press theory, and its evolution following the October
revolution, see McNair 1991 and Anna Arutunyan’s recent The Media In Russia (2009).
11. Wolfe argued not only that journalism could have an aesthetic dimension, and could at its
best be literature of the highest quality, but that literary journalism had by the late twentieth
century replaced the novel as the great ‘social realist’ form. for Wolfe, the journalistic writing
of Breslin and others was doing in the 1960s what the novels of Dickens and others had
done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – documenting and dramatising
iss 133
the dysfunctional aspects of capitalist social relations, dissecting and commenting upon
them in a form accessible to mass readerships, in a popular cultural context. This important
function of literature (as Wolfe perceived it) had been abandoned by the self-obsessed
navel-gazing of post-war, postmodern literary fiction, leaving the new journalists to carry
on the work of writing about lived social reality in a creative but still authentic way. Dickens,
Steinbeck, Zola, in Wolfe’s view, wrote novels full of documentary detail, often based on
personal observation, about subjects that mattered to people. What the new journalists did
was not so different in method from great literature, even if it enjoyed nothing like the same
status. Perhaps one day it would, Wolfe clearly hoped. Indeed, his own non-fiction books,
such as The Right Stuff (1979), would contribute substantially to that effort, while his later
novels (The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a Man In Full (1998), I am Charlotte Simmons
(2004)) were an attempt to reclaim the high ground of social realism from cinema, which
had become, as he put it in hooking up (2000), ‘the great naturalistic story-telling medium
of the late twentieth century’ (160).
hooking up, and the essay ‘My Three Stooges’ in particular, provides a coda to The
New Journalism, and brings Wolfe back full circle to the novel. Attacking Norman Mailer,
John updike and John Irving for their ‘otherworldly preciousness’, in ‘My Three Stooges’
Wolfe recalls that ‘in 1973, while I was still exclusively a writer of non-fiction, fourteen
years before I published my first novel, I wrote an essay on what was known then as the
“New Journalism”. In it, I said that the American novel was in bad shape, but that there was
a tremendous future for a sort of novel that will be called the journalistic novel, or perhaps
documentary novel, a novel of “intense social realism based upon the same painstaking
reporting that goes into the New Journalism”’ (2000: 147). Wolfe’s three novels to date were
written to this brief, and achieved varying degrees of critical and commercial success. A
fourth novel, Back to Blood, was published in 2009.
12. The film industry is a business, and investors routinely hedge their bets. Production
companies hear about this or that project underway at a rival studio, and decide they better
have something like it in production, just in case it is a big hit. Just as TV channels engage in
competitive scheduling, film production companies do not want to be made to look slow or
old-fashioned by the competition. This is why films often come in cycles. The fact that these
films were made is worthy of note, however, as the sign of a particular cultural moment, an
indication of the extent to which by the early twenty-first century public interest had grown
in the subject of journalism-as-art.
13. James, N., ‘Capote’, Sight & Sound, volume 24, number 3.
14. In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967).
15. This is a central theme of academic media and journalism studies from the 1970s, exemplified
by the work of the Glasgow university Media Group (1976, 1978), Gaye Tuchman (1972)
and Judith Lichtenberg (1991).
16. Thompson’s life and work were the subject of an earlier, much less successful film directed
by Art Linson and called Where the Buffalo Roam (1980). Starring a youthful Bill Murray as
Thompson, this film has the ramshackle look and feel of a home movie made by his friends
and admirers, all of whom appear to be as stoned as their subject.
17. for a critical take on Gonzo, see Cox, David, ‘Gonzo and better forgotten’, Guardian,
22 December 2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/22/hunter-s-
thompson-gonzo-and-better-forgotten).
Part III
Villains
 9
Rogues, reptiles and repentant

sinners
J ournalists are heroes, their watchdog duties inscribed in the founding

mythology of liberal democracy. They are also villains, when they fail to
perform these duties adequately, or if they disregard or neglect their normative
functions as watchdogs and witnesses to become, instead, manipulators of the
truth, fabricators of the facts, abusers of the monitoring power which has been
bestowed upon them. In this guise journalists are represented in cinema as, at
best, lovable rogues; at worst, loathsome reptiles for whom death itself is not
too severe a punishment. The chapters in Part III explore examples of each.
At the outset, and as a generalisation, one can say that films in which
journalists are represented as heroic tend to be those in which as investigators,
watchdogs and witnesses they are seen to challenge power, or to have power
challenge them, as they go about their democratically ordained functions of
monitoring and surveillance, analysis, critical scrutiny and commentary. These
films tend to be critical of power (or more precisely, its abuses), and celebratory
of the role of the journalist in facing down that power, be it in the political,
economic, or military spheres (or media power, for that matter – as we have
seen, journalists such as Lowell Bergman and Ed Murrow have been repre-
sented as heroic in their struggle with their own managers and proprietors).
Films about journalists as villains, on the other hand, tend to critique the
media institutions themselves, and those who work in them, and in particular
the popular, ‘tabloid’ media. In a similar fashion to much scholarly critique of
journalism, film-makers tend to equate popular with degenerate, damaging,
noteworthy.
At the same time as film-makers attack the news media, they may defend
the actions of power elites, or at least attempt to present sympathetically those
elites’ perspectives on events, and to frame their consequent desire to constrain
or control rogue journalists as having validity. Journalists may be accused of
subverting legitimate (and very necessary) authority, or of undermining good
government. They may be accused of inappropriate or unjustified interference

in the private lives of those whom they write about. They may be blamed for
damaging society itself, of degrading, dumbing down or otherwise corroding
the cultural life in which they play so central a role by flooding it with sleaze
and infotainment. Where journalists are represented as the villains of the piece,
movies become the watchdogs of the watchdogs, a third tier of critical scrutiny
overseeing both the fourth estate and those institutions and individuals which
the fourth estate is charged with overseeing.
There is an important difference between the two modes of scrutiny, of
course. In contrast to the practitioners of liberal journalism movie-makers
are not bound by objectivity and the professional rules designed to ensure
journalistic authority by mobilising consent around perceptions of reliability,
accuracy, honesty and integrity. The media critiques constructed by film-
makers appeal to their audiences by reference to other criteria – aesthetic
and stylistic innovation, the application of personal judgement (legitimised
because of the recognised creative status of the author responsible), and the
mobilisation of story-telling techniques and resources which, when all are
put together to make a finished film, might win over audiences and capture
the zeitgeist in a way which gives them resonance beyond the cinema. Where
journalism in its normative mode avoids emotion and polemic in favour of
detachment and seriousness of tone (a style echoed in classics of heroic repre-
sentation such as All the President’s Men and Good Night, and Good Luck),
the film-maker concerned to represent journalistic villainy is more likely to
dramatise and exaggerate for effect, to play to the gallery with the crudest of
stereotypes and caricatures.
Many such films (Sydney Lumet’s Network comes to mind [1976]) are
satirical in tone, and thus licensed to go over the top in pursuit of their point.
This has led to some ripe portrayals down the years, and satires such as
Natural Born Killers and Rag Trade have been harshly criticised for their lack
of believability, which probably misses the point of satire. On the other hand,
some of the very best movies ever made about journalism have been those
which portray the most villainous characteristics of the profession in bold,
primary colours. Nor should this be surprising. Heroes, if truth be told, can
be dull and boring, and villains much more interesting both for actors to play
and audiences to watch. The most appealing characters in movies, including
movies about journalism, are often those which combine heroism and villainy
–Walter Burns in His Girl Friday, for example. Nicole Kidman’s performance
in To Die For – the most irredeemably loathsome of all the characters she has
ever played – is regularly cited as one of her best. Likewise, Kirk Douglas in
Ace in the Hole and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success are cast-against-
type villains whose performances drive classic movies of the journalism genre.
We love to hate them.
ogus, ils nd nn sinns 139
Movies, then, in their function as meta-media engaged in the construction

of regulatory and legitimatory myth, are not merely celebratory of journalism
at its idealised best, but interrogative and critical of the journalist’s flaws and
failings. This reflects the duality of journalists’ oscillating social contribution
as either heroes or villains.
HEROES OR VILLAINS? JOuRNALISTS ON ScREEN,

1997–2008
In a 2008 piece for the Guardian Stephen Armstrong observed that ‘recently, the
screen seems to have fallen out of love with the [journalism] trade’.1 I disputed
this assertion in a letter to the same newspaper published a week later,2 citing A
Mighty Heart and Good Night, and Good Luck as recent examples of journalists
being portrayed as heroes. Are they typical, however, of the journalism movies
released in the period 1997–2008? As we saw in chapter 4 the majority of
those films portrayed the journalist as, in general terms, heroic. But there were
villains aplenty, as there have been throughout cinema history. These repre-
sentations can be grouped into three categories:
• The lovable rogue.

In this category the villainy is of the kind we can live with, may indeed be
attracted to; the charming fellow (and such villains are usually men) who is,
with the best will in the world, not to be trusted; the cad, or ‘bad boy’ whom
women love, but would never dream of marrying. He is often played by the
leading men of the time – clark Gable, cary Grant, Richard Gere, George
clooney.
• The reptile.
This is the figure with few, if any redeeming qualities, who embodies without
apology or hesitation the very worst of what journalism can be in a market-
driven media culture. He or she (and there are some memorable female reptiles
in cinema) is wholly loathsome.
• The repentant sinner (or reformed rogue).

This is the category of celluloid hack who knows that he or she is violating the
normative principles of liberal journalism, for whatever reason (usually profes-
sional advancement) and feels guilty about it. Such a representation will tend
to involve a struggle between heroism and villainy, or between good and evil
– between the conscience of the journalist and the pragmatic realities within
which he or she works.
THE LOVABLE ROGuE – FROM HiS GiRL FRiDAy TO

RuNAwAy BRiDe
There is a long and honourable tradition of films about journalism which

have featured what I will characterise as the lovable rogue – the figure who
displays many of the characteristics of journalism which we love to hate, such
as lack of trustworthiness, but who is nevertheless a sympathetic, even sexy
character. The lovable rogue is nearly always played by a leading actor of his
time (and the sub-genre is very much a male-defined form). The lovable rogue
is glamorous and sexy, his sexiness enhanced by a hint (or more than a hint) of
naughtiness. In films about journalism the rogue tends to appear in romantic
comedies, opposite a leading Hollywood lady, often one who has herself played
a journalist such as Rosalind Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer or Julia Roberts.
Lovable rogues tend to play it for laughs, then, but with an element of
sexual tension as the stars duel with each other, and a sometimes sophisti-
cated engagement with the ethical issues raised by roguish behaviour. His Girl
Friday, starring cary Grant, is the paradigm case. chapter 7 discussed Rosalind
Russell’s performance as Hildy Johnson in this film, noting the strength of her
character and its significance in the history of films about female journalists.
cary Grant’s Walter Burns is also an iconic portrayal, exemplifying a type
Figure 23 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). Source BFI

which is at the same time both admirable and despicable. We know we are
supposed to disapprove of Walter’s populist news values, and the ruthlessness
with which he pursues his journalistic goals, but we cannot help but love the
way he goes about it, wise-cracking, chain-smoking, undermining his rival for
Hildy’s heart (and her time – Walter, as her ex-husband, may want to sleep
with Hildy, but he also wants to re-acquire her services on his newspaper).
Walter engineers the fiancé’s arrest on a false shop-lifting charge, and engages
in merciless verbal humiliation of the hapless Bruce, who in the end must
retreat to Albany without his bride-to-be.
On its re-release in 1997 Laura Mulvey noted that His Girl Friday was the
Howard Hawks’ film in which ‘everything seems to work as it should’,3 fast-
moving dialogue in perfect harmony with visuals, and ‘in which the reporters
provide a chorus to ongoing speech and action’. An exemplary scene is that
in which Walter takes Hildy and Bruce to lunch, all innocence and profes-
sionalism, only to make clear his contempt both for insurance salesman Bruce
and Hildy’s marriage plans, albeit in a manner which exudes charm and sexual
energy. As the cigarettes are lit and the lunchtime martinis are ordered (this
film, like so many movies about journalism in the monochrome era, looks
today like pornography for nicotine addicts), we watch Walter work his roguish
magic.
walter: Well, well, well, so you two are gonna get married, huh? How
does it feel, Bruce?
Bruce: It feels awful good, yes sir.
walter: You’re getting a great little girl for yourself.
Bruce: I realise that. Things have been different for me ever since I first
met Hildy. Everybody else I’ve ever known, you could always tell
ahead of time what they were gonna say or do. Hildy’s not like that.
You can’t tell that about Hildy, and that’s nice.
walter: Well, you’re getting something else too, Bruce. You’re getting a
great newspaperman, one of the best I ever knew. Sorry to see her go,
darned sorry, Hildy.
Hildy: I’d like to believe you meant that.
walter: I do mean it. Listen, If you ever want to come back to the
newspaper business …
Hildy: Which I won’t. In spite of everything, if I ever do, there’s only one
man I’d work for.
walter: You bet your life. I’d kill you if you ever worked for anyone else.
Hildy: Now you hear that Bruce? That’s my diploma.
Bruce: It must be quite a business if … Hildy, are you sure you want to
quit?
Hildy: Now Bruce, what do you mean?
Bruce: Well I mean, if there’s any doubt about it, if there’s anything …
No, this is your chance to have a home and to be, like you said, a human
being, and I’m going to make you take that chance.
walter: certainly. Why, I wouldn’t let her stay. No, she deserves all this
happiness Bruce, all the things I couldn’t give her. Yeah, all she ever
wanted was a home.
Bruce: Well I’ll certainly try to give her one.
walter: I know you will, Bruce. Where you gonna live?
Bruce: Albany.
walter: Albany, huh? You get a family up there, then?
Bruce: Just my mother.
walter: Oh, you’re gonna live with your mother?
Bruce: Well, just for the first year.
walter: That will be nice. A home with mother, in Albany too.
Throughout this exchange Walter’s demeanour portrays his view that he can
think of no better definition of a living hell for his ex-wife than ‘a home with
mother in Albany’. His roguish qualities are also reflected in his attitude to his
journalism. At one point Hildy says to Walter, ‘You’d hang your own mother
for a scoop’, and she isn’t joking.
The moral ambivalence represented by the lovable rogue reflects public
attitudes, past and present, to the field of popular journalism from which they
are usually drawn. His Girl Friday was adapted from stage play The Front Page,
written by former journalists Ben Hecht and charles MacArthur and first
produced in 1928 as a satirical take on the then-ascendant popular press and
its excesses. Nearly a century ago, when the ‘tabloids’ were still a relatively new
phenomenon, The Front Page interrogated their unethical news values, but
with a nod to the fact that such values were driven by an apparently insatiable
public taste for the lurid and the sensational. People were entertained by the
popular media, morbidly attracted to tales of scandal and excess even when
they knew that, really, they should not be. Thus, pleasure was tinged with guilt.
Walter Burns in His Girl Friday exemplifies this tension – he is a rogue, yes,
prepared to make the most appalling ethical compromises to maximise sales
of his newspaper in a market hungry for drama. But there is a bit of all of
us which cannot resist the kinds of stories popular newspapers deal in. And
without us, after all, the readers, such journalism would not exist.
The lovable rogue, then, is not a truly bad or evil figure. Rather, he repre-
sents the often absurd distortions of normative journalistic values generated by
a popular market place of readers who cannot get enough of the stuff. He has
redeeming features and a capacity for good which, as played by these leading
men of the movie business, tends to come through before the final credits roll.
George clooney’s columnist in One Fine Day (Michael Hoffmann, 1996),
Jack Taylor, presents a more recent example of the type, with his less than
reliable performance of parental responsibilities and general self-centredness
morphing by the end of the film into a more considerate, family-oriented
figure.
Runaway Bride (Gary Marshall, 1999) stars Richard Gere in the lovable
rogue role, opposite Julia Roberts as a woman, Maggie carpenter, who
repeatedly jilts her fiancés at the altar. Gere as columnist Ike Hoffmann
specialises in provocative attacks on women – he admits to a penchant for
writing ‘inner diatribes at the opposite sex’ – and writes a column labelling
Maggie the ‘runaway bride’. His writing is lazily inaccurate, however, and
Maggie complains to his editor (and ex-wife), who dismisses him on ethical
grounds. ‘Journalism lesson number one’, she tells him as he is canned, ‘if you
fabricate the facts, you get fired’. Ike then travels incognito to Maggie’s town
in order to prepare a devastating, fact-based exposé of her character that will
redeem him in his editor’s eyes. Instead, he begins to fall in love with her, and
thus to question the ethics of a journalism which depends so much for its raw
material on the violation of another’s personal privacy.
As with other films in this sub-genre, the main marketing attraction of the
film is the romantic interaction of its two A-list movie stars. Gere and Roberts
had performed opposite each other in the huge 1990 hit, Pretty woman (also
directed by Gary Marshall) and Runaway Bride was a transparent attempt to
repeat that success (and just about did so, making $309 million at the global
box office). The plot device (reportedly based on an actual incident) of creating
conditions where a journalist is brought into close contact with the victim of
one of his dashed-off pieces is in the first instance precisely that – a device
which exploits the licence of journalism to invade the lives of others, and allows
us to criticise those who abuse that licence. In terms of our classification it is a
secondary representation, and much less focused on the practice of journalism
than, say, His Girl Friday (where journalism is primary – one of the reasons
why it can be regarded as a classic of the journalism genre). However, and
in keeping with many rom coms and other genres in which journalism has
formed the backdrop or stage for the action but is not the narrative centre of
the piece, the script of Runaway Bride does address in an insightful manner
the ethical questions raised by Ike’s polemical brand of journalism and invites
its audience to reflect on them, if in a viewing context which is above all about
entertainment and romance.
Our relationship to the lovable rogue is, then, like our relationship to the
popular media in general: ambivalent. We are attracted to him, as to the racy
headlines of the Sun or the New york Post, with the feelings of guilt associated
with the consumption of any forbidden fruit. We know it is a little unseemly
to read about the latest misadventures of Britney Spears or other celebrities,
or to know the gory details of a grisly murder case or a motorway pile-up, but
it is hard to resist when the stories are lying there on the news stand, headlines
and photographs demanding our attention. The lovable rogue represents in
human form that dimension of journalism which we both love and hate. He
embodies that promise of naughtiness and transgression which is at the root
of much human desire, and which so frequently gives him the mystique of a
sex symbol.
THE REPTILE
The lovable rogue is entertaining, but perhaps the most fun, and mischief,
which movie-makers have with journalism is when they enter the territory of
the tabloid reptile: the repulsive, loathsome hack with few, if any redeeming
features; the figure conjured up by Hunter Thompson in chapter Two, and
by Ralph Steadman in the scary sketches which illustrated Thompson’s books
and articles (lizards, literally, reproduced to some effect in Terry Gilliam’s
adaptation of Fear and Loathing …). If the lovable rogue is the kind of cultural
transgressor with whom we may feel some affinity, since deep down we all have
a guilty fascination with the kinds of story he deals in (even if we may not admit
it), and who can therefore be played by a handsome star such as cary Grant or
Richard Gere, the reptile is a true villain. His (and occasionally her) function
is to embody the very worst that journalism can be in a commercialised media
system, and to appall us with its excesses.
The representation of the journalist-as-reptile may be viewed both as a
warning to the public in a democracy that their media are at worst akin to
predators running wild, and that they – the public – bear some responsi-
bility for putting them back in their cage; and also as a form of vengeance
waged by one sector of the culture industry against another found wanting.
In a few cases, such as Paparazzi, directed by Paul Abascal in 2004 (and given
limited cinema release in the uK in January 2005), the vengeance may be more
personal. Produced by Mel Gibson, who has the briefest of cameos in it, the
film was reviewed on its release as a self-indulgent vanity project, allowing
Gibson to articulate his wrath at the celebrity media who have dogged his
career. According to one reviewer, observing the Diana-inspired plot in which
a wronged celebrity wreaks vengeance on the journalistic scum responsible
for his unhappiness, the film is ‘sadistic in the extreme and lacking any moral
compass. It’s the kind of film only OJ Simpson would enjoy’.4 Another noted
that, while the actions of some celebrity photographers are surely worthy of
condemnation, ‘Paparazzi’s vilification of the profession is so over-the-top you
can’t take any of its objections seriously … Is executive producer Mel Gibson,
who has famously had “issues” with the media’s coverage of his private life …
using the film to work through his own anger about press intrusion?’.5
Quite possibly. central character Bo Laramie becomes involved in a feud

with a group of four paparazzi photographers, led by the evil Rex. The script
is peppered with sarcastic digs at the tabloid media, such as the scene where
Vince Vaughan (in another blink-and-you-missed-it cameo), playing an actor
alongside Bo in one of his action movies, says with heavy irony:
Says here [holding up the front page of a supermarket tabloid] – this

came out in England so it must be true – ‘unnamed sources say Laramie
took a private jet to Switzerland, where the young star reportedly went
for a penile enhancement, surprising his wife on her birthday’.
The newspaper headline visible on screen reads: ‘Laramie underwent penile

enhancement’. Lead reptile Rex, defending his profession to a girl he meets in
a bar, says:
Rex: I’m a photojournalist.

Girl: Your pictures hurt people.
Rex: Do they? The irony is, everybody wants to have steak, but nobody
wants to date the butcher. My job is to provide a window on reality for
society. It’s up to them whether they want to look through it or not?
You never bought a tabloid?
We the public, he suggests, are as much responsible for the villainous excesses
of the paparazzi as the journalists. This is a valid point, well made, but it is
undermined in the rest of the film by reducing the celebrity-paparazzi battle
to a Good versus Evil melodrama. So angry is the script with its journalistic
subjects that Laramie is allowed to kill three paparazzi and get away with it. The
satire is crude and clumsy, and nowhere near as effective as in the uK-made
Rag Tale (see below).
PAPARAzzI, AND A NOTE ON cELEBRITY JOuRNALISM
The term ‘paparazzi’ was coined by Federico Fellini in his 1958 film, La
Dolce Vita (not released until 1960), now regarded as a classic of the journalism
movie genre. His character, Joe Paparazzo, is a photojournalist who spends
his days snapping the celebrities who hang around Roma’s Via Veneto and
other locations. Joe was based on an actual person, Tazio Secchiaroli. La
Dolce Vita was not widely acclaimed on its release. It became a recognised
classic, however, as the Guardian explained in an editorial to mark the fiftieth
anniversary of the film (itself a rare accolade for a piece of cinema, no matter
how exalted): ‘Fifty years on, La Dolce Vita’s preoccupation with celebrity,
sex and hedonism seems a presciently modern cultural turning point’.6 As the
popular media became more demanding, and the numbers of paparazzi grew
to service them, late twentieth-century capitalist societies saw the growth in
their midst of a ‘celebrity culture’ distinct from the way in which celebrity was
constructed and reported in pre-Warhol, pre-Fellini times. There was always
celebrity, of course, and one of the pleasures of Amanda Foreman’s volume of
popular history on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (made into a film starring
Keira Knightley in 2008) is its revelation that even in the late eighteenth
century there was a form of celebrity journalist active in London, obsessively
and often irreverently reporting the doings of aristocrats and other famous
people. At this time coverage of the rich and famous, though satirical and often
scurillous, functioned as a form of politicised critical scrutiny, drawing the
common people’s attention to aristocratic excess and the elite abuse of early
democratic processes. In England, and in France, as John Hartley has noted
(1996), this journalism of sensation and scandal (which often crossed into the
realm of the pornographic), by demystifying and exposing the human flaws
and weaknesses of the landed gentry made an important contribution to the
erosion of feudal class distinctions and the emergence of democratic societies.
It is safe to say that contemporary celebrity journalism is rarely motivated by
such lofty goals, and is seen as a damaging rather than democratising force by
most commentators, including most movie-makers. The argument, in simple
terms, is that journalists construct celebrity as a commercial instrument for
selling newspapers (or TV programmes and now websites), paying no regard
to the attributes held by a person which might justify their elevation. Fame
is an arbitrary quality, awarded to people for any number of reasons apart
from the fact that they are talented in some field of human endeavour. Fame
is a machine for generating stories in popular media, devoid of substance and
authenticity.
In the 1990s and since, the artificiality and emptiness of celebrity has been
accentuated by the rise of reality TV. With the explosion of docu-soaps and
fly-on-the-wall documentary strands in the 1990s, then of competitive reality
TV shows such as Big Brother and Survivor in the 2000s, the notion that anyone,
literally, can become famous and rich has never been more prevalent. The
celebration of ordinariness has become ubiquitous, and celebrity culture banal
(where it used to be glamorous and exciting). Moreover, celebrity journalism is
increasingly packed with coverage of reality TV stars falling drunk out of night
clubs and showing their knickers. People with real talent have been squeezed
out of celebrity culture by the media’s fascination with ordinariness. This
phenomenon reached its peak, the critics argue, with the media circus which
surrounded the Big Brother-fuelled career and untimely death of Jade Goody
in March 2009.
There is a counter-argument that these trends represent a democratisation
Figure 24 La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960). Source: BFI
of capitalist culture appropriate to the times we live in; that by celebrating

ordinariness, reality TV and the forms of journalism which feed off it, no
doubt parasitically at times, subvert the once-powerful monopoly on what
constitutes talent once exercised by the self-appointed taste dictators of the
arts and entertainment industry. celebrity was never much more than a media
construction anyway, and has today become much more accessible to many
more people than ever before. Those who believe that they have some special
talent dispute the worth of these ordinary celebrities, of course, but from the
cultural democratisation perspective Jade Goody and Katie Price (Jordan,
mainly famous for the size of her breasts, and her willingness to display them
in public) have just as much popular relevance as more obviously ‘talented’
individuals. Reality culture, and contemporary celebrity journalism, celebrate
ordinariness in a manner which accentuates the value of everyday human
experience. They reject the social deference of the past, which was routinely
extended to the kind of bored, vacuous rich kids depicted in La Dolce Vita.
Among those films which explore celebrity culture Woody Allen’s Celebrity
(1998) is a little-seen meditation on its artificiality, and the complicity of the
media in fuelling the seemingly endless succession of relatively talent-free
individuals who become famous (and rich). Celebrity was a commercial and
critical failure, and failed even to get a cinema release in many markets (like
Allen’s Scoop, made in 2005). Celebrity illustrates an interesting feature of
movies about celebrity journalism – they are rarely very good, at least in the eyes
of the majority of film critics. Celebrity’s failings were linked by some reviewers
with Allen’s own negative opinions of celebrity journalism (and the scandalous
coverage he received of his affair with the adopted child of his then-partner
Mia Farrow, Soon Yi, in particular), as if he had allowed personal prejudice to
drive his take on the subject.
A similar critical fate befell Mary McGuckian’s Rag Tale (2005), a satire
about red-top journalism in the uK, which is heavily dependent on celebrity
culture for its daily diet of coked-up starlets and dysfunctional footballers’
wives. Dismissed on its release by one newspaper as ‘an unbelievable tale of
tabloid hell’, full of clichés and unrealistic stereotypes such as the notion that
‘journalists are often drunk and sometimes dishonest’,7 Guardian film reviewer
Peter Bradshaw called it ‘a boring mess’ and ‘intelligence-insulting nonsense’.8
critic Philip French saw ‘a satirical farce presenting the staff of a British
tabloid as drunken, lecherous, treacherous, foul-mouthed, unprincipled,
vindictive, coke-snorting hacks’.9 Gritty realism, then, if let down by hyper-
active cinematography of the type briefly fashionable in the early to mid-2000s.
Like Celebrity, which boasted a cast list to make any Hollywood producer
weep with envy, Rag Tale boasted a very distinguished cast of British and
American actors (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Malcolm McDowell, John Sessions,
David Hayman and others). I am less critical of the film than most reviewers,
seeing both entertainment and education in its fast-moving script, its evocation
of the paranoia of a news room in crisis, and the macho thuggishness of its
editorial meetings. Rag Tale is merciless in dissecting the commercial logic of
celebrity culture, and of tabloid newspaper culture more widely, the hypocrisy
of many of those who condemn it, and the woefully ignorant state of the
people who buy it. I am rather alone in this view, however, which may stand
as an example of the fact not only that good films about tabloids and celebrity
culture are indeed difficult to find, but even more difficult for newspaper film
critics to swallow. Too often (though not, I suggest, in the case of Rag Tale)
the satire is lazy and self-satisfied, crafted by individuals who take for granted
the superiority of their own talent and cannot understand why that of others
should be celebrated. Let me turn, then, to four films which are more highly
regarded, and which exemplify the journalist-as-reptile sub-type: Ace in the
Hole, directed by Billy Wilder in 1951 and known in the united States as The
Big Carnival; Mad City (costa-Gavras, 1998); To Die For (Gus Van zant,
1995); and Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone’s 1994 study of the relationship
between crime and the media in the united States. All are satires, with strong
critical messages about how the media relate to public perception of crime and
deviance. In all of them, reptilian journalists meet grisly ends.
ACe iN THe HOLe
The power of Billy Wilder’s 1951 film, from this distance, lies not only in
its piercing critique of popular journalism’s propensity to manufacture
problematic reality rather than report it, but in its resonance for and relevance
to our own twenty-first century times. The film tells an appalling story of
journalistic cynicism, but with hindsight it is one which could have been told
in any decade, in just about any country in the years since it was made.
Figure 25 Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951). Source: BFI

The film stars Kirk Douglas as chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck

journalist whose car has broken down and who is stranded in the desert town
of Albuquerque, New Mexico as the story gets going. Tatum has been used to
working on the big East coast newspapers, and is dismissive of local journalism
(a common trope of journalism movies). Out of necessity he talks himself into
a job at the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, introducing himself to the editor in the
following terms.
I’m a $250 newspaperman. I can be had for fifty. I know newspapers

backward, forward and sideways. I can write ’em, edit ’em, print ’em and
sell ’em. I can do big news and little news, and if there’s no news I’ll go
out and bite a dog.
After a year or so of covering boring local non-stories (as he views them),

assisted by young photographer Herbie, he is desperate for ‘something big’ that
will propel him back to the top of his profession. He stumbles on an accident
in the desert. A man – Leo Minosa – is trapped down a cave, and Tatum begins
the process of turning what should be an easily remedied inconvenience into a
major news event. Seen from today’s vantage point, the film is exhilerating in
its echoing of contemporary debates (a feature it shares with His Girl Friday).
Everything we thought we knew about the flaws of late twentieth/early twenty-
first-century popular journalism (what used to be called ‘tabloid’ journalism,
before most newspapers adopted the tabloid print format) is exposed here. As
Tatum and Herbie head in their open-top automobile for a story about rattle-
snakes being smoked out from the desert underbrush, Tatum articulates the
cynicism which drives his end of the journalism business.
Herbie: You know, this could be quite a big story, chuck. Don’t sell it
short.
Tatum: Big deal. A thousand rattlers in the underbrush. Give me just
fifty of them loose in Albuquerque … a whole town in panic, deserted
streets, barricaded houses, they’re evacuating the children. Every
man is armed. Fifty killers on the prowl. Fifty! One by one they start
hunting them down. They get ten, twenty, it’s building. Forty, forty
five, they get forty-nine. Where’s the last rattler? In the kindergarten,
in the church, in a crowded elevator? Where?
Herbie: I give up. Where?
Tatum: In my desk drawer, fan, stashed away only nobody knows it, see?
The story’s good for anther three days and then when I’m good and
ready we come out with a big extra. Sun-Bulletin snags number fifty.
Herbie: Where do you get those ideas?
This approach to journalism – the readiness to manipulate reality in pursuit

of the bad news story – will now be applied to the rescue of the trapped Leo.
We quickly learn that he could be rescued quickly and easily. Tatum, however,
senses a story in Leo’s predicament, possibly a Pulitzer prize, and proceeds to
turn the incident into a media circus involving the corrupt local sheriff, Leo’s
equally corrupt wife (with whom Tatum has a fling), the East coast media and
then the great American public who begin to treat the incident like a carnival
(hence the uS title of the film – The Big Carnival). A theme tune is written,
souvenir stalls are set up, train and car loads of tourists arrive, lots of money is
made. To achieve this degree of newsworthiness, however, Tatum allows Leo to
remain trapped underground for a week, even after he is warned of the risks.
When it becomes clear that Leo is dying, the journalist has a brief moment
of conscience, but it is too late. Leo dies, and the media circus evaporates.
In the final act Leo’s wife shoots Tatum and he falls dead in the offices of the
Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin. Moral order is restored as the journalist who has
sacrificed a life to his greed loses his own.
The film is successful both as satire and as tense, noir-ish drama, and
embedded in the script are frequent monologues by Tatum on the nature of
news. At one point, he explains to Herbie the nature and appeal of human
interest.
One man’s better than eighty four. Didn’t they teach you that [at journalism
school, the idea of which chuck despises]? Human interest. You pick up
the paper and read about eighty-four men, or 284, or a million men like
in a chinese famine. You read it but it doesn’t stay with you. One man’s
different. You wanna read all about it. That’s human interest. Somebody
all by himself like Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic …
Wilder’s script is merciless in portraying the very worst of liberal journalism,

and is hardly more forgiving of the public who make such excesses possible and
profitable. In one of the most memorable sequences we see a train pulling in to
a railway stop near the cave. The doors open, and a wave of excited humanity
exits the train and runs towards the crowd. Leo’s theme tune is playing, the
burgers and candy floss are selling like hot cakes, and we are left in no doubt
of Wilder’s view that the reptilian journalist is our creation (the public’s) as
much as that of a media so commercialised that it has lost all moral sense. In
the decades since this fictional episode there have been many similar real-life
incidents, in which tragedy has become entertainment for newspapers and
their readers. There have also been other movies presenting similar scenarios,
such as Mad City (costa-Gavras, 1998).
costa-Gavras’ film, though a minor work of cinema, presents an interesting
contrast with Ace in the Hole. Both films suggest that the demands of the news
media for a good story (meaning one that will attract and build an audience in
a competitive media market place) take precedence over the innocent victims
who have been caught up in a tragically newsworthy situation. In Ace in the
Hole, as we saw, chuck Tatum’s greed for a story leads directly to Leo’s death
deep in the cave. chuck is little better than a murderer, and pays for his crime
with his own death. In Mad City Dustin Hoffman plays a TV news reporter
who by coincidence becomes involved in a hostage situation inside a public
library. The hostage-taker, played by John Travolta, is mentally ill rather than
evil, and as the story unfolds there are opportunities for him to be talked out
of the building and the crisis defused. Already inside, however, Hoffmann’s
character spots the opportunity for a scoop, and gets his producers involved.
From this point on the situation is driven by the needs of the media rather than
the hostages. He gets his story, played out on live TV news across the nation,
but Travolta’s character pays for it with his life.
unlike Wilder’s film, Hoffmann comes to see the error of his ways and tries
to redeem himself by saving the hostage-taker from being shot down – he is a
repentant sinner (see below). Where Wilder is unforgiving in the punishment
he metes out to the reptilian Tatum, costa-Gavras gives us a more conven-
tional Hollywood resolution, and one which does not require the death of the
journalist in question. In contrast to chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole Hoffman’s
character is much more aware of the ethical transgression in which he is taking
part, and ambivalent about the use made of the story both by himself and his
employers at the news station. Forty years after Wilder’s film the journalist,
like his public, is much more troubled by the realisation of how news works, of
what news is.
NATuRAL BORN KiLLeRS
closer to Wilder’s bleak vision, if very different in plot and tone, is Oliver
Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994), a film which was widely condemned on its
release for its portrayal of violence but can now be recognised as a perceptive
and principled satire about celebrity culture and the corrupt relationship
between crime and the media in the united States (the film has an American
focus but its themes are highly relevant to comparable countries like the uK).
In a manner which recalls Terence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), Natural Born
Killers has two young outcasts from superficially stable families go on a killing
rampage through America, growing steadily more notorious as they go. Stone
enlists our sympathy for Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette
Lewis) by alluding to her history of sexual abuse (in early scenes shot to look
like a TV sit com we see Mallory being groped lasciviously by her father, and
we can imagine the rest), and Mickey’s rejection by the same father, prompting
the first of the many murders which drive the narrative. In this way we are
shown that, senseless and cruel as most of the subsequent killings will be, there
is context and causality behind them.
Stone’s romantic treatment of the killers provoked huge controversy on the
film’s release, and Natural Born Killers became a key piece of evidence for the
prosecution in the case against violence in mainstream cinema. Stone’s aim,
however, is to make the media complicit in the morbid fascination with which
the killers come to be held by the uS public. First, there is the frequent
reference to news coverage of their nihilistic road trip across America, an
exaggerated if highly plausible recreation of how many actual cases have
been reported. Disapproval and moral panic blends with the media’s need to
highlight the grim and gory details as the killers become media celebrities.
Then they are caught, and the satire grows even more savage. The presenter
of a TV true crime show, Wayne Gale (played by Robert Downey Jr in the
period before his re-emergence as one of America’s most highly-regarded
actors – see his role as a less villainous journalist in David Fincher’s Zodiac),
enters the high security prison where Mickey and Mallory are being held,
and persuades the authorities to grant him a live interview with Mickey. The
episode expertly pastiches the fascination of contemporary TV audiences
with liveness, and the way in which producers manipulate their viewers’
sympathies. Murderous Mickey, by now beyond reason or redemption, is
constructed on the show as a hero, and the TV audience encouraged to root
for him as a victim of the system rather than a cold-blooded killer of innocent
people. Downey Jr’s character is a cartoonish figure, utterly lacking in positive
qualities, and prepared to unleash chaos in pursuit of his ratings. When, during
the interview and thus live on TV, Mickey breaks free and sparks off a bloody
prison riot, Downey Jr and his crew follow and film the escaping convicts as
they kill and wound their guards, delighting in the televisual spectacle they
have managed to create.
Natural Born Killers shares with Ace in the Hole an appalled interest in the
fact – as true in the 1990s as it was in the 1950s – that there are journalists
who do not merely report events. They will influence them, manipulate them,
sometimes even manufacture them in pursuit of the story and without regard
for the human cost. chuck Tatum causes the death of Leo Minosa. Gale, by his
recklessness and irresponsibility in setting up a live interview with a psycho-
pathic killer, and then encouraging him in his anger and self-victimhood,
causes a riot and many deaths, all of it available to his audience in real time.
This is what his form of tabloid TV journalism demands, and what his audience
are entranced by. unlike chuck Tatum, however, there is to the end no hint
of remorse by this hack, and it is left to the film-maker to dispense justice to
someone who is a truly sinister, amoral individual. In the final scenes Mickey
and Mallory are re-united and preparing to head off down the road together.
Downey Jr’s journalist pleads with them to let him accompany them, so that
he can record the next act in their drama and continue to make folk heroes of
them. Instead, Mickey coldly and without hesitation executes the journalist,
with whom we are encouraged to feel no sympathy. His death is wholly
deserved. His journalistic crimes are even more reprehensible than those of
the killers whom he has helped elevate to celebrity status. They, indeed, drive
off into the sunset and a life of implied domestic bliss, to the sound of Leonard
cohen’s ‘The Future’.10
HAcKESSES
Screen journalists of such undiluted villainy as Tatum and Wayne Gale are
nearly always men. Indeed, I can think of only one female who comes close to
those excesses in her pursuit of professional success – Suzanne Stone (Nicole
Kidman) in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. The paucity of female baddies reflects
the gender balance of good and evil in other movie genres, and probably too
in the journalistic profession. As we saw earlier, women have historically been
under-represented in the profession. They have, as a consequence, fewer
opportunities for badness.
This fact – that women in journalism have not been regarded as the equals
of men by their male counterparts, and have been pushed into ‘women’s issues’
and required to use their preferably beautiful bodies as much as their journal-
istic talents to advance their careers – is the main justification presented by Van
Sant for Suzanne Stone’s numerous transgressions as she seeks to make her
way in TV. The world she wishes to succeed in is very much a man’s world, and
we do not blame her for using her feminine charms as an aid to making her way
in it. She goes too far, however, engineering the murder of her own husband
(because she believes that he is a hindrance to her career) and manipulating a
group of vulnerable young people into assisting her ruthless rise to the top. In
the end, since her husband’s family are Italian Americans with connections,
she is assassinated by the mafia.
Suzanne, like Downey Jr’s character in Natural Born Killers, is a caricature,
a cartoon character in a satire with no pretensions to realism. Her dramatic
function is to suggest that the evil she represents is the product of the
media environment we today inhabit, an environment in which everyone is
encouraged to believe that they too can be famous, they too can be on TV.
Suzanne’s methods are extreme, but her ambitions are routine.
THE REPENTANT SINNER
There is a category of movie which deals with the critical self-reflection of

the journalist who one day discovers that he or she can no longer live with
him or herself. This is the theme of Stephen Frear’s Accidental Hero (1992),
starring Geena Davis as TV news reporter Gayle Gayley, who comes to
question the news values she works by, and who then recants and reforms,
thereby re-asserting the normative principles which every journalism student
is taught to revere.
At the centre of the film is the metaphor of the news story as an onion,
comprising multiple layers which are peeled back to reveal … what? The artifi-
ciality and constructedness of news, and of celebrity culture in particular, are
treated here with a sophistication not seen since Ace in the Hole. Although
the plots of both films are very different, the target of their satire is the same
– the readiness of market-driven news media to manufacture and narrativise
the problematic realities which they will then present to their audiences as
objective news. In Ace in the Hole chuck Tatum manufactures a prolonged
and tense rescue situation, heightening the drama in order to maximise the
newsworthiness and saleability of his story. In Accidental Hero Gayle and her
employers manufacture dramatic coverage of a rescue from a crashed airplane,
endowing the wrong person with heroic qualities which then become the basis
of a false and corrupt media celebrity. Both films expose the ethical flaws of
such journalism, and invite the media to reflect on their complicity in such
manipulation.
Gayley is returning from an awards ceremony where she has been honoured
for her reportorial work – in particular, her live on-the-scene coverage of a
man’s suicide after being exposed in the media – and her flight comes down
in the city. Immediately before this scene we hear her deliver an acceptance
speech in which she dissects with rare economy the manufactured nature of
the modern news story.
This is an onion [holds up an onion, and begins peeling it, eyes watering
as she proceeds]. It’s a metaphor for a news story. Only a few hours ago I
was sitting on a ledge, sixteen stories above the street, interviewing a man
who subsequently jumped to his death. $40 million in the bank, happily
married, good health, great story.
But there’s gotta be more. I mean, we’re pros, right? Extramarital
hanky panky, maybe? [continues peeling] another great story. Maybe the
guy’s been accused of child molesting? Terrific story.
What? Turns out the accusations were false? Wonderful, more story.
Maybe the alleged mistress was lying, setting the guy up, huh? Sensa-
tional story.
So we keep going, keep digging, expose the guy’s family, his whole
life. Why? Because we’re pros. Because we’re looking for the truth. What
if it turns out, for all our digging, for all our painstaking investigation,
what if it turns out there wasn’t any truth? Just stories. One story after
another, layer after layer, until there’s nothing left, and if it’s like that,
do we have any obligation to stop at any point? Or do we just keep going,
digging, digging, peeling, peeling, until we’ve destroyed what we were
investigating in the first place?11
The speech allows us to see her character’s unease with the job she does, based
on her recognition that much of what counts as ‘news’ is in fact mere artifice.
News is indeed a form of story-telling, positioned in the cultural universe
somewhere between fact and fiction, and with no necessary or inevitable
relationship to the truth of what happened.
This idea is then developed in the subsequent plot, which sees Davis’
character rescued from the burning aircraft wreckage by a mysterious figure
who then disappears. This is Dustin Hoffman, a small-time crook trying to go
straight, and who has accidentally (and reluctantly) found himself in a position
where he demonstrates heroism, saving not only the journalist but the lives
of many others on the plane. Sensing a story in the episode, and with her own
personal involvement ratchetting up the human interest value, Gayle goes in
Figure 26 Accidental Hero (Stephen Frears, 1992). Source: BFI

search of the ‘Angel of Flight 104’. By way of various plot machinations she
comes to believe that the accidental hero is John Bubber (Andy Garcia), and
proceeds to turn him into a media celebrity. Director Frears now embarks on
a satire about the manufacture of reality and celebrity in TV news, showing
how the actual details of the rescue are transformed into an uplifting, quasi-
religious tale. The rescue is reconstructed for the cameras, moving testimo-
nials are broadcast for the ‘Angel’ (who is, of course, an imposter, and himself
becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the media circus he is colluding
with). We see how mediated reality diverges from the actuality, which in this
case is itself sufficiently remarkable not to require this kind of mythologising.
Finally, Garcia retreats from his unearned fame, allowing Hoffman’s accidental
hero to take his due credit. With the corrupt nature of the mediation process
thus exposed for all to see, Davis finally sees the error of her ways, and repents.
cONcLuSION
Journalistic villains have not become more visible over time, or more villainous
than they were in the monochrome days of His Girl Friday and Ace in the Hole.
The roguish and reptilian stereotypes of those movies continue to be replayed
in contemporary cinema. Now, as then, journalistic villains are associated with
the popular media – the tabloid or (in the uK, red top) sectors of print and
TV, and celebrity journalism in particular. Women are rarely represented as
villains, and in the 1997–2008 period there was no character nearly as repre-
hensible as Suzanne Stone in To Die For. The bad girl trio depicted in Rag Tale
(see appendix, p. 229) were as bad as it got in that decade and these women, one
might argue in their defence, were only doing what they had to do to get by in a
working environment of brutish male hacks. Neither was there any recognition
(though it must surely come) of the villainous potential of online journalism,
with its accelerated, globally networked rumour-mongering and gossiping.
There is another category of journalistic villain, however, who received
some attention from film-makers in the 1997–2008 period, and it is to those
that we now turn.
NOTES
1. Armstrong, Stephen, ‘From hero to zero’, Guardian, 12 May 2008 (http://www.guardian.
co.uk/media/2008/may/12/itv?gusrc=rss&feed=media).
2. I must disagree with Armstrong’s view that while the great majority of such portrayals have
showed hacks as ‘hardworking forces for good’, the recent trend is towards images of sleaze
and venality (as evidenced by James Nesbitt’s character in Midnight Man). In fact, there
have been both positive and negative images of journalists in film ever since the medium
first took an interest in the subject. Stephen mentions Ace in the Hole, surely the most savage
portrayal ever made of how news manufactures reality, and nearly sixty years old. MacKen-
drick’s Sweet Smell of Success, made half a century ago, has Burt Lancaster as the sinister
king-maker J. J. Hunsecker, surely a model for rottweiller journalists down the years.
On the positive side, Michael Winterbottom recently made a poignant film about Daniel
Pearl, while George clooney portrayed Ed Murrow as near saintly in Good Night, and Good
Luck.
As an academic currently working on a book about journalism in the movies, I find that
there are plenty of lazy stereotypes to be found on our screens, past and present. The best
movies about journalists, the ones that have survived the test of time, are those, like Oliver
Stone’s Salvador or Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, which avoid stereotypes and engage
with the complexity of the profession in an increasingly uncertain world.
3. Review by Laura Mulvey, Sight & Sound, volume seven, number three, 1997.
4. For a review of Paparazzi, see Neil Smith at http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/01/13/
paparazzi_2005_review.shtml.
5. Lawrenson, Edward, Sight & Sound, volume 15, number 3, 2005.
6. Guardian, 26 November 2008. A few years after La Dolce Vita modern celebrity culture
reached maturity and became mainstream in Andy Warhol’s New York, symbolised by the
artist’s aphorism that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes (a film of
that name about tabloid television journalism was made in 2001). What precisely he meant
by the phrase is less important than what it has come to mean in the public imagination –
that we inhabit a culture in which anyone (if not, actually, everyone) can achieve the kind of
media celebrity which in the past was restricted to people who were truly talented in some
way – actors, writers, musicians, sports men and women. Modern media, Warhol under-
stood, had the capacity to elevate the ordinary to the heights of public visibility and acclaim,
even if it was only for a short time. The ever-expanding media’s appetite for new faces, new
trends and fashions provided those with little to offer except their newness unprecedented
scope for attracting media attention.
7. O’Brien, J., Guardian, 12 September 2005.
8. Review, Guardian, 7 October 2005.
9. Review, Observer, 9 October 2005
10. John Herzfeld’s 15 Minutes (2001) stars Kelsey Grammar as a similarly cynical tabloid TV
presenter, who works with celebrity cop Robert De Niro to get the most sensational exclu-
sives. Although Grammar’s character is reptilian, it is De Niro’s media-obsessed detective
who pays with his life for his celebrity.
11. I first quoted this extract in my essay ‘What is journalism?’, in Hugo De Burgh’s edited
collection Making Journalists (2005).
 10
Fabricators, fakers, fraudsters
I f there is one thing deemed worse by journalism’s many critics than the
cynical manipulation of reality in pursuit of the saleable news story it is,
surely, the deliberate fabrication of the facts themselves – the invention of
stories and sources, the presentation of lies as truth. Chuck Tatum in Ace in
the Hole may have ‘manufactured’ problematic reality in a manner which is
indefensible to any but the most cynically commercial of news editors but his
story was at least founded on an actual event, in the reportage of which he then
expended considerable newsgathering and reporting energy (albeit without
concern for the victim of his manipulation). Lies were told in the process of
turning his predicament into a news story, but Leo Minosa did exist, and he
was stuck in a cave. Richard Gere’s Ike in Runaway Bride got himself into
trouble because of ‘journalism lesson number one. If you fabricate your facts
you get fired’. But he was guilty principally of laziness in fact-checking the
lead supplied by a source encountered in a bar (and the runaway bride was, in
fact, a serial jilter of fiancés at the altar). The true journalistic fabricator avoids
even this outlay of effort and simply makes things up, gambling that he or she
will not be found out.
If the greatest ethical sin of scholarship is plagiarism, journalism’s greatest
ethical sin is to invent stories which are not true; to lie, and then to use the
privileged cultural status of journalism to have those lies believed. To be
published in an established newspaper or online publication or to have a story
broadcast on a TV news bulletin or current affairs magazine, in most countries,
carries with it some guarantee of authenticity (how strong that guarantee is
depends, of course, on the publication’s reputation). Whether the outlet in
question is elite, mid-market or popular, if it comes to the marketplace bearing
the imprint of an established news brand the expectation of the audience is of
authorial integrity. It is a cliché, but true, that we tend to believe what we read
in the newspapers, or see on the TV. More than that, we must have a degree
of trust that what we are reading or seeing or listening to is what it says it is.
Without it there is no basis on which to expend one’s time and money on the
consumption of news. Journalism has to be believable, if it is to have value as
a cultural form.
It is generally understood that mistakes will be made by journalists and
editors from time to time, and that there may be inaccuracies in reportage of a
story arising from any number of causes, but these are not assumed to include
deliberate fabrication on the part of the author. A publication’s reputation
for, if not objectivity, at least honesty, and thus its position in a competitive
information marketplace, excludes tolerance for journalistic invention, be it
in the pages of the Sun or Mirror in the UK, the New York Times in the US,
or on CNN and the BBC. The more competitive and global the information
marketplace becomes, moreover, the more important is the maintenance of this
reputation.
By ‘invention’ I do not mean the imaginative embellishment of reality seen
in almost all the elements which make up a media outlet’s information package,
from the graphic packaging of a weather report to the deliberately florid
language of the controversialist rant, or to the blurring of fact and fiction which
occurs in the writing of Truman Capote and Hunter Thompson. As argued in
Chapter 8, the latter device is by now understood and accepted in the context
of late twentieth-century cultural relativism, and the associated idea that
objectivity and truth are, while entirely legitimate aspirations for journalism
(and necessary for competitive reasons, to repeat), less absolute than was once
believed to be the case. Having lost much of the epistemological naivete of
the past, modern audiences are more receptive to the idea that journalism is
the creation of human beings, and bears their subjective characteristics. The
growing popularity of first-person journalism in the late twentieth century
suggests indeed a demand for accounts of the world which depart from sterile
objectivity and incorporate creativity, even to the point where the line between
fact and fiction is unclear.1
The unacceptable breach of the contract between journalist and public, the
crime which puts its perpetrators firmly in the category of villain, occurs when
a story which has been invented, wholly or in part, is presented to the reader
as true, in a context where the audience is entitled and likely to believe the
truth claim. It is a deception not only of the audience for the fabricated piece,
and thus a violation of public trust in journalism as a cultural form, but of the
editors of the publication or outlet in which it appears, who are rarely complicit
in the fabrication (except in so far as their editorial procedures have failed to
spot it). I therefore exclude here the ‘journalists’ and editors of publications
such as the National Enquirer in the United States and the Daily Sport in the
UK, which regularly invent sensational stories about celebrities, both dead and
alive, and present them as true. Do readers believe it when they read that Elvis
fbios, fks, fudss 161
Presley has been spotted in a supermarket in Delaware, or that – as in the

fictional publication featured in Paparazzi (see previous chapter) – fictional
movie star Bo Laramie has had a penile implant when he has not? Some may,
just as there are some who believe that men never walked on the moon, and that
9/11 was not a jihadi attack but a zionist-neocon conspiracy. There are some
very gullible people in the world, and our sympathies go out to them, but for
the great majority of the public these publications are peripheral to journalism,
parodic mutations of the form positioned in the media market more as comic
books than news outlets. Most people (if not all) understand their function as
fantasy-based entertainment rather than fact-based news. Fabrication, to be a
violation of journalistic ethics, must occur in a context where the trust between
public and journalist is consciously and deliberately betrayed for the sake of a
journalist’s personal advancement.
A HISToRy oF JoURNALISTIC HoAxES
There have always been professional liars in journalism. Some of the best-
known examples from recent times include Janet Cook, whose heart-wrenching
account of a young heroin addict called Jimmy was published in the Washington
Post in September 1980, and won her a Pulitzer prize in 1981.2 She had in fact
made the story up.
In the 1990s Channel 4 television in the UK received substantial fines for
broadcasting documentaries in which evidence and sources had been fabri-
cated. In one example, from the Cutting Edge current affairs strand broadcast
in 1996, ostensibly about the cocaine smuggling trade between Columbia and
Britain, the Guardian newspaper discovered that supposed Columbian gang
members were actually actors.3 The production company, Carlton TV, was fined
£2 million. In another case, again on Channel 4, the maker of a documentary
on child prostitution in Glasgow used members of the production team to
impersonate ‘johns’ on camera. on this occasion a fine of £150,000 was
imposed. In 1999 the Vanessa daytime talk show on the prestigious BBC1 was
revealed to be employing actors to impersonate ‘real’ people in its Springer-
lite tales of family dysfunction and sexual deviation, sparking a wave of moral
panic around the incidence of ‘faking’ in British public service broadcasting,
and the BBC in particular.
These examples show that, despite the tenor of media coverage (and
scholarly commentary) which frequently accompanies these cases when they
are exposed, journalistic fabrication is not a new problem. Public concern
about the issue tends to be cyclical, usually sparked by one high profile
case which puts it on the news agenda from where, in the manner familiar
to students of agenda-setting, editorial sensitivities are raised, other cases of
varying seriousness identified, then fed into a narrative of worsening journal-

istic unreliability. Each new cycle tends to be forgetful of an ignoble tradition,
and to present evidence of fabrication as if such things have never happened
before. A rhetoric of decline kicks in, suggesting that standards are getting
worse, or that they have never been so bad as now.
That is in the story-telling, narrativising nature of news, and if it leads to
an exaggerated picture of how commonplace journalistic liars are, we should
nevertheless welcome the fact that news media are often the first to expose
their own, and then become their severest critics. This confirms the continuing
importance to journalism’s survival of trust in journalistic integrity (we would
really be in trouble if journalistic lying no longer attracted opprobrium from
news media). In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, however, anxiety about the
level of journalistic fabrication in the media, and associated declines in recorded
levels of public trust in journalism as a whole coincided with the trauma of
technology-driven transition from the great journalistic carrier media of the
twentieth century – print and analogue broadcasting – to the internet and
multi-channel digital TV (and radio). This parallel structural trend threw up
new challenges to the notions of journalistic truth, objectivity and reliability.
The result was a transnational, even global collapse of trust in journalism, as
examples of fabrication and sloppy editing became the subject of an expanding
online sector eager to assert its rights vis à vis the ‘old’ media.
THE CRISIS oF JoURNALISTIC TRUST
In April 2003 New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was discovered plagia-
rising an article which had originally appeared in the San-Antonio Express
News. In what the New York Times apologetically described as ‘a low point
in the 152-year history of the newspaper’,4 it was subsequently revealed that
Blair had fabricated and plagiarised dozens of articles. More damaging than
this was the fact that his lying had fooled his editors, confident and self-
satisfied as they had hitherto been in their status as a ‘quality’ news organi-
sation, and the newspaper of record in the US. The NYT was embarassed,
humiliated, compromised, at the very time when the rise of online journalism
was beginning to seriously challenge the traditional dominance of print and
analogue broadcast news media.
The NYT was not alone, however, in harbouring journalistic fraudsters. In
early 2004 USA Today conceded that one of its staff reporters, Jack Kelley, had
fabricated parts of at least eight stories, ‘offering readers a lengthy apology in an
attempt to avoid the damage to its reputation endured by the New York Times
last year’.5 In the United Kingdom in May of that year, photographs said to be
of British troops abusing prisoners in Iraq were published on the front page of
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the Daily Mirror. In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib story the photographs –
which included scenes of soldiers urinating on prisoners – had credibility and
the story ‘legs’. Less than one year after the Andrew Gilligan affair, and the
related suicide of a government scientist, there was a hunger amongst anti-war
organisations such as the Mirror for stories which would show British forces in
Iraq, and thus the UK government which put them there, in a negative light.
However, the British Ministry of Defence alleged that the images had been
faked, citing the fact that items of equipment seen in the frames were not used
by British forces in Iraq. After initial denials from defiant editor Piers Morgan
the fraud was conceded and he was forced to resign for being taken in by what
the Mirror’s owners called a ‘calculated and malicious hoax’.6
At the BBC, meanwhile, perhaps the most trusted news organisation on the
planet, the effects of the Gilligan affair and its aftermath had been extremely
damaging.7 This was not a fabrication scandal, but a case of a journalist allegedly
misrepresenting the views of a source in order to present a misleading story
about the government, and to characterise the prime minister as a liar. The
details of the case are available on the website of the Hutton inquiry set up by
the UK government to investigate the affair.8 Suffice to say here that the British
government of Tony Blair was accused in May 2003 of ‘sexing up’ a dossier
on Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, in order to
encourage parliamentary support and pro-war public opinion in advance of
the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The journalist concerned, Andrew Gilligan,
speaking on the BBC’s flagship radio Today programme cited an official source,
later named as David Kelly, but in a way which was (the government and its
supporters argued) dishonest and misleading. The government was furious,
and in a tragic turn of events David Kelly subsequently committed suicide,
leading to a major investigation by Lord Hutton. In August 2003 the Hutton
inquiry reported its findings, which were highly critical of the BBC’s editorial
procedures.
The findings of the Hutton inquiry were contested by many observers,
who accused it of being a whitewash of governmental duplicity. others, such
as journalist John Lloyd, urged the BBC to accept that on this occasion its
editorial practices had been found wanting.9 The director general and chairman
of the corporation both resigned, and the lingering impact on the BBC was to
undermine public confidence in its editorial standards and in the accuracy of
its reporting.
on 10 october 2005 one of Britain’s most trusted and successful newspapers,
the Guardian, published on its front page the story of a Chinese dissident who
had been brutally beaten and was now missing, possibly dead. The story was
accompanied by pictures and a graphic eye-witness account by the reporter. It
later emerged that much of the story had been invented. on 17 october, the
Guardian apologised for the story’s ‘gross errors and exaggerations’.
By the mid-2000s, therefore, on both sides of the Atlantic, the issues of

journalistic fabrication and invention, of fakes and hoaxes, were high on
the news and public agendas. For the BBC the issue was not fabrication but
editorial standards, but it too was swept up in the wave of negative stories about
journalistic integrity. In a trend fuelled not least by the networking potential of
online technology the established news media of print and terrestrial broadcast
TV and radio were going through a generalised crisis of public trust in their
output, caused by the perception, fair or not, that their content was vulnerable
to inappropriate editorial manipulation, slack and sloppy production, and
downright fabrication and lying.
THE CRISIS oF TRUST AND THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Chapter 5 referred to the downbeat state of investigative journalism in the

twenty-first century as the editorial resources devoted to this key journalistic
specialism were cut back in the wake of competitive pressures. other kinds
of journalism were also under unprecedented scrutiny, not least from the rise
of online news-makers, also known as ‘citizen journalists’, content-generating
users, bloggers and social networkers who as the 2000s progressed spent a
great deal of their time checking up on, and then spreading the news about,
errors of judgement or fact, not to mention deliberate deception on the part
of the ‘old media’. If the established news media had acted as a fourth estate
watching over political power, emerging online media acted as scrutineers of
print and broadcast journalism, harrying them and deflating their presump-
tions of superiority with repeated examples of fabrication and plagiarism.
The principal victims of this ‘crisis’ of trust – and for once, crisis is an
appropriate term – have, as noted above, been the New York Times, USA
Today, and CBS in the United States; the Mirror and the BBC in the United
Kingdom. These familiar, once trusted institutions now faced the emergence
of an online, twenty-four-hour, globalised news culture in which ordinary
people – amateurs in journalistic terms – had unprecedented capacity to follow
stories back to their source, and to communicate their own take on these stories
to a global audience, at great speed and with relatively few opportunities for
censorship or control.
This trend has been welcomed by many, including this writer, as amounting
to a decentralisation and democratisation of journalism, liberating it from the
stultifying effect of the old, top-down, capital-intensive media organisations,
as well as the authoritarian control of governments.10 There is a downside to
technological change, however, in that many of the elements of traditional
print and broadcast journalism which we have good cause to value are also at
risk from the internet.
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Journalism on the internet, it is argued by some observers, suffers because

of the dissolution of the boundary which has traditionally existed between the
professional and the amateur. There are concerns that in the era of the blogger
and the ‘citizen journalist’, where user-generated content is often king, the
professional standards of journalism such as reliability and accuracy of sourcing
are eroded. The consumers of news find it more difficult to distinguish truth
from falsehood, and reasonable speculation from gossip and rumour. There
is a lot more information out there in the globalised public sphere, yes, more
than any human being has ever had access to before, but much of it is flawed
because of its doubtful provenance. Who has originated it? What checks have
they carried out on the reliability of their sources? Can we trust it, in the way
that we have traditionally trusted, say, the BBC? A number of observers have
acknowledged the important democratising effects of the new media, while
balancing these against the degenerative effects of so much information that
is untested and potentially untrue. oliver Kamm in a 2006 article for the
Guardian observed that the blogosphere (that sector of the internet where so
much of this information circulates) is a ‘democratic medium, allowing anyone
to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost.
But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. you need no compe-
tence to join in’. However:
Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good
thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere.
But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because
blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary; they
are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media
provide. In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusion, the
blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation.11
While online journalism is often flawed (is often not ‘journalism’ at all),
for all the reasons cited in the above works and elsewhere, it should also be
acknowledged that it has no special relationship to error in news-gathering
and presentation, nor to the fabrication of facts. Nor indeed to commentary,
despite Kamm’s condemnation of the blogger. ‘old’ print media are full of
opinion, polemic, punditry – far too much, many have argued. The online
commentariat, though much more numerous and independent of organisa-
tional affiliations, does not qualitatively differ in its output from the old media
punditocracy. There have been online journalistic hoaxes, of course, but as we
have seen this deviation from the normative standards of liberal journalism has
a long history which predates the internet. on the plus side, online journalists
have broken important stories which print and broadcast media were simply
unable or unwilling to (such as the Clinton-Lewinky scandal first reported by
the Drudge Report). online journalists have played a valuable role in exposing
a number of old media fabrications and hoaxes, including the Jayson Blair
scandal at the New York Times. In doing so, they have challenged long-estab-
lished presumptions of where in the media environment journalistic and
ethical superiority reside.
SHATTERED GlASS AND THE CRISIS oF JoURNALISTIC

TRUST
online journalism is a recent phenomenon and thus not one which had been
extensively addressed by film-makers as this book went to press. The world
awaits a movie about blogging and its cultural impact. But there has been one
important film in recent years which deals with precisely these issues as they
impact on the ‘old’ media. With fortuitious timing given the wave of faking
scandals which broke in the preceding months, including the Jayson Blair case,
Billy Ray’s 2003 film (released in the UK on 14 May 2004, by coincidence the
same day as Piers Morgan resigned as editor of the Mirror over the hoax Iraqi
prisoner abuse story) returned to a 1998 case, that of Stephen Glass and the
extended hoax he played on the New Republic. Adapted from a Vanity Fair
article by Buzz Bissinger,12 Shattered Glass marks the moment when authority
and influence in the public sphere began to shift from print to the internet.

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For one reviewer, ‘the film plays like a cautionary tale about rotten practices
in the fourth estate’.13 The film focuses in on the New Republic’s meticulous
editorial process, with a sequence portraying the checking and revising stages
through which every article passes. Not only is the sequence an interesting
lesson in one dimension of ‘objectivity’ – the importance of checking sources,
and verifying claims – it raises the question: if such a rigorous process is in
place, how on earth could a young novice such as Glass so abuse his employers’
trust and get away with it?
It is ironic that the fabrications and lies of Stephen Glass, which fooled
editors at one of the world’s most respected and editorially sound publica-
tions, should have been uncovered by what was then, in 1998, the very new
medium of online journalism, in the form of Forbes Digital Tool. As Shattered
Glass shows, it was this online publication’s editor, Adam Penenberg, after
conducting his own research on a Glass story (‘Hack Heaven’) he had found
to be suspicious, who finally blew the whistle. In a piece for Forbes Digital
published on 5 November 1998 Penenberg gave an account of the steps he
and his colleagues took to establish the truth or otherwise of the Glass story.14
The internet was a key tool in doing so, as search engines failed to show up
any reference to the company, Jukt Electronics, referred to by Glass in ‘Hack
Heaven’, or to enable confirmation of any of the other details in the story. An
online publication, using internet search methods, had proven the unreliability
of one of the great US media of record. For Penenberg:
It is ironic that online journalists have received bad press from the print
media for shoddy reporting. But the truth is, bad journalism can be found
anywhere. It is not the medium; it is the writer.15
In another piece written by Perenberg’s colleague Kambiz Foroohar, he

wondered if he (or Forbes) should have blown the whistle sooner, and with
more forcefulness since, in his words, ‘we had enough information to run a
story casting serious doubts on [Glass’ piece]’.16 Rather than going public with
their doubts about Glass, they gave him the benefit of the doubt, and Charles
Lane several days to establish the truth and avoid embarrassment for the New
Republic. In the end, Glass had to concede that his story was faked, and he
was fired that weekend. Justifying Forbes’ decision not to publish immediately
suspicions were raised, Foroohar wrote:
We were convinced that the story was a fake but we thought that no
sane person would create such a ridiculous fiction. We called the
Mountainview, Calif. number but only got a suspicious-sounding voice
mail. Investigating further, we discovered that the supposed corporate
phone number was for a cell phone. It was very odd.
on Friday, May 8, there followed a series of conference calls between

senior editors at Forbes Digital Tool and the New Republic’s Lane and
Glass. I assumed that a clever hoax had been set up to embarrass a
journalist whose reporting left a lot to be desired. Although Forbes Digital
had enough information to run a story on how the New Republic had
been fooled, we held back. We decided to delay publishing our story for
a few more days to find the hackers who had perpetrated the hoax. on
Sunday, the New Republic’s editor issued a press release announcing that
he had fired Glass. According to Lane, Glass had fabricated the whole
article. Should we have published our story on Friday? It is a cliché, but
hindsight is always 20/20. We erred on the side of caution. In today’s
climate of trigger-happy journalism it is better to lose the scoop than
have egg on our faces.
Unlike many films which have been critical of journalistic ethics, Shattered
Glass received generally positive reviews. Howard Good observes that Sydney
Pollack’s Absence of Malice (1981), starring Sally Field as a reporter who flouts
her own ethical conventions in order to get the story her editor requires, was
‘an antagonistic portrayal of the press’ (1989: 2), and that journalists were duly
antagonised. Billy Ray’s account of an even more despicable journalist was not
received as anything but a realistic, understated, even sympathetic account of
the predicament of an editor when he discovers that his star reporter is a fake.
By 2003/4, perhaps, the crisis of journalistic trust was so advanced that for
journalists to attack its cinematic treatment would merely have made matters
worse. And indeed, Shattered Glass is not a film which accuses US journalism
of anything more than naivete and gentile arrogance. Peter Sarsgaard plays
Chuck Lane as a kindly, supportive boss who is cruelly misled, and who deserves
our understanding. He stands, we might also say, for the better instincts of the
US media as they confront the uncertain and dangerous environment of the
twenty-first century.
Positive reviews aside, the remarkable fact is that Shattered Glass was initially
released in only eight cinemas in the US, and made less than $3 million at
the worldwide box office (approximately one hundredth of the revenues taken
by Borat). The reason for this is not clear, although it is consistent with the
pattern of many other movies about journalism which are now recognised as
classics. Both Ace in the Hole and The Sweet Smell of Success were commercial
flops, and are now revered by critics and scholars of the journalism genre.
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SHATTERED GlASS, SHATTERED DREAMS –

THE CoMING DEATH oF PRINT JoURNALISM?
Following the release of Shattered Glass, though not necessarily because of it,
the crisis of journalistic trust continued to build, and to coincide with other
perceived transgressions. CBS coverage of the 2004 presidential election
campaign was found to have been taken in by forged documents and accused of
liberal bias. At CNN in 2005 chief news executive Eason Jordan was forced to
resign after alleging in public that the US military was targeting journalists in
Iraq. In 2007 the BBC experienced another wave of faking scandals (not journal-
istic this time, but inevitably incorporated within the same narrative framework
as the Blair and Glass examples) when it was revealed that programme makers
had invented the names of competition winners on children’s TV, and that
voting on phone-in shows was perhaps less rigorously managed than it should
have been (a criticism made too of the commercial broadcaster ITV). Back on
the terrain of journalism, a reality TV-style documentary on the Queen was
condemned for misleading editing. In one scene the Queen appeared to have
grumpily walked out on a photo session with celebrity photographer Anne
Liebowitz. She had done no such thing, it turned out, but the producers of the
show felt the appearance of drama would increase its appeal.
The overall impression given by these incidents was of a media under
unprecedented scrutiny for practices which had probably always been present
in news and other categories of output, but to which opponents and rivals
had become hyper-sensitive. Even the long-standing trick of using ‘noddies’ in
TV interviews (that is where, after the completion of an interview, the camera
films the interviewer from behind, ‘nodding’ in agreement with the inter-
viewee, thereby giving the impression of continuity) was condemned as fakery,
and banished from its programmes henceforth by Channel Five News. In this
respect, reportage of the crisis of trust at the BBC and elsewhere had many
of the structural features of a moral panic, fuelled not least by the anti-BBC
motivations of big commercial media such as News Corp and Associated
Newspapers. Undermining the BBC and the UK’s system of public service
broadcasting in general had been a favoured past time of these organisations
since the Thatcherite 1980s, and the various lapses and failures which came to
light when the press started to look for them provided useful ammunition for
those such as News Corp who wished to break up the BBC monopoly. That
said, the lapses, and the crisis of public trust in the BBC, and in journalism
generally which they fuelled, were real.
In a lengthy article for the New Yorker magazine published in March 2008
Eric Alterman considered these issues of trust against the background of a
newspaper industry in ‘life or death’ mode. As he observed, the American
newspaper (and the argument applies also to those newspapers of comparable
societies such as the UK) is ‘designed to appeal to a broad audience, with

competing values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of
objectivity’.17 Alterman noted that this model was being replaced by online
news aggregation sites, such as the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, which
do not originate stories but bring them together under one banner, where they
become the subject of online debate. ‘Surrounding the news articles are the
highly opinionated posts of an endless army of both celebrity and non-celebrity
bloggers’. This is good for democratic discourse, Alterman concedes, but at
what cost in terms of our capacity to trust what we read in the news?
It is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but
democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on
newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride
in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to
know.
We are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterised
by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level
of first-rate journalists. The transformation of newspapers from enter-
prises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each
engaged in its own kind of ‘news’ – and each with its own set of ‘truths’
upon which to base debate and discussion – will mean the loss of a single
national narrative and agreed-upon set of ‘facts’ by which to conduct our
politics.
It is no bad thing, many will think, that the journalism of the future is likely
to be premised on the broad acceptance of interpretative plurality, the idea
that there is indeed no ‘single national narrative and agreed-upon set of facts’
to which we must all defer, but a multiplicity of perspectives on events and
issues. And yet, we still need to know who is trustworthy and who is not, given
that we cannot experience directly all the events which make the news, or have
direct access to the ‘facts’ behind every issue. Journalists in the twenty-first
century, to a greater extent than ever before, are needed as sense-makers and
sifters not just of ever-more complex reality, but of the many and diverse ways
in which reality will be reported in the digital future. Whether these sense-
makers operate on paper, TV, radio or online, they have to be trusted, which
requires their acceptance of certain standards of quality control. A trusted
voice need not be a paid staffer of an organisation like the BBC for us to trust
him or her, but we still need assurances of some kind, do we not, to separate
the journalistic wheat from the chaotic chaff?
The capacity of the internet to spread the news, to disseminate by online
word-of-mouth who in the blogosphere is to be trusted and who is not, whose
views are perceptive and insightful, and whose are not, will be key here. As is
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already the case online, where of the millions of active blogs in existence only
a few are read by anyone other than their creators, quality journalism will rise
to the top, in an evolutionary process which weeds out the malicious rumour-
mongers, the deliberate liars, the lazy thinkers, and elevates those worth reading
and listening to to the top of the internet ratings. This will happen without
central direction (which is just as well, since there is none on the internet) but
through the more informal processes of sharing and networking which online
media permit.
It does not happen without toxic material leaking down and through the
internet’s myriad pathways but since, as Shattered Glass shows, this has always
happened even with the most respected of old media outlets, it is unlikely
to bring democracy crashing down. It should be our aim, perhaps, if the
strengthening of mediated democracy is the goal, especially at the global level,
to preserve the strengths of the old media, harness the opportunities presented
by the new, and develop our critical faculties and reading skills in telling the
difference between quality and rubbish in the online journalism environment.
The dynamism and lack of deference for establishments of all kinds (including
media establishments) shown by the online producers of news and journalism
are qualities to be welcomed and encouraged. So too is the importance to all
stakeholders, not least the online producers, of standards of quality control
which enable material accessed online to be trusted and used. In the end a
happy medium, an historic compromise will be found which enables these two,
increasingly blurred groups of writers to co-exist.
CoNCLUSIoN
The lesson of Shattered Glass is not that the established media of record are
fatally flawed, and that online journalism is in some sense superior; merely that
the mantra of old media good, new media bad is simplistic. For all that there
are legitimate concerns around the impact of the internet on the gathering,
production and dissemination of news and journalism, it is the case that lies,
mistakes and gossip have been part of the journalistic media for centuries,
firmly embedded even in the most highly regarded of media outlets. The
capacity of the new media to act as watchdogs and whistleblowers over the old
is one of the most welcome features of the internet.
At the end of 2008, just as the crisis of trust which dominated much debate
about journalism in the early 2000s was melting away (until the next iteration
of the cycle), concern began to grow that the long foreseen death of print as
a journalistic medium was finally upon us. The tension between print and
online journalism dramatised in Shattered Glass had, it was argued, become
a life-and-death struggle for survival in a recession-hit world of declining
circulations and advertising revenues. Newspaper is a carrier medium for

journalistic content, and may indeed be in terminal decline, as circulations fall
by 3 per cent a year and rising.18 The news brand continues to be central to the
functioning of journalism, both as a political force and a commercial product.
The BBC and the Guardian provide examples of two ‘old’ media brands which
have successfully made the transition to the internet, at no perceptible cost to
public views of their journalistic quality. Journalism of quality can and will
thrive on the internet, just as it survived the transition from print to radio and
then TV. Methods will change, there will be formal evolution. The presen-
tation and packaging of journalism will adapt to the online environment and
the interactive, participatory ways in which people use it. The lines which
have separated professional and amateur journalists for centuries will dissolve
further, and may even disappear entirely (although I doubt it). But journalism
will survive, for at least as long as liberal democracy. It is just that it will
look different. Shattered Glass will come to be seen as a key movie by future
audiences, because it marks the moment at which that transition from old to
new really began to be felt for the first time.
NoTES
1. Fans of Hunter Thompson derive much of their pleasure in reading his work from deciding
whether this or that episode of drug-fuelled mayhem could possibly have happened, or if it
is the creation of the author’s imagination. What’s more, they don’t really care which it is,
because these episodes feed into a broader vision of the world that is uniquely the journalist-
artist’s own, and transcends the question of what actually happened that weekend in Las
Vegas.
2. For details of this and other journalistic fabrications see the Museum of Hoaxes website
(http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/).
3. For a discussion of this period in British current affairs and documentary-making, see
Winston, B., ‘The primrose path: faking UK television documentary, ‘docuglitz’ and
docusoap’ (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1199/bwfr8b.htm).
4. Barry, D., et al, ‘Times reporter who resigned leaves long trail of deception’, New York
Times, 11 May 2003 (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/11PAPE.html?ex=
1367985600&en=d6f511319c259463&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND).
5. Lawrenson, E., ‘It didn’t happen here’, Sight & Sound, volume 4, number 6, 2004.
6. Reported on the BBC’s news website on Friday 14 May 2004.
7. See my News & Journalism In the UK, 5th edition, for an account of the affair and its
aftermath (McNair 2009).
8. www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/.
9. See Lloyd’s book on What the Media are Doing To Our Politics (2004), and the debate hosted
by the Guardian newspaper in December 2004.
10. See, for example, my essay in Chadwick and Howard’s Routledge Handbook of Internet
Politics, ‘The internet and the changing global media environment’. This edited volume
contains a large resource of essays addressing in detail the democratic implications of the
internet, including the journalistic dimension.
fbios, fks, fudss 173
11. Kamm, o., ‘A parody of democracy’, Guardian, 9 April 2007. Andrew Keen’s Cult of the
Amateur (2008) argues with even greater force that the democratisation thesis as applied to
news online is a utopian illusion. Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody makes
a similar case, if less emphatically. For a scholarly history of online news media, see Allan
2006.
12. Bissinger, B., ‘Shattered Glass’, Vanity Fair, September 1998, (www.vanityfair.com/
magazine/archive/1998/09/bissinger199809
13. Lawrenson, E., ‘It didn’t happen here’, Sight & Sound, volume 4, number 6, 2004.
14. Penenberg, A., ‘Lies, damn lies and fiction’, Forbes Digital Tool, 5 November 1998 (www.
forbes.com/1998/05/11/otw3.html).
15. Idem.
16. Foroohar, K., ‘Tracking lies’, Forbes Digital, 5 November 1998 (www.forbes.com/1998/
05/11/otw2.html).
17. Alterman, Eric, ‘“out of print”: the death and life of the American newspaper’, New Yorker,
31 March 2008.
18. For a recent overview of the state of print journalism in the UK, see my News and Journalism
in the UK, 5th edition (McNair 2009).
 11
King-makers
N ews media are important cultural institutions, not least because it is

perceived that they have the capacity to influence public opinion and
political processes. Exactly how they do so, and with what consequences or
effects, has always been a matter of debate,1 but there is no doubt that the
power of perception in itself means that the people and corporations who
own news media and thus have final say on editorial policy, then the editors
and journalists responsible for content and then, too, the communications
specialists who aim to shape and manage that content for various purposes
and ends, are to a greater or lesser degree political actors. Political journalism
(and political communication) may win or lose elections (as was claimed of the
Murdoch-owned Sun in the UK in the 1980s), make or break careers, elevate
or lower individuals in the public imagination. They have influence on and
through the public sphere, on public opinion, and thence on those institutions
and individuals who feel as if they need to take into account the state of public
opinion in decision and policy-making. This in turn gives rise to the parallel
profession of public relations. Since the very existence of public relations is
premised on the existence of journalism as an agent of public opinion and a
factor in political decision-making, I include films about public relations in
this chapter. PR professionals such as Max Clifford in the UK are powerful
figures, with a potentially huge impact on how their clients – be they politi-
cians, pop stars, or members of the public who find themselves at the epicentre
of media feeding frenzies – are represented by journalists.2
To the extent that they are perceived to have influence news media
– defined both as institutions and the individuals who own or staff them –
can be viewed as king-makers. They have the power to build up the power
of others, as vested in reputation, social status and wealth. They also have
the power to attack those assets, and erode the power founded on them. In
this final chapter we explore the ways in which cinema has represented these
king-mks 175
journalistic king-makers, and also the changing nature of media power in the
age of the internet.
‘HE’S Told PRESIdENTS wHERE To go aNd

wHaT To do’ – THE PUNdIToCRaCy aNd
Sweet Smell of SucceSS
Journalists are required, first and foremost, to report events, then to make sense
of complex reality, to bear witness to injustice and suffering, and to scrutinise
power in the name of the people. In carrying out these roles and functions on
behalf of the public in a democracy they themselves become, some of them,
public figures of consequence, wielding significant power in their spheres of
competence, be these the worlds of politics, sport or entertainment. a film
reviewer can make an immense difference to the success or failure of a new
movie. a leading sports columnist can use his space in a popular newspaper
to make a struggling football coach’s position much more fragile than it might
otherwise have been. The very last film of the 1997–2008 period reviewed for
this book – frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008) – focuses on one such journalist,
david Frost, best known for his deceptively ‘soft’ interviewing technique as
deployed on shows such as the BBC’s frost on Sunday and Breakfast with frost.
His 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon were possible in large part because of
his power and influence as a journalist more famous than most of those whom
he interviewed. The Nixon interviews, and the contest between two iconic
public figures which they presented (Howard’s film portrays it like a boxing
match in which the protagonists slug it out for superiority, round by round)
came to be seen as a key moment in america’s (and Nixon’s) coming to terms
with the meaning of watergate.
other journalists have had different kinds of impact. In a career spanning
more than forty years australian investigative reporter John Pilger has
frequently placed issues on the public agenda in the UK and elsewhere which
might have been ignored had he not addressed them in documentaries such as
cambodia – Year Zero.3 Michael Moore has had a comparable influence in the
United States, and celebrated foreign correspondent Christiane amanpour at
the height of her fame needed only to turn up at an event for it to become news.
Her presence endowed news value on events.
Media power of this kind is generated not by the journalist alone, but is
also a function of the reputation of the news brand – the BBC, for example,
or the wall Street Journal – channelled through the personality of a particular
journalist. In 2008 the BBC’s business correspondent, Robert Peston, acquired
huge influence as an astute reporter of, and commentator on, the credit crunch
which first emerged in all its severity that year. The shocks of the fabrications
perpetrated on the New Republic and the New York times by Stephen glass
and Jayson Blair respectively were amplified by the power exercised by those
publications in US political life. what they wrote – what anyone writes in the
New Republic or the NYt – has greater influence and hence indirect power to
make things happen than something written by an anonymous hack for, say, the
National enquirer.
Newspapers, TV, radio and online news outlets acquire through the perfor-
mance of their normative democratic role a form of power which is auton-
omous and self-contained, and which is distinct from the power accruing to
elected politicians, or appointed officials, or self-made millionaire businessmen
and women. This power is a consequence of the normal functioning of news
media when they are doing their job properly, and a necessary condition for
journalism to perform the most important of its allotted roles in a democracy,
since there can be no effective scrutiny without a degree of authority. who
cares what a journalist says about corruption if he or she has no influence with
decision-making elites, no independent authority in the eyes of the public?
Many cinematic representations of journalists, as we have seen, are driven by
the watchdog’s struggle to be heard in the face of the resistance of the powerful.4
But power, once acquired, can be used for more than just the public good.
Media power in particular, with its potential impact on mass publics and thus
on political processes, is a much sought-after resource for those with their own
private interests to promote, but an obligation to be seen to operate within
democratic standards, and to be responsive to public opinion. News media
are usually constituted as private enterprises. This is their default mode in
capitalist societies, where private ownership of media is reconciled with
normatively approved levels of freedom and pluralism through the mainte-
nance by regulation of editorial and ideological diversity. with that qualifi-
cation, and with the exception of public-service broadcasters and a handful of
niche publications operated on a not-for-profit basis by the memberships of
political and other organisations, the preferred model for journalistic organi-
sation in liberal democratic societies is that of the capitalist business, selling
the news commodity to a market of readers, and those readers to advertisers.
But news is a cultural commodity, imbued with ideological power over
and above its basic use value (that is, informing us about what is happening
in the world). The commentary and analytic forms of journalism, and those
who produce them – the sense-makers of complex reality – have a particular
power in this respect. They are the punditocracy, the commentariat, the secular
priesthood in whom we place our trust. They are the interpretative elite of
the journalistic sphere, licensed to analyse complexity as experts, to define
its essential meanings, to recommend and advise on individual and collective
responses to events. The pundits are the most directly influential of journalists,
because their voices are highlighted and often aggressively marketed as incen-
tives to buy a particular newspaper or watch a TV news bulletin. Buy this

newspaper and acquire access to his or her opinions, is the deal.
The phenomenon of the media pundit is not new, as is demonstrated by the
recent reprinting of a 1945 book called molders of opinion.5 as often happens
with books written about journalism in decades past, one is struck by the
relevance of the contents to present-day debates in journalism studies. Editor
david Bulman, for example, observes from this vantage point (long before
transnational TV and the internet accelerated the media trends he observed
nearly seven decades ago), ‘tremendous changes in the manner of gathering
and interpreting news’ (2008: v).6 In particular, the velocity and quantity
of journalistic information has increased hugely. In such an environment
the public, ‘confused by the abundance and complexity of the news’ needs
the pundit more than ever. ‘Columnists and commentators are the delphic
oracles of today’ (ibid.: vii). They have ‘more influence than any other factor
in molding the opinions of adult americans’. Bulman’s book then presents a
series of short essays about the well-known columnists of the time, such as
walter lippmann (praised)7 and walter winchell (condemned as an unethical,
sleazy gossip columnist).
Neal gabler’s biography of walter winchell is rare in arguing that, far from
being a reprehensible sleaze-monger, his rise was one manifestation of a democ-
ratising wave in american culture. winchell, he argues, ‘helped effect and
then came to symbolise a cultural revolution in which control of the american
agenda shifted from the mandarins of high culture to the new masters of mass
culture’ (1994: 645). where walter lippman was a ‘sage political columnist’,
and a ‘sceptic of the rationality of the popular will’, winchell was ‘the voice
of the disenchanted and disenfranchised and the champion of democracy,
the embodiment of the ascendant american masses’ (ibid.: xiii). He was also,
not least by gabler’s own account, a nasty piece of work, who revelled in his
accumulation of power and did not hesitate to use it for personal gain.
at the peak of his influence winchell is estimated to have reached two-thirds
of americans in his newspaper columns and radio broadcasts. gabler suggests
that he invented the gossip column as a form,8 reaching out to the US masses
first through the Graphic, a tabloid dedicated to the sensationalisation and
dramatisation of news. For winchell, argues gabler, ‘gossip, far beyond its basic
attraction as journalistic voyeurism, was a weapon of empowerment for the
audience. Invading the lives of the famous and revealing their secrets brought
them to heel. It humanised them, and in humanising them demonstrated that
they were no better than we and in many cases worse’ (ibid.). For his critics,
on the other hand, as for the critics of gossip and celebrity journalism ever
since, the ethical violations of intrusion on privacy and catering to people’s
more voyeuristic tendencies outweigh any notional democratisation inherent
in the form.
This argument takes us into a wider discussion about the ethics of the
gossip column, and the place of celebrity journalism in the public sphere.9 In
the 1920s, observes gabler, as winchell’s iconoclastic style was being estab-
lished, his readers were dismissed by respectable journalists, scholars and the
type of people who preferred the other walter, as semi-literate morons. This,
as John Carey’s the Intellectuals and the masses (1992) reminds us, was also
the case in Britain, where the rise of mass and tabloid culture provoked scorn
and anxiety amongst those who saw high culture as the only culture worth
having. For decades since many scholars in media studies have interpreted the
rise of this kind of ‘infotainment’ as a corruption or ‘dumbing down’ of the
normatively preferred values of journalism, which from the critical perspective
should favour information about the economy, politics, foreign affairs and so
on. There is another body of opinion, however, which sees the interest of
popular journalism in the more private, more personalised sphere of issues as
entirely legitimate and healthy.
The critical view, less forgiving of the gossip columnist, is reflected
cinematically in Curtis Hanson’s 1997 adaptation of the James Ellroy novel
lA confidential. danny de Vito plays Sid Hudgens, editor of Hush Hush
magazine. Sid narrates what one reviewer at the time called ‘Ellroy’s magni-
ficant walter winchell-inspired tabloid speak’’10 as we follow his pursuit (and
occasional setting up) of Hollywood movie stars. In Ellroy’s books, and in this
film, the gossip columnist/celebrity journalist is a low-life figure barely less
despicable than the criminal sadists and psychopaths who populate the rest of
his fictional universe. Sid is eventually despatched in a manner that invites no
sympathy from the audience.
walter winchell’s career did not have such a dramatic ending, of course,
and by the 1950s he had established himself as america’s foremost journal-
istic king-maker. In this capacity he was the model for the character of J. J.
Hunsecker, played with chilling menace by Burt lancaster in Sweet Smell
of Success (alexander MacKendrick, 1957). Hunsecker is a king-making
columnist – ‘He’s told presidents where to go and what to do’, says his crony,
press agent Sydney Falco (Tony Curtis) – who uses his power corruptly, to
fight his personal battles. at the core of the film’s plot is Hunsecker’s quasi-
incestuous relationship with his sister, who is in love with a left-liberal jazz
musician. Hunsecker disapproves of the relationship and uses his column to
smear the musician and (he hopes) reclaim his sister. we see how he exploits
his contacts in an equally corrupt NyPd, ruthlessly calls in favours, and seeds
an unfounded smear story in the attempt to destroy the musician. In the end
he is defeated by his own immorality, but not before huge damage is done
to innocent people. Scott Kashner writes that ‘winchell’s special brand of
nastiness is the evil heart’ of the film.11
The script of Sweet Smell of Success, by Clifford odets and Ernest lehman,
Figure 28 J. J. Hunsecker, Sweet Smell of Success (alexander MacKendrick 1957)
echoes the real-life relationship between walter winchell and his sister,12 and
the propensity of that real-life king-maker to wield his journalistic power as a
weapon. In a key scene Hunsecker is meeting with a senator, Harvey, and his
female ‘friend’ in his favourite New york club. The female is an aspiring singer
and has her agent, Manny, by her side. Hunsecker is joined by Sydney Falco,
and we receive an explanation of what a press agent and a columnist do, and
can do to those with whom they fall out.
J. J.: This man [Manny] is not for you, Harvey, and you shouldn’t be
seen in public with him, because that’s another part of a press agent’s
life. They dig up scandal about prominent people and shovel it thin
among columnists who give them space.
Harvey: There seems to be some allusion here that escapes me.
J. J.: we’re friends, Harvey. we go as far back as when you were a
fresh-kid congressman, don’t we?
Harvey: why is it everything you say sounds like a threat?
J. J.: Maybe it’s a mannerism, because I don’t threaten friends. But why
furnish your enemies with ammunition? you’re a family man, Harvey,
and some day, god willing, you might want to be president, and here
you are, out in the open, where any hep person knows that this one
[Manny] is toting that one [the girl] around for you? are we kids or
what? [stands up, signalling that the meeting is over]
The next time you come up, you might join me on my TV show?
Harvey: Thanks J. J., for what I consider sound advice.
J. J.: go thou, and sin no more.
lancaster’s sinister and reportedly authentic performance as Hunsecker’s

bullying columnist with the barely repressed hots for his sister was too
disturbing for mainstream Hollywood, and Sweet Smell of Success was not a
commercial hit on its release. In Kashner’s view it was ‘just far too cynical for
the times – in 1957, america was in no mood to see a film about its dark side’.13
Today it is revered as a powerful and prescient exploration of the rising power
of the journalist in democratic societies, and a warning against the abuse of
that power.
as noted, the phenomenon of what we today call a punditocracy was already
the subject of books being written in the United States in the 1940s (and walter
lippmann’s 1922 book on Public opinion also reflects extensively on the nature
of expert or elite journalism). In the intervening period, as print and radio were
joined by TV and now the internet, the quantity of opinion and commentary in
journalism as a whole has expanded. at the end of the twentieth century there
was an upsurge of concern about the punditocracy, and associated trends such
as the ‘hyperadversarialism’ of political journalists discussed by James Fallows
in his 1996 book, Breaking the News. Commentators noted the commercially-
driven growth of gladiatorial, confrontational punditry, driven by an ‘attack
dog’ mentality. Journalists were neglecting their responsibility to inform,
and accentuating their watchdog function to the point at which politicians
were increasingly finding it difficult to communicate their policies, and their
positions. In the UK former deputy press secretary to Tony Blair, Tim allan,
referred to the hyper-adversarial style of Jeremy Paxman, John Humphrys and
others as a ‘punk political journalism’ which ‘puts the journalist centre stage. It
judges itself by how many hits it can rack up against the subject. any commu-
nication by the politician on his or her terms is regarded as a failure’.14
John lloyd’s what the media Are Doing to our Politics (2004) written in
the wake of the gilligan affair accused journalists of corrosive cynicism to the
point at which democracy itself was undermined. These arguments were given
urgency by then-current trends on declining public participation in democratic
processes. observing record low rates of voting in the US, the UK and some
other countries, these critics blamed journalists, at least in part, for what was
assumed to be a broad public disenchantment with politics. By treating politi-
cians with sneering contempt, went the argument, the average citizen was less
inclined to feel any allegiance to the democratic process, or any respect for its
elected representatives.
There are many complex issues raised in this debate. where, for example,
is the balance to be drawn between legitimate (and necessary) adversarialism
on the part of the journalist towards the politicians, and illegitimate or ‘hyper’
adversarialism? when does the normatively ordained critical scrutiny of power
become ‘corrosive cynicism’? does an excess of the latter in the public sphere
erode public trust in politics and thus undermine the democratic system?
when these trends coincide with the celebrification of politics, and the person-
alisation or privatisation of political journalism, is the public sphere thereby
degraded?
These are questions to which there are no definitive answers, only subjective
judgements based on interpretations of trends and assumptions about the
chain of cause and effect between, say, gladiatorial interviewing technique
and public cynicism about politics. as a citizen, I value the aggressive inter-
viewing styles of journalists such as Paxman and Humphrys in an era when
political actors come to the table armed to the teeth with all the tricks of media
management and public relations. at the same time, there is excess here and
there, as journalistic egos are inflated and they come to see themselves and
their often entertaining interrogations as the point, or end of the exchange,
rather than the means to informing audiences.
The so-called ‘crisis of public communication’ of the 1990s fuelled much
scholarly debate around political journalism,15 but has now subsided as voting
trends improved in the 2000s and critical attention moved elsewhere. In
relation to punditry, the major concern is now with the impact of the internet
on the quality of the information presented by commentators, online and
offline. In particular, and assuming that we do indeed have a need for the
analytical, sense-making, commentary work of the interpretative journalist,
what relationship do we have with the proliferating numbers of online pundits
now active? How do internet users, confronted with thousands, millions of
bloggers and other categories of online journalist (or those who see themselves
as journalists, which may not be the same thing), distinguish authority from its
mere appearance, or credibility from confidence trickery? as the old top-down

world of print recedes into history, what are the mechanisms of quality control
which will enable us to sort and sift the huge informational mass of the internet
for the pearls of wisdom?
as this book went to press, no feature film had as yet been made about
the online commentariat or punditocracy, no contemporary equivalent of
MacKendrick’s classic film. Shattered Glass does, as the previous chapter
noted, mark the moment when power began to shift from print to digital, but
it is really a film about the former’s vulnerability to fraudsters, rather than the
online media’s huge expansion and what it means for the future of journalism
as a cultural form. Maybe there is a script in production about Matt drudge
and his exposure of the Clinton-lewinsky scandal, or the adventures of the
Baghdad Blogger in war-torn Iraq.16 If not, perhaps someone should write one?
Meantime, early 2009 saw the global release of Ron Howard’s frost/Nixon,
about the 1977 interviews of former president Richard Nixon by leading
British journalist david Frost. where Sweet Smell of Success with its menacing
of a senator by J. J. Hunsecker represents the dark side of the journalist-as-
king-maker, the usurpation of legitimate democratic power by the unelected,
self-appointed watchdog who then becomes a bully, frost/Nixon gives us a
representation of the normative ideal – the political journalist as hero. In these
four interviews, conducted in a private home in California, a disgraced leader
who has evaded the admission of guilt that will set his people free is brought
to account by a journalist. Frost’s critical scrutiny of Nixon presents a lesson
in the proper functioning of the fourth estate, which is to watch over power
and hold it to account. Nixon had resigned rather than be impeached, and
then been pardoned by incoming president gerald Ford. There had been no
holding to account of the conspiracy until Frost came along with his inspired
idea. In frost/Nixon the king-maker becomes the one who escorts the king
from power, who lances the boil which has been infecting the realm, and guides
the old man into as dignified an exile as can be expected in such circumstances.
The script lays stress on the fact that Frost was not an established member
of the political press corps, nor a heavyweight pundit, but a figure known for
his comedy and light entertainment shows as much as his political journalism.
Could such a journalist outwit Richard Nixon, it asks? will he just throw ‘puff
balls’ to be batted aside by the wily old president? The film has researcher
James Reston Jr (Sam Rockwell) in despair at one point as he rails at Frost’s
failure to divert Nixon from ‘the sort of banal anecdotes you’d expect from a
talk show host’. Frost maintains a dignified silence on that point, and in the
end vindicates himself by extracting the admission of wrongdoing he seeks.
The episode dramatises a wider debate around the effectiveness of various
interviewing styles which Fallows and others raised in the 1990s. which style
of interview is likely to produce the most information from a political subject,
especially one with something to hide? The bulldog terrier approach of such
as Jeremy Paxman in the UK, or david Frost’s deceptively soft, friendly style,
which here and in many subsequent interviews caught interviewees off guard?
Both styles have their place, and so does every style in between. But no political
interviewer was ever more successful in getting his or her man (or woman) than
david Frost in 1977. Behind the smile there was steel, and Nixon did not see
it coming.
SPIN doCToRS
Nixon went on TV for the money, as Howard’s film shows, and also because he
knew that it was a way of speaking to the american people directly, of securing
whatever legacy might remain to him. as the former president recalls at one
point, TV images are crucial to a politician’s reputation. He cites the case of
his 1960 televised debate with John F. Kennedy, when it is widely believed that
the sight of his perspiration, pale complexion and bushy eyebrows lost him
the advantage (radio listeners favoured Nixon over the telegenic Kennedy).
This case has become axiomatic in the study of political communication,
and shorthand for the power of the media, and of television in particular.
The perception of that power, and that it is open to abuse, has had another
consequence: the rise of a parallel communication-oriented profession, known
today as public relations.
Public relations is the management of communication between an actor in
any sphere of public life and his or her publics. It is, in part, the attempt to
shape, influence or manage how the media represents one’s client, and thus
how he is perceived by the public. In frost/Nixon we see the former president
acutely conscious of how he will look on TV, and surrounded by advisers
dedicated to helping him in that task.
In common vernacular the public relations professional is better known as
the spin doctor, the media advisor, the communications guru. although not
a new practice in itself, the profession of public relations dates back only to
the start of the twentieth century, when the expansion of mass print media
coincided with the extension of voting rights to the great majority of the
people in democratic societies (women, for example, who had hitherto been
denied the vote). The rise of PR in the century since then reflects the growing
recognition amongst social actors of all kinds (and not only elite groups – many
of the most effective deployers of PR techniques are single-issue pressure
and campaigning groups unconnected with power elites) that because media
are potentially powerful, or potentially influential on those who wield power,
there is something to be gained by trying to influence what the media say
about oneself, one’s organisation, one’s favoured political cause. Influencing
journalism – media relations, or media management – has become a profession

in itself, part of the broader field of public relations. There are indeed estimated
to be more PR professionals in the US and the UK than journalists.
Such facts alarm many observers, and have contributed to a vast and still
growing ‘demonology’ of spin which presents the rise of PR as synonymous
with the decline of journalism (or of certain standards in journalism). The
scholarly critique of public relations is extensive, and occupies a substantial
sub-sector of media and journalism studies which views it as practically the
same as propaganda.17 Journalists are critical too, blaming PR for what is
perceived as growing journalistic dependence on public relations as sources
for news. In 2008 journalist Nick davies made this case forcefully. when news
organisations are under ever-increasing financial pressures, and journalists are
required to meet tighter deadlines with fewer editorial resources, the temptation
to use PR ‘puffery’ is understandable. The quantity of news ‘supplied’ by PR
professionals, rather than gathered and independently sourced by journalists,
has increased over time, which cannot be a good thing for the reputation and
integrity of the fourth estate. The fifth estate of public relations practitioners
has its place in a complex and fast-moving world, but it is, or should be, always
a subordinate one.
which brings us to the case for PR. Not only is it an organisational conve-
nience, indeed necessity, for news-makers to have access to a regular supply of
stories, but there is democratic value in individuals and organisations having
the capacity and opportunity to communicate their considered positions on
given topics to the public at large. This would be so even if the journalists
always got it right, which of course they do not. In any conceivable circum-
stance, communication between, say, a government and its citizenry is essential,
or between a party and those whom it wishes to enlist as voters, but in the
media environment we today inhabit there can be no guarantees of communi-
cative clarity or consistency. government ministers disagree with each other
or with their executive and may leak information, confusing the message a
government may wish to present. a media frantic for story, and highly compet-
itive, may easily misread the government’s message, which should ideally be as
clear and unambiguous as possible. In a word of chaotic communication any
ambivalence or confusion in a message quickly gets blown up into a story of
‘split’ or division, which may come to overwhelm the substantive issues under-
pinning that apparent division. This is in the nature of contemporary political
journalism, and a communicative reality for all political actors. For this reason,
as alistair Campbell and others argued when they were required to defend the
New labour spin operation in the 1990s, communicative co-ordination and
clarity are essential.18
Most people, even the critics of PR, will accept this when pressed. Some
of the best media communicators are figures such as Michael Moore, Noam
Chomsky and a myriad ‘anti-establishment’ public figures who use the

techniques of persuasive communication with great skill. To communicate
effectively, in a volatile media environment fraught with risk is unquestionably
a good thing in itself, and an entirely reasonable aspiration for any political
actor. Journalists sift and sort complex reality for their audiences. PR experts
(professional and amateur) help journalists to achieve that sifting. They may
also succeed in placing issues on the public agenda through the use of media-
friendly demonstrations (or spectaculars), sound bites and other ‘pseudo-
events’ designed purely to grab the media’s attention. all this is fair and
reasonable. Not good, from the democratic perspective, is the use of public
relations techniques in ways which are dishonest or otherwise unethical. Just
as journalists have ethical codes, so the practitioners of public relations – who
also claim the status of profession – are rightly expected to behave within
certain commonly agreed standards. when these are violated, which they
frequently are, criticism and condemnation are entirely justified.
another defence of PR is, of course, directly related to the previous section
on the power of the journalist – when pundits and commentators threaten to
drown out the opinions and policies of politicians with hyperadversarialism
and corrosive cynicism (and not just politicians in the narrow sense, but all
political actors), the latter require access to managed communication, designed
and executed with the aim of effectively conveying their messages. How can
citizens in a democracy make meaningful choices, if they are not permitted to
hear the policy proposals of their aspiring and actual representatives from the
horse’s mouth rather than refracted though the journalistic prism?
In previous work I have argued that the rise of hyperadversarial journalism
in the late twentieth century was an evolutionary response to the rise of
public relations and spin.19 Conversely, the need of political actors to be
heard in a hyperadversarial journalistic culture justifies investment in the
methods and tools of effective communication. whether the logic of this
communicative arms race is accepted or not, public relations is here to stay
as an element of the media environment; one, moreover, which is growing
in importance, as reflected in popular culture in a variety of ways. on TV
there have been Spin city (US) and the thick of It (UK), comic satires
inspired by the communication practices of the Clinton and Blair admin-
istrations respectively.20 The BBC also produced Absolute Power (radio and
TV versions were made), starring Stephen Fry as a cynical, amoral public
relations consultant.
PR’s rise in the twentieth century parallels the rise of the cinema, and has
been the subject of a number of movies, if not nearly as many as journalism.
This reflects the relative newness and cultural marginality of public relations.
It also confirms the particular esteem – ambivalent and contradictory though
it often is – in which journalism is held. There is a popular fascination with
Figure 29 Tony Curtis as Sydney Fako, Sweet Smell of Success (alexander

MacKendrick, 1957). Source: BFI
journalism which is absent from the world of public relations, even though
practitioners of the latter are more numerous, better paid on average, and live
lifestyles which are probably just as glamorous. It is as if public relations is
the unwelcome guest in the modern public sphere, a necessary but unloved
element of the communication process. How else to explain the relative lack
of interest in the profession (and I will call it that) amongst film-makers?
There have been some films made about PR, however, and more over time,
with the status of the PR man (rarely a woman) gradually changing. Morris
and goldsworthy 2008 identify waikiki wedding (Frank Tuttle, 1937) starring
Bing Crosby and four’s A crowd (Michael Curtiz, 1938) starring Errol Flynn
as early examples of the sub-genre. Some films about PR also qualify as films
about journalism (Sweet Smell of Success, for example – see above), in so
far as they represent the PR professional working alongside the journalist.
others barely address journalism, and focus entirely on the world of public
relations.
as in films about journalism, cinematic representations of public relations
professionals often combine grime with glamour, and positive with negative
images. as Morris and goldsworthy note, ‘popular representations of PR
exude glamour’ (2008: 6), but it is glamour of an anti-heroic kind, set within
critical studies of how unethical and manipulative public relations can be. The
men and women of the PR industry are rarely portrayed as heroes, even when
they are played by the leading screen stars of their day. In the period 1997–2008
key movies about PR included wag the Dog (Barry levinson, 1998) and thank
You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2006). In wag the Dog a communications
guru (Robert de Niro) enlists the help of a Hollywood producer (dustin
Hoffman, reportedly modelled on Robert Evans) after the US president asks
him to manufacture a fake media war and thus distract the public’s attention
from a potential sex scandal. The film appeared in the wake of the Clinton-
lewinsky scandal, and President Clinton’s authorisation of a missile attack
on suspected jihadi sites in afghanistan and Sudan. These were seen by many
at the time as diversionary strikes with little military value. wag the Dog took
this notion to an absurdist level, suggesting that the american public could be
fooled by an entirely fictional war played out on TV news (as with many satires
about public relations, the film-makers often assume a gullible and stupid
public easily taken in by the crudest PR stunts).21
In thank You for Smoking aaron Eckhart plays a top lobbyist for Big Tobacco,
whose best friends and drinking buddies include lobbyists for firearms and
alcohol. In what can be read as another take on the scenario depicted from
the journalistic perspective in the Insider, Reitman’s film explores the tools
and techniques used by tobacco companies to manage public opinion in their
favour. Both of these films reflect an era of heightened knowingness about
public relations, an environment in which phrases such as ‘on message’ are
part of the common parlance and the average citizen is quite likely to have
a view on spin. They play as satire and invite the audience’s contempt for a
profession almost always portrayed as fundamentally untrustworthy, albeit one
whose practitioners are glamorous and sexy as well as powerful. They are, in
this sense, propaganda for the anti-PR lobby, who fear the growing influence
of persuasive communication on the public sphere.
Contrast them with the figure of Sydney Falco (Tony Curtis) in Sweet Smell
of Success, portrayed as a reluctant gofer for J. J. Hunsecker’s king-maker
columnist. Sydney represents the PR man as a sad, desperate figure, waiting

for crumbs to fall from the more powerful man’s table, prepared to do anything
to curry favour. In a key scene which makes clear the low status of public
relations in the 1950s Hunsecker explains Sydney’s role to his companions in
a night club.
J. J.: Mr Falco is a hungry press agent, and fully up to all the tricks of his
very slimy trade. Match me, Sydney!
Sydney: Not quite this minute, J. J.
Senator: May I ask you a naïve question, Mr Falco? Exactly how does a
press agent work?
Sydney: you just saw a good example of it, Senator. a press agent eats a
columnist’s dirt and is expected to call it manna [as in ‘manna from
heaven’].
Senator: But don’t you help columnists by furnishing them with items?
Sydney: Sure, the columnists can’t do without us, except our good and
great friend. J. J. forgets to mention that. you see, we furnish him with
items.
J. J.: what, some cheap, gruesome gags?
Sydney: you print them don’tcha?
J. J.: yes, with your clients’ names attached. That’s the only reason the
poor slobs pay you, to see their names in my column all over the world.
Now you make out you’re doing me a favour?
Sydney: I didn’t say …
J. J.: The day I can’t get along without a press agent’s handouts I’ll close
up shop and move to alaska, lock stock and barrel.
Falco is the undervalued servant, sometimes the slave of the journalist whom he
feeds with juicy titbits of celebrity gossip. In one scene, as Sydney encounters a
dissatisfied client, the latter complains about what he pays his money to Falco
for. ‘It’s a dirty job, but I pay good money for it, don’t I?’ Sydney is roundly
despised and mocked wherever he goes. at the end of the film he is beaten
and dragged away to an uncertain future by the same corrupt cops who have
helped Hunsecker frame the musician who is in love with his sister.
By the time, thirty years later, we get to Power (Sydney lumet, 1987) the
public relations professional has acquired much greater, well, power. Richard
gere plays Pete St John, a media advisor for political parties and other clients
employed to help them win elections. gere’s character educates his clients, and
we the audience, as to the techniques of political PR in a media age. Crucially,
he is the boss, sophisticated and in control, while his clients are the supplicants,
desperate for his services and prepared to corrupt themselves at his bidding.
There is cynicism in the script, but also a weary pragmatism, founded on the
knowledge that this is how things are in the late twentieth century, and political
actors better get used to it. In the opening scene we find Pete at the scene of
an election rally in an unnamed latin american country, risking death and
articulating the principles of political success in a mediated democracy. later
in the film we see him flying in his private jet, playing the drums for relaxation,
being glamorous and cool, as in the scene where he puts straight an aspiring
state governor with principles by telling him how it is in the modern media
world. Having lectured the politician on what colour of clothes to wear, how to
speak in public and what kind of exercise machine to use (and for how long per
week), the politician observes with exasperation:
wallace: I am paying you. you work for me. you’re trying to run my life
here.
Pete (wearily): wallace, wallace, wallace. you are paying me to make you a
new life. Politics. and in order for me to do that I’ve got to be in charge
of all the elements that go into it. It’s the only way I work. That means
framing the overall strategy as well as deciding all the specifics. The
look of the campaign, the look of the billboards, the bumper stickers,
what colours they’re going to be. It means the polling, it means the
ads, radio, TV, newspapers, it means co-ordinating every piece of
information out of this office to make sure that it fits with what the
polls are telling us the people out there are worrying about, and what
they’re feeling good about.
wallace (fumbling for a sheet of paper): But aside from the campaign
themes I want to address some of my long-term plans.
Pete: I’m sure they’re great, but they’re not important. My job is to get
you in. once you’re there, you do whatever your conscience tells you
to do.
gere’s performance in Power is about as heroic and glamorous as PR practi-

tioners get in the movies. In more recent films such as thank You for Smoking
the projection of communicative power co-exists with encouraging audience
revulsion at the amoral excesses of the profession, and its offshoots such as
those who populate the world of party political campaigning. the contender
(Rod lurie, 2000), a rarely seen story of dirty tricks in the US white House
centred on efforts by a morally conservative congressman (gary oldman) to
smear and destroy a vice-presidential nominee who is also a pro-choice feminist
(Joan allen), and Primary colours (Mike Nichols, 1998) place public relations
– and its more unsavoury elements in particular – at the heart of government
and political campaigning, engaged in dirty tricks and other unethical practices
in pursuit of so-called democracy. The latter, like wag the Dog, was inspired
by, if not absolutely faithful to, the actual history of the Clinton white House,
as recounted in Joe Klein’s source novel. There, and in these films, the media
and the danger to political reputation they represent fuel the activities of the
professional communicators, although they are rarely allowed to excuse their
excesses.
BaRoNS
The perception, right or wrong, that journalism has influence is, of course, one
of the main reasons why businessmen down the years have wished to acquire
ownership of news media outlets, and to become media barons in charge of
media empires. lord Northcliffe, who launched the Daily mail in Britain in
1896, is described by Michael wolff as the founder of the ‘world’s first great
populist media empire’.22 Media empires, if this is true, are thus a feature of
twentieth-century capitalism, and of the rise of popular journalism (formerly
known as ‘tabloid’) which accompanied mass literacy and democracy. after the
Northcliffe empire came Rothermere (Northcliffe’s brother), Pearson, Hearst
in the US, Maxwell, Springer in germany, and others, all of them eclipsed by
the towering figure of Rupert Murdoch, unquestionably the most powerful
media baron of all time (and possibly the last).
Media companies are a vehicle for making profit and some owners treat
them in precisely this way, as business opportunities, maintaining a ‘hands-
off’ approach to editorial policy. given the priority attached in democratic
societies to media pluralism, such detachment is sometimes a condition laid
down by government regulators for the purchase of this or that newspaper
or TV channel, as in the 1980s in Britain when Rupert Murdoch’s News
Corp bought the times and Sunday times, having undertaken to preserve the
independence of its editorial policy. Similar undertakings were given to the
Bancroft family by Murdoch when he purchased the wall Street Journal in
2007 (in both cases, separated by a quarter of a century, Murdoch side-stepped
his undertakings and took control of editorial policy at the earliest possible
opportunity following conclusion of the deals).
In 2008 News Corp’s desire to take control of the UK ITV network was
blocked by competition rules. aware that news media companies are different
in key ways from other companies, many governments, including those in the
greatest champion of free markets, the USa, operate quite strict limits on
the quantity and type of media which individuals and corporations may own.
These rules are intended to limit ownership and prevent media power from
being concentrated in too few hands, and thus preserve political pluralism and
diversity. They express the recognition that media ownership is by definition
media power, and that those who wield such power must be constrained. For
the final category of journalistic screen villain explored in this book, and
perhaps the most powerful of all the categories of communicative king-maker,

we consider the representation of the media baron.
FRoM cItIZeN KANe To cItIZeN muRDocH
Picture the scene, if you will. oxford University, 1952, an overseas student
surveys the gentle surroundings from his well-appointed rooms; the paths
criss-crossing the quadrangle lead one way into the great hall where every
night he and his peers take their meals and drink their claret in the shadow
of the dons. In the other direction, the lecture theatres and the library where
the actual learning is done. The student is a quick learner, who loses patience
easily. He is also a rebel. Behind him on his desk there is a bust of lenin.
Vladimir Ilyich lenin, who killed the Tsar and casually ordered the slaughter
of thousands of bourgeois in the name of socialist humanity. His hero.
The student’s name is Rupert Murdoch, and he is fed up to the teeth
with the antiquated English elitism of this place, the rigid class system, the
snobbery that makes him an outsider although he is as rich, if not richer
than most of his fellows. He is an outsider because he is not English, but
australian, of the Melbourne Murdochs, the son of a journalist and now
wealthy newspaper proprietor Keith, one of australia’s most powerful men,
who is himself regarded with suspicion by the wealthier set in that city. why?
Because he has been a journalist, and journalism is not a respected profession
in the australia of those days. That makes Rupert angry, as he moves among
these cloisters.
and then, one day, when he least expects it, he receives a letter. His father is
dead. He is needed back home, to run the family newspaper business. Rupert is
sad, but also relieved, elated even. Now he can give up the pretence of trying to
become an English gentleman and start his real life’s work, selling newspapers
to the masses. He will take over the australian media, then the world’s, with
popular, down-to-earth journalism the man in the street can understand. This
will be his destiny, and his revenge on those who see journalism as a profession
not fit for a gentleman.
at this point the man in the orange advert23 will crack a very cool joke about
how to incorporate mobile telephones into this pre-mobile scenario, and the
illusion will break down. But there is no pitch, pastiche or otherwise, as far
as this writer is aware, for a film about Rupert Murdoch, the world’s greatest
media baron; at least not one that’s been successful. and yet Murdoch’s story
is every bit as dramatic as the fictional Charles Foster Kane, whose life as a
media baron (loosely based on that of william Randolph Hearst, the great
pioneer of US popular newspapers) was the subject of what is in many people’s
estimation the greatest film ever made.
There is no Citizen Murdoch (although there is a biography of that name),

despite the inherent drama of the story – the early inheritance of a troubled
family business; the building of an empire, first in australia, then in Britain,
assisted there by a right-wing government which gave him carte blanche to
smash the powerful print unions; and then in america, and thus the world,
growing to contain within it hundreds of newspapers, satellite TV stations,
social networking and online publications – the greatest media empire the
world has ever seen, and as of this writing, growing still with the purchase of
the wall Street Journal in 2007 for a cool $5.6 billion. There is no narrative
film of this story of media power, which is interesting in itself, and my starting
point for this final section.
Rupert Murdoch, let us note, is not just a media baron, but a man who feels
at ease with the business of journalism in all its facets, and whose impact on
journalism as a form has made many others feel distinctly ill at ease. according
to his most recent biographer he ‘perhaps knows as much about the various
aspects of putting out a newspaper – paper, printing, distribution, advertising,
reporting, editing, headline writing, promotion – as anyone in the world’ (wolff
2008: 17). This may well be the case, but Murdoch’s impact on journalism has
been, or until recently had been perceived as, almost entirely negative. He it
was who introduced the institution of the Page 3 girl to British tabloids in the
1970s, sparking the race downmarket to ever more sexually explicit content.
It was his newspaper, the Sun, which attracted universal opprobrium for
accusing liverpool fans at the Hillsborough stadium disaster of looting and
urinating on the bodies of the dead. It was his company which in 1986 smashed
the Fleet Street print unions and ushered in a much more profitable, if largely
de-unionised era for the British newspaper industry.
It was his newspapers’ cheerleading which, many argued, kept the Thatcher
government in power for more than a decade during which it presided over
de-industrialisation, mass unemployment and inner city riots. It was Murdoch
who successfully wrested ownership and control of the prestigious wall Street
Journal from the Bancroft family in 2007, amidst fears that he would corrupt
this citadel of objective financial journalism. and it was Murdoch who, in his
seventies, left his wife and married a woman nearly forty years younger.
His has been an eventful life by any standards, and he has become a global
household name, even guesting on the Simpsons. He has been portrayed by
Barry Humphries in the 1991 mini-series Selling Hitler ( about a famous
hoax involving the attempted sale of Hitler’s diaries), and by Ben Mende-
hlson in the 2002 film Black and white (Craig lahiff), where a young, anti-
establishment Murdoch is seen putting his adelaide newspaper to the aid of
a campaign against a perceived miscarriage of justice involving an aboriginal
man. No-one, however, has ever tried to make a feature film with Murdoch
at its centre (there have been documentaries),24 which immediately begs a
question. why, if citizen Kane was such a great movie, and its subject matter
so timeless, as is often and correctly suggested, has no comparable study of a
contemporary, and much more powerful media baron, been made?
The answer, critics of Murdoch will reply, is right there. apart from the fact
that Rupert Murdoch is very much alive and can be assumed to enjoy access to
the best lawyers money can buy, media power on the scale which he possesses,
extending through News Corp’s ownership of Fox Entertainment group to the
film-making business, acts to silence or deter the kind of independent artistic
or critical voice who could craft a Murdoch bio-pic worth watching. Michael
wolff’s 2008 biography, written with an unprecedented degree of co-operation
from the man himself, signalled that Murdoch had entered a period when his
legacy was becoming increasingly important. ‘He is becoming a liberal, sort
of ’, concluded woolf on the basis of extensive interviews, although ‘he remains
a militant free-marketeer’.25 as he neared his eighties, it seemed that he was
mellowing and softening as a person, and more concerned to ensure that his
enduring image was not that of a ruthless media baron only. and indeed, as the
brutalities of wapping in 1986, or the excesses of the Sun at its most intrusive
and insensitive faded into history, his singular contribution to transforming
the news media was coming to be seen as more positive than had been allowed
in the past. a reputational make-over was under way, and had been for some
time as this book went to press. But still no bio-pic, and none on the horizon.
Murdoch is not the only significant absence in cinema’s representation
of media barons. There have been very few films made about them, despite
the potential richness of the material. Robert Maxwell’s corrupt and bullying
career, ending with his mysterious death by drowning off the Canary Islands
in 1991, has never been dramatised in the cinema, although the BBC made a
TV drama about his final days in 2007. Canadian baron Conrad Black, sent
to prison in the US for corporate corruption, has escaped the attention of
film writers. apart from the risks to a producer or writer of approaching such
figures as subjects for film (at least while they remain alive), perhaps it is
thought that one of the greatest films ever made, a film about a fictional media
baron but based on the life of william Randolph Hearst, has said all there is to
be said on the subject.
The daddy of all movies about media barons is, of course, orson welles’
citizen Kane (1941). Not only is it the greatest movie about a media baron ever
made (and there have not been that many, as noted), it is in many critics’ view
the greatest movie ever made, due mainly to the innovative and highly influ-
ential cinematography of gregg Toland.26 citizen Kane, described by laura
Mulvey as ‘a pseudo-biographical portrait of a major newspaper tycoon’ (1996:
97) has been written about extensively within academic film studies, lauded
as a ground-breaking work of cinematic art. The film adopts the structure of
a journalistic investigation as a vehicle for propelling its story – the life of
Figure 30 citizen Kane (orson welles, 1941). Source: BFI
Charles Foster Kane, from childhood to death, as represented in fake newsreel

footage, the testimony of friends and colleagues, newspaper headlines and
enacted scenes involving Kane. Mulvey notes as particularly innovative the
way in which, by utilising this variety of sources, the script problematises truth
and questions the extent to which any life can really be ‘known’. ‘The film’s
‘active spectator’ is forced to look back at and re-examine events as though
the film were suggesting that history itself should be constantly subject to
re-examination and re-reading’ (ibid.: 102).
The same narrative strategy is employed, in a deliberate homage to citizen
Kane, in Todd Haynes’ fictionalised bio-pic of david Bowie and the glam rock
era, Velvet Goldmine (1998). as in welles’ film a journalist (Christian Bale) sets
out to trace what happened to 1970s glam rock star Brian Slade (david Bowie
would not allow his own name, or that of Ziggy Stardust, to be used). In a
series of interviews and flashbacks, including a key moment with a fictionalised
Iggy Pop (called here Kurt wild, and played by Ewan Mcgregor), the film
comes close to, but ultimately fails to discover the core of Slade’s personality,
although it has a lot of fun trying. In an exhilarating queer homage to 1970s
glam rock and its aesthetic roots the frequent references to citizen Kane are
just one of the film’s many pleasures.
as a film about journalism citizen Kane articulates both the normative
liberal ideal, in Kane’s youthful determination to represent the people before
power, and the cynical reality, as an older, less principled Kane betrays his
idealism in pursuit of personal power. The first half of the film evokes the
spirit of a radical popular newspaper and the young men who make it happen
while the latter half moves out of the news room and into the realm of media
power and its abuse. In a key scene Kane’s old friend and colleague, asked to
do a review of the baron’s girlfriend’s dreadful operatic debut, writes the truth.
Kane respects his right to criticise, and then sacks him for doing so.
Since the release of citizen Kane there have been no movies in English
which focus so centrally on the figure of the media baron, although they have
appeared in various contexts here and there. In 2002 an episode from w. R.
Hearst’s life was portrayed in Peter Bogdanovich’s the cat’s meow. The film
presented an account of a mysterious death which occurred aboard Hearst’s
yacht in 1924, during a weekend party attended by gossip columnist louella
Parsons (Jennifer Tilly), Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard) and others. although
the facts of the death by gunshot wound of Thomas Ince have never been fully
established, the film suggests that Hearst did it in a case of mistaken identity,
while in a jealous rage, and that louella Parsons’ subsequent lengthy career
as a gossip columnist for Hearst was the price she extracted from him for her
silence on the matter.
In 1997 the James Bond film tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode)
featured as its chief villain a media baron named Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce),
whom reviewers then and since have compared to both Rupert Murdoch
and Robert Maxwell. Mary Mcguckian’s Rag tale has a media baron in an
important supporting role. Richard Morton (Malcolm Mcdowell), chairman
of global Media Incorporated, is a Murdochian figure, sitting isolated in his
high-technology office surrounded by telephones and screens and electronic
snooping devices, spying on his staff, his wife, his rivals. Two things distin-
guish him from the real Murdoch, however: one, Morton has no track record
as an interfering proprietor, although it is his desire to interfere in the content
of the Rag which generates the plot and the narrative tension. Second, he is
easily outmanouevred by his staff on the Rag, who have secured his downfall
by the end of the movie. Richard Morton is most emphatically not Rupert
Murdoch, who has ruled his global media empire with unquestioned authority
for half a century.
CITIZEN CITIZEN?
Rupert Murdoch may turn out to have been the last media baron. Not the last
individual ever to hold or wield media power, but the last to be so in control
of so much that he can be credibly compared to a feudal baron. The rise of
the internet, and the decentralisation and fragmentation of media which it
has produced, the emergence of citizen journalism, user-generated content,
blogging and social networking, effectively ends the era of top-down control
which began in the late nineteenth century with lord Northcliffe and the
Daily mail. The established centres of media power and influence – propri-
etors, editors, senior journalists in print and analogue broadcast media – are
under intensifying pressure from a ‘new commentariat’ or online punditocracy,
operating on the internet through blogs and personal home pages, social
networking sites and other network channels. Control of media is slipping
away from the old power centres and towards a globalised, networked public
sphere to which hundreds of millions, billions have unprecedented access, and
not merely as consumers of journalism but as producers. after more than a
century of mass media organisation based on centralised, top-down lines of
one-to-many communication, the structures of media power are being radically
transformed, with uncertain consequences for democratic and authoritarian
societies alike.
NoTES
1. The scholarly literature on media effects, and political media effects in particular, is
extensive. For an overview, see my Introduction to Political communication (2007), and recent
books by Sarah oates (2008) and Karen Sanders (2008).
2. That said, this chapter discusses PR in the movies only in an introductory way, acknow-
ledging that there is much more to be said on the subject than I have space for here. For a
recent discussion of public relations’ public image, see Morris and goldsworthy’s PR: a
persuasive industry? (2008).
3. a box set of John Pilger’s TV documentary work was released in 2008, accompanied by a
book by anthony Hayward on the journalist’s career (2008).
4. as was the March 2009 Channel 4 adaptation of david Peace’s Red Riding novels, in which
young investigative reporter william dunford uncovers corruption in the west yorkshire
police, local government and building trade, forces which combine to overwhelm him.
5. Edited by david Bulman, and published by Bruce Publishing Company, 2007.
6. In contrast to the time of the Civil war (about the same span in time from 1945 as 1945 is
from the present), he suggests: ‘There are advantages – great advantages – in the speed with
which news is now transmitted. But there are disadvantages too. In the old days the diffi-
culty of communicating even news of importance automatically screened out the drivel that
serves no higher purpose than a peep show. Furthermore, the reader had time for thought
and discussion. He was not bombarded daily with problems of world-shaking importance,
spiced with juicy bits of gossip. as a result of the speed and abundance of news, the modern
is confused. His time and mental capacity are limited. He is painfully aware that an attempt
to assimilate anything beyond the smallest fraction of the day’s news would result in an
acute attack of mental indigestion.
7. an essay by J. C. o’Brien argues that ‘although he is called a columnist, about all that he
has in common with most other practitioners of the trade is a comparable number of inches
of space on the features page. Primarily he is a scholar and philosopher who has chosen
the newspaper instead of the lecture platform as a forum. Unlike the commentary of most
so-called interpretive columists, which is largely emotional reaction to events, lippmann’s
is related to and grows out of long-pondered, basic philosophical conceptions’ (2008: 47).
8. gabler describes winchell’s innovative style as ‘a high-velocity montage of snapshots, a
fragmentary new journalistic form that mirrored the modernistic experiments in high liter-
ature then being conducted by gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Celine and others’ (1994: 80).
9. For recent scholarly discussion of this issue, see Michael Higgins’ media and their Publics
(2008).
10. John wrathall, Sight & Sound, 1997.
11. Kashner, S., ‘a movie marked danger’, Vanity fair, april 2000.
12. See Neal gabler’s biography of winchell (1994).
13. Kashner, S., ‘a movie marked danger’, Vanity fair, april 2000.
14. allan, T., ‘Puffed up punks’, Guardian, 4 december 2004.
15. The phrase was the title of an influential academic book by Jay Blumler and Michael
gurevitch published in 1996.
16. For an update on the health and happiness of the Baghdad Blogger as of early 2009, see
Plommer, l., ‘He spared neither regime nor invader’, Guardian, 15 January 2009 (www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/15/baghdad-blogger-iraq-media).
17. Recent book-length critiques of public relations include thinker, faker, Spinner, Spy by
david Miller and will dinan (Pluto, 2007). Journalist Nick davies’s flat earth News (2008)
is heavily critical of the corrosive effect of the news media’s growing dependence on public
relations.
18. For an account of this debate, see my Journalism and Democracy (2000).
19. See my 2001 essay on ‘Public relations and broadcast news: an evolutionary approach’, in
Michael Bromley’s edited volume No News Is Bad News (2001).
20. The writer of the thick of It, armando Ianucci, subsequently wrote and directed a feature
film called In the loop, released in 2009. In the loop develops the framework of his BBC
TV sitcom, and places its characters in the midst of the media management operation which
accompanied the 2003 gulf war.
21. levinson also directed man of the Year (2007), starring Robin williams. as in wag the Dog,
levinson aimed to critique the way in which american politics had become dominated by
the machinations of media and image. The film was a commercial and critical flop, however.
22. See his biography of Rupert Murdoch, the man who owns the News (2008). For a history
of the British popular press, see Matthew Engel’s tickle the Public (1996).
23. at the time this book was being written, screenings of films in the Cineworld multiplex chain
were prefaced by short comic advertisements featuring a team of Hollywood producers in
meetings with real-life movie stars such as dennis Hopper, angelica Huston, John Cleese
and Rob lowe. Each short film revolved around a serious ‘pitch’ of a screenplay by the actor
in question, which was then undermined by the producers’ desperate efforts to find a role in
the movie for orange mobile phones.
24. outfoxed: Rupert murdoch’s war on Journalism, directed by Robert greenwald in 2004, is
the most critical.
25. woolf, M., ‘Tuesdays with Rupert’, Vanity fair, october 2008.
26. ‘an obvious reason for the astonishing audience response to this film is its look, the most
remarkable aspect of which is the extraordinary sharpness of every element in every scene’
(Turner, g., ‘Sharp practice’, Sight & Sound, volume 9, number 7, 1999.
 12
In closing
W e have seen journalists portrayed in cinema as heroes and villains; as

complex, richly drawn characters; and as crude stereotypes. We have
seen lurid anti-tabloid revenge fantasies where journalists are exterminated
like cockroaches; and poignant reconstructions of real-life tragedies in which
the journalist is the victim, or the target. There are still stereotypes and
caricatures of journalism on the screen, many of them crass and stupid. But
there has been amongst film-makers a clear recognition of the importance
and difficulty of the job journalists do in a modern democracy, particularly
at a time of conflict. There were many heroic representations of journalism
in the cinema over the period 1997–2008 – many more, indeed, than there
were villains. Journalists, male and female, are represented in the cinema of
this period as courageous investigators and witnesses, and as determined
protectors of their sources and their freedoms.
There are some journalistic bad guys (and bad girls) still around in the
movies, to be sure, as there are fakers, fraudsters, hacks and reptiles in real
life, but for now at least, they are eclipsed by the more positive representations
favoured by such directors as George Clooney and Michael Winterbottom.
Public opinion may be ambivalent about journalists as a professional category,
and trust continues to be an issue, but the success of films such as Good Night,
and Good Luck demonstrates that we want our journalists to be heroic, and
value their efforts to be so.
It is entirely coincidental, though fitting, that the final release of the
1997–2008 period was a film which portrays the scrutinising, adversarial,
watchdog function of journalism at its best. One might think it relatively easy
for a journalist to look good when placed opposite Richard Nixon, but the play
did not have to be written, nor the film made by such a powerful Hollywood
player as Ron Howard. If All the President’s Men presented a positive image of
journalism against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal, there is a pleasing
circularity in Howard’s returning to that subject for a new generation relatively

unfamiliar with the magnitude of the scandal, and the role which determined
journalists played in it.
We go out on a high note, then, but at a moment when the news media and
those who work in them – in newspapers especially - were under unprecedented
pressure from digital technologies and associated trends such as the rise of
citizen journalists, content-generating users and bloggers. Future films about
journalism will address these themes, no doubt, adding further chapters to the
story begun by Billy Ray in Shattered Glass. The decline of print journalism,
and its potentially adverse implications for democratic societies, inspired the
making of State of Play (Kevin Macdonald, 2009). The film, released in the
UK just after this book went to press, was intended to defend the value of
‘grubby’, old fashioned, adequately resourced investigative journalism in the
era of ‘sharp-suited bloggery and the internet’.1 It will not be the last to do so.
Note
1. Appleyard, B., ‘The genuine article’, Sunday Times, 5 April 2009.

appendix
Films about journalism,

1997–2008
This appendix contains mini-essays on all the films classified in chapter four
as being ‘about journalism’ made for the cinema and released in the United
Kingdom between 1997 and 2008.
1997
Welcome To Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997, 103 minutes)

This is the first of two films about war correspondents made by Michael
Winterbottom in the period 1997–2008, both based on actual events. It is not
generally regarded as Winterbottom’s best film – for one critic, ‘the second
half falls flat: the film moves with the characters and the narrative, supporting
them and offering no resistance … a stiff-upper-lipped tearjerker based on the
true story of an ITN journalist who resolves to rescue and adopt a child from
Sarajevo’.1 Welcome To Sarajevo is flawed, but successfully conveys the surreal
tragedy of the Bosnian-Serb siege of what had been a prosperous, sophisti-
cated city at the heart of Europe. In particular, the director uses an innovative
and chilling blend of enacted and actual news footage to convey the horror of
the massacre of civilians, and the death by sniper of a mother on her way to
her daughter’s wedding.
The story is that of a disillusioned TV news reporter who, despite the profes-
sional requirement for objectivity and detachment in his coverage, becomes
increasingly engaged with the tragedy of war and its impact on civilians. We
begin with scenes in which the journalists comment with war-weary accep-
tance on the increasing commodification of their reportage, and the debased
need for ‘infotainment’, meaning in this context suitably graphic images
of people dying. In a key scene we see Michael, the reporter, instruct his
cameraman (James Nesbitt) to make sure he gets a shot of a discarded loaf of
202 appendix
bread after a grisly market bombing in which dead and mutilated civilians lie
all around. The feelings and pain of the victims are less important to the war
correspondent, this scene suggests, than getting the money shot which will
lead the TV news that evening.
The film is flabby in its structure, as the above review suggests, with the
poignancy of the human stories gradually pushing out the discussions of
journalism which inform its first half. It is also, at first, smug in its dismissive
references to news as entertainment. When asked by their producer why they
have not got grisly footage of another atrocity which competing news organi-
sations have obtained, Michael’s cameraman Greg says ‘It’s all this news
as entertainment bollocks, isn’t it?’ He implies that he and Michael are not
driven by the crass values of news conceived as infotainment; that they are
above such commercialism. Later in the film, however, Michael uses the most
heart-wrenching footage he can obtain to mobilise international support for
the plight of the orphans he finds trapped in Sarajevo (and one of whom he
rescues, as did Michael Nicholson, on whose real-life experiences the film is
based).
Woody Harrelson plays a stereotypically wild and crazy American reporter
of the Hunter S. Thompson school, but with a degree of knowingness which
convinces the viewer that such reckless behaviour is probably an asset for a
war correspondent in a situation such as the siege of Sarajevo. The film also
contains many genuinely poignant scenes, such as one where a local assistant
for the news team carefully saves some eggs to take back to his Bosnian friends.
In the heart of Europe, in the last decade of the twentieth century, as barbaric
war rages, the image of an omelette shared amongst friends who hunger for a
return to peace and normality is genuinely moving.
Box office: $334,000 (US only)2
LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997, 138 minutes)

James Ellroy’s ‘LA quartet’ of novels are steeped in the tabloid and celebrity
news culture of pre-war Hollywood, which continually overlaps with the
parallel worlds of organised crime, corrupt politics and serial psychopathy. In
this episode of the series, and by critical consensus the best film adaptation
of an Ellroy novel, Danny De Vito plays Sid Hudgens, editor of Hush Hush
Magazine (catch phrase – ‘Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush’).
Sid is a scandal-monger, a journalistic villain of the worst kind whose stock in
trade is the exposé of Hollywood stars’ substance abuse and sexual excesses.
Working hand in hand with celebrity TV cop Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey)
he sets people up for arrest and subsequent shock horror coverage in Hush
Hush.
films about journalism, 1997–2008 203
Although journalism is a secondary element of this complex crime thriller,

the treatment is rich and evocative, drawing heavily on the real-life practices of
Walter Lippmann, Louella Parsons and other gossip columnists of the era in
which the story is set. In the end, Sid’s moral corruption brings him too close
to the real source of evil in Ellroy’s novel, and he is violently eliminated. As
with other tabloid villains portrayed in the 1997–2008 period, the script allows
us to feel little sympathy for his demise, given the relish with which we have
seen him plot and execute the downfalls of others.
Box office: $126,216,940
Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997, 119 minutes)

In this Bond movie Jonathan Pryce plays Elliot Carver, a cartoonish media
baron whose desire to break into the Chinese broadcasting market is the pretext
for his engineering a war between China and the UK. The film is included here
because it is a rare portrayal of a media baron, and a reflection of the fact that
by the late twentieth century it was entirely credible that a megalomaniac Bond
villain should be a character who, if not based on Rupert Murdoch, at least
refers to him and his business activities (News Corp has been heavily involved
in China).
Box office: $333,011,068
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Clint Eastwood, 1997, 155
minutes)
John Cusack plays a reporter assigned to write a 500-word piece on the high
society of Savannah, Georgia, and in particular the legendary Christmas party
of Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey). While undertaking his research for the piece,
however, Williams is accused of murdering his male lover. Cusack’s reporter
senses a bigger story beneath the surface, and begins to research a book. There
are echoes here of the real-life circumstances in which Truman Capote wrote In
Cold Blood, as we see the journalist putting together his material, interviewing
sources, overcoming the resistance of a closed society to the East Coast writer
come to discover their secrets. The film fails, however, both as a drama and as
a study of the journalistic process. Cusack’s journalism functions merely as a
plot device to give him (and the viewer) access to the information which drives
the plot. Beyond making some early observations about the importance of a
reporter’s independence vis à vis his sources, the script has very little interest
in how this kind of journalism works.
Box office: $25,105,255 (US only)
204 appendix
Mad City (Costa-Gavras, 1997, 115 minutes)

In a story with echoes of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole Dustin Hoffman plays
disillusioned, dissatisfied local TV news reporter Max Brackett, who happens
to be covering a routine story at the museum when a hostage situation develops.
Sacked museum worker (John Travolta) has snapped after being made
redundant, and taken a group of children hostage. Presented with a scoop,
Max and his producers proceed to build the story into a national spectacle,
further enraging the hostage-taker and endangering his hostages as they do
so. As in Wilder’s film the hunger for a saleable story leads to the manufacture
of a crisis, and the amplification of the problematic reality which journalists
are supposed merely to report. Max’s bosses and rivals are portrayed as
unsympathetic villains, ruthless in their exploitation of an unfolding human
tragedy. Unlike Wilder’s satire, however, the journalist on this occasion is a
reluctant participant in the media circus. His motives are good, and in the
end he rebels against the rampant commercialism of his managers. Fifty years
after Chuck Tatum’s unapologetic villainy, Max is a more knowing, reflective
figure, unwilling to just play along with the demands of the news business,
here portrayed as the enemy of truth and objectivity.
1998
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998, 113 minutes)
Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s best known book had a
troubled production history (British director Alex Cox had been enlisted as
director before Gilliam, for example, but was taken off the project reportedly
after disagreements with Thompson). Starring Johnny Depp as Thompson
and Benicio Del Toro as his Attorney, the script stays close to the language
and structure of the book, describing a weekend of drug-fuelled deviance in
Las Vegas, circa 1971. Ostensibly sent to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race,
Thompson’s aim is to show, through the prism of his satirical, surrealistic
prose (here translated into voiceover and dialogue), ‘the American dream in
action’. ‘Our trip was to be a classic affirmation of everything right and true
in the national character; a gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities
of life in this country, but only for those with true grit’. As readers of the
book will know, everything Thompson writes is steeped in irony, and the only
heroic thing about this journey into the ‘savage heart’ of the American dream
is the level of consumption of illegal drugs achieved by the journalist and his
attorney. That is his point, of course – only through the prism of hallucino-
genics can the reality of the American dream be accessed.
From the viewpoint of 1971, and against the backdrop of Thompson’s

previous work, this was a radical journalistic strategy, making him one of the
most celebrated journalists in the world. In 1998, deprived of that context, the
film lacks the satirical edge of the book and proceeds as a series of transgressive
episodes of drug-fuelled rebellion against all that Las Vegas represents (a
supper show by Debbie Reynolds is disrupted by boorish drunkenness, for
example, in the mistaken belief that this is some kind of ‘statement’). There
are moments of overt misogyny in the latter third of the film, and much of the
humour of the book is drowned out by paranoia and threatened violence. By
staying so close to the original source material, written nearly three decades
before, the script lacks narrative drive.
The real Hunter Thompson makes a brief cameo in a scene where the Duke
reminisces about San Francisco in 1965, signalling his close involvement in
and endorsement of the film.
Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 1998, 118 minutes)

Cameron Crowe’s loosely autobiographical film is a coming-of-age story about
a young, would-be music journalist (Patrick Fugit) who finds himself at fifteen
years old on tour with rising rock band Stillwater. Aided and advised by Lester
Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffmann), William learns how to become a journalist,
and how to become a man as he negotiates life with the band and its groupies,
or ‘band-aids’, led by Penny Lane (Kate Hudson). This is a gentle story, miles
away from the more realistic portrayals of the rock and roll lifestyle depicted in
Velvet Goldmine or Twenty Four Hour Party People. Compared to the reported
antics of Led Zeppelin and other bands touring around the time when the film
is set, 1972–3, the members of Stillwater are choir boys. They smoke a little
pot, and have sex from time to time, but this is a sanitised picture of life on the
road; a version fit for the US teenagers whom the film appears to be targeting
with its focus on William’s growing pains. This is a film you could take home
to a mother as protective as William’s is in the script.
Hoffmann’s mentorly role is to advise William on how to be a good music
journalist, and to represent authenticity in the face of the big industry sell-out.
He warns William that despite the temptations he must never make friends with
the rock stars, if he is to preserve independence and integrity as a journalist.
‘You have to build your reputation on being honest, and unmerciful’. And in
the piece William writes for Rolling Stone he tries to be honest, if hardly savage
in his criticism. His honesty leads the band to disown him to his editor as a liar,
but in the final sequence they apologise and repair the damage to his career.
Notable as a rare example of a film set in the world of music journalism,
206 appendix
and with a generous approach to its characters (there are no bad guys – just
a few inflated egos) this is a diverting, sweet account of its subject. At one
point William’s editor at Rolling Stone warns him that he is not travelling with
Stillwater ‘to party. We already have one Hunter Thompson’. A story further
removed from the debauchery and excess of gonzo would be hard to imagine.
Box office: $47,383,689
Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998, 117 minutes)

Todd Haynes’ affectionate study of 1970s glam rock pays homage to Citizen
Kane in its journalist-seeks-answers-to-mystery investigative structure.
Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is commissioned to find out what happened to
Brian Slade, a Ziggy Stardust-like figure who disappeared from rock stardom
in the 1970s. As in Citizen Kane the journalist proceeds through a series of
interviews with those who knew and worked with Slade, gradually uncovering
pieces of the jigsaw which will solve the mystery. As in Welles’ film there are
no easy answers or neat resolutions, but the journey is fascinating, especially
for viewers, like this writer, who remember the glam rock era as teenagers. The
practice of music journalism is a secondary concern of the film, which succeeds
mainly as a multi-layered meditation on the nature of image and celebrity, and
a celebration of glam. The film can be read as a fan’s bio-pic of David Bowie
in his Ziggy years, and also as a queer deconstruction of the glam aesthetic.
Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998, 120 minutes)

Made just as end-of-millennium angst was peaking (Y2K, anyone?), Deep
Impact tells the story of an MSNBC news reporter (Tea Leoni) covering
the Washington political brief, who stumbles upon ‘Ele’, which she believes
to refer to a sex scandal cover-up in government. An ambitious journalist
eager to be promoted to anchor, she aggressively pursues the story until she
arouses the wrath of the authorities. Ele, she then learns, is an acronym for
Extinction Level Event – specifically, a comet speeding towards earth with the
capability to wipe out all life. She is asked by the president himself (Morgan
Freeman) not to break her story until the authorities are ready, in return for
which co-operation she will be given the first question at the presidential news
conference where Ele will be revealed to the public.
The first third of the film is the most interesting for journalism students.
What we see is a late 1990s world in which the media are treated with deep
cynicism by politicians, who are merely trying to do a difficult job. What at first
looks like a sinister cover-up is quickly revealed to be a very necessary policy
of controlling information to avoid panic. Should the journalist co-operate or

not? Her ambition and her sense of ethics say not. The president, looking like
an older version of Barack Obama, tells her, ‘Congratulations [on getting to
the story of Ele]. You now have the biggest story in history. I know you’re just a
reporter, but you used to be a person’. Is it appropriate for her to co-operate in
keeping the secret for a little longer, he asks, if it is in the best interests of the
nation? Is the Truth always in the best interests of the nation?
Leoni’s character co-operates as requested. When the meaning of Ele is
finally revealed to the world, the film becomes a sci-fi/action hero/ rescue
mission drama, in which Leoni’s character, and MSNBC News, are positioned
as spectators, reporters, and then trusted guides through what is going to
be a rough ride for humanity as the comet hits. Extended scenes of Leoni
anchoring MSNBC’s rolling news coverage of the US-Russian efforts to save
the world act as a narrative device taking the audience through the technical
details of how to land a space raft on a comet and blow it up with nuclear
weapons. Amidst technological complexity, the journalist is positioned as our
sense-maker and guide.
Box office: $349,464,664
Celebrity (Woody Allen, 1998, 109 minutes)

Kenneth Branagh stars as celebrity journalist Lee in a satire about modern
media culture, and the shallowness of the people who inhabit it. Branagh imper-
sonates Woody Allen’s neurotic New Yorker, complete with physical and verbal
tics, and the cast features cameos and supporting roles from a galaxy of stars,
including Leonardo Di Caprio, Famke Janssen and Charlize Theron. Sven
Nykvist’s monochrome cinematography is reminiscent of Manhattan, and the
ingredients are in place for a funny and sophisticated look at contemporary
celebrity. The film is a wasted opportunity, however. Branagh’s performance is
brazenly contrived, and makes Allen’s normally funny dialogue seem merely
annoying. The plot lacks credibility, and the script and acting are wooden from
beginning to end. Avoiding any serious engagement with the nature of mediated
celebrity, or celebrity journalism (which Branagh’s character openly detests
and seeks to escape at the earliest opportunity), Celebrity fails on almost every
level, and emerges as little more than an angry celebrity’s (i.e., the director’s)
extended dig at the media which had hounded him ever since the revelation of
his affair with his partner’s adopted daughter. Allen’s anger at Mia Farrow may
also help explain the uncharacteristically sexist tone of a film in which almost
every female character is a crude caricature of some patriarchal stereotype or
other, from wacky blonde model to broken, bitter divorcee.
208 appendix
1999
True Crime (Clint Eastwood, 1999, 127 minutes)

In a story with some similarities to Alan Parker’s Life of David Gale, Clint
Eastwood plays maverick investigative reporter Steve Everett, who is assigned
to do a ‘human interest side bar’ on the imminent execution of a convicted
murderer. Everett becomes convinced that the convicted man is innocent, and
embarks on a race to have his execution cancelled. The film uses journalism
principally as a vehicle for access to a crime thriller narrative. The journalists
and editors on Everett’s Oakland Tribune are clichéd, and Eastwood’s character
lacks credibility. Entering his seventies, we are nonetheless asked to accept that
he is a serial and highly successful pursuer of women young enough to be his
grand-daughter, and that he has a five-year-old child. We are also given to
understand that this is a journalist in mid-career, although no editor would
employ someone so old as a staffer.
Notwithstanding some funny and insightful lines on the nature of popular
journalism – James Woods’ editor says to Everett at one point, ‘Issues are shit
that we make up so we can have good stories’ – this is a film about journalism
made by people who do not really understand how it works.
Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999, 112 minutes)

Richard Gere plays Ike Graham, a columnist for USA Today who specialises in
‘inner diatribes at the opposite sex’. Over drinks in a New York bar, and eager
for a story, he is told of Maggie Carpenter (Julie Roberts), a woman living in
the small town of Hale who, he is unreliably informed, has jilted seven fiancés
at the altar. He dubs her ‘the runaway bride’ and pens a cruel column about her
man-eating tendencies. The article is inaccurate and Maggie complains. Ike is
sacked by his editor, who also happens to be his ex-wife.
Ike sets out to vindicate himself by going to Hale and reporting Maggie’s
latest planned wedding. He is promised a cover story in GQ if she again jilts
her fiancé, a kind sports coach named Bob. A warm-hearted, well-written
romantic comedy ensues as Ike and Maggie at first clash, then gradually fall
in love as both he and she come to see the error of their past ways, and to
recognise that after a number of failed attempts to find love, they are right
for each other.
In this film Gere plays the classic journalistic rogue, deeply attractive to
women but not to be trusted. His journalistic ethics are questionable, and he
is a cynic, but at core he is a good man. Maggie is the catalyst for exposing the
best in him, and he in her. Designed as a vehicle for the director and stars who
made the hugely successful Pretty Woman, and similarly light and upbeat in
tone, Runaway Bride has quite a lot of value to say about journalistic ethics,
and the work of Ike’s brand of personalised column-writing in particular.
Ike articulates the common view of journalism as somewhat less than worthy,
when he tells Maggie that his father wanted him to be a novelist and notes that
‘Journalism is literature in a hurry’.
Box office: $309,457,509
Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999, 114 minutes)

A film in large part about ‘the media war’ of 1991 in Iraq, when US and other
forces liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion and briefly entered
Iraq. The film follows a group of soldiers who stumble on to a map describing
hidden Iraqi gold, and seek to liberate it for themselves. Primarily a caper
movie in its structure and pacing, though realistic and disturbing in its realism,
and in the impression of early post-war chaos it delivers, Three Kings is also a
penetrating study of the relationship of the media to conflict. The 1991 Gulf
War was the first to involve twenty-four-hour real-time news media on the
ground, here represented by the character of Adriana Cruz, an ‘NBS’ reporter
modelled on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Her character is presented as a
sincere journalist, confused by what she sees as a senseless war. She embodies
the celebrification of news, but is portrayed as a reluctant participant.
George Clooney plays her escort, charged with ensuring that she gets access
to good news stories about the war. He is cynical about her presence, and the
role of the US military in Iraq, asking at one point, ‘what did we do here?’
His first appearance in the film shows him having sex with another journalist,
perhaps a reference to the film-maker’s view that the military well and truly
fucked the media in Iraq. ‘What was this war about?’ Adriana Cruz echoes
Archie’s earlier exasperation, and voices the corrupt, empty nature of news.
‘This business is about sexual politics and style …’ In the end she redeems
herself by helping Archie with the evacuation of civilians. By sacrificing their
gold for the civilians, the soldiers are also redeemed.
Although Cruz’s pursuit of her story is a secondary sub-plot, the presence
of the media hangs over the narrative. Three Kings is not the first film to explore
the relationship between journalism and war in the era of the always-on media,
but its innovative cinematography and unsentimental treatment of conflict and
its consequences makes it among the most effective. The US again went to war
in Iraq twelve years later, with far more human casualties inflicted, making the
carnage depicted in this film seem mild by comparison.
Box office: $107,752,036
210 appendix
Never Been Kissed (Raja Gosnell, 1999, 107 minutes)

Drew Barrymore (who also produced the film through her Flowers company)
stars as Josie Celler, a dull but efficient copy editor on a Chicago newspaper
given the opportunity to go undercover and write about teenagers at a local
high school. Barrymore does not convince as a twenty-five-year-old imperson-
ating a seventeen-year-old student, and the journalistic elements of the plot are
clichéd and unrealistic. The script is lazy and lacks narrative credibility. Barry-
more’s character’s status as a journalist gives her the licence to go undercover
with the school kids, and thus drives the plot, but the film avoids the potentially
interesting ethical or professional issues it raises (such as the pressure placed
on Josie to entrap her teacher into a sexual relationship, and thus manufacture
a big story for the newspaper).
Box office: $84,565,230
The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999, 151 minutes)

Michael Mann’s contribution to the journalism genre takes as its subject the
CBS Sixty Minutes investigation into the allegations of a former tobacco
company researcher that Big Tobacco had been knowingly withholding
information about the addictive properties of cigarettes. Jeffrey Wigand, the
‘insider’ of the film’s title (played by Russell Crowe just before he became
a global superstar with Gladiator), is sacked from his senior research post at
the firm of Brown and Williamson (he is a vice-president) for challenging
the firm’s research ethics. By accident (he is preparing a story on the tobacco
industry) CBS producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) comes into contact
with Wigand, whom he intends to employ as a consultant. Bergman, again by
accident, although his razor-sharp journalistic intuition and nose for a story
place him on permanently high alert, realises that Wigand is in possession of
newsworthy information about his former employer, and begins the process of
turning him into a whistle-blower. Bergman’s goal as a senior producer at Sixty
Minutes is to prepare an investigative report which will expose the self-serving
propaganda of the US tobacco companies, who by then were already under
growing pressure to meet at least some of the costs of compensating smokers
who had fallen ill or died from tobacco consumption. Wigand is reluctant to be
involved, having signed a confidentiality agreement guaranteeing his salary and
health benefits. The plot is structured around Bergman’s struggle to groom his
whistle-blower, then to protect him (unsuccessfully) when the flak starts to fly.
By the late 1990s Mann was renowned as a style-defining director of the
TV series Miami Vice, and thrillers such as Manhunter (1986) and Heat (also
starring Al Pacino, and made in 1995). Mann’s movies hitherto had been long,
complex and wordy, shot in crisp, clean blues and whites, and imbued with
philosophical weight. The Insider fits into all of these boxes, with a screen time
of two and a half hours in which we move between grainy, washed-out images
signifying Wigand’s paranoia and ultimate nervous collapse to glossy interior
shots of impeccably minimalist board rooms and sterile suburban homes.
Pacino’s journalist is given several lengthy monologues about the meaning of
ojectivity, integrity, and the importance of standing by one’s whistle-blower, or
source, when the going gets tough, as it quickly does. As Wigand grows to trust
Bergman, and begins to co-operate with the complex strategems which will
enable a public, legal expose of Big Tobacco, Brown and Williamson unleash a
campaign of harassment and intimidation, including bullets left in mail boxes,
mysterious footprints in the garden, and death threats sent by email to Wigand
and his family.
A central theme of the film is the impact on a family – any family – of whistle-
blowing against a powerful corporate force. We see an ostensibly happy family
(although there are hints of problem drinking and domestic violence) broken
apart by the pressure on Wigand to stick to the terms of his confidentiality
agreement. His wife leaves him, temporarily, and takes the children with her,
one of whom is asthmatic and requires expensive health treatment. Wigand
bears all of this, because he trusts Bergman’s assurances that, having taken the
risk of going public with his insider knowledge, his information will be aired
and it will all be worthwhile. Unfortunately, Bergman has underestimated the
forces aligned against him. A merger deal involving CBS and Philip Morris
leads CBS Business to override CBS News, and Wigand’s key interview is cut
from the broadcast. Bergman retaliates against his employees, and by compli-
cated manouevring manages to get the story out in its entirety. To do this he
must betray his star presenter, Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer).
The Insider is a ‘true’ story, but in traditional Hollywood manner a number
of scenes are ‘creatively imagined’ in order to heighten the suspense of the
viewer. The bullet placed in Wigand’s mail box, for example, may or may not
be real. As Wigand’s suffering intensifies, melancholic soundtrack music of the
type later used to great effect in Gladiator highlights his distress and appeals
to our sympathies. Such details heighten the drama of the story, but are irrel-
evant next to the central myth relayed in the film – the courage of the key
players, and the struggle to maintain the integrity, not just of the journalist as
he balances truth against professional loyalty, but the former employee with
some kind of debt to his employer. When is it right to violate an agreement
of confidentiality, and when is it right to betray one’s journalistic colleagues?
Mann clearly goes with the whistle-blower and the principled producer, both
of whom are established as individuals prepared to risk all, be it their lives,
or their reputations for professional loyalty and collegiality, in the pursuit of
exposing the abuse of power.
Box office: $60,289,912
212 appendix
Complicity (Gavin Millar, 1999, 100 minutes)

Johhny Lee Miller plays Cameron Colley, an investigative reporter for the
Edinburgh-based Caledonian newspaper, in a thriller based on Iain Banks’
novel. The film fails on almost every level, and was released straight-to-video
in most markets (except Scotland, where it is set). Miller’s clichéd reporter (he
drinks whisky all the time, but is never drunk; he smokes cannabis and snorts
cocaine on the job; enjoys rough sex) is too slight and boyish to be convincing.
While attempting to portray a world-weary journalistic cynic, he looks and
sounds (in an irritating voiceover) as if he is just out of journalism school, or
maybe just school.
The plot contrives to have him framed for a series of gruesome murders,
and entirely fails to suspend the viewer’s disbelief. The script is laden with
crudely reductive assertions about how journalism works, such as the moment
when Cameron’s editor spikes a mildly left-of-centre article he’s written with
the words, ‘You’re paid to toe the editorial line’. Complicity reinforces the
conclusion that good movies about the more popular end of the journalism
business are thin on the ground.
Box office: not applicable (released in cinemas in Scotland, but not in
the wider UK or overseas).
2000
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000, 94 minutes)

Mr Chow (Tony Leung) is a journalist in 1962 Hong Kong. He and his wife
move into a small flat, next door to Mrs Chan (Maggie Cheung) and her
husband. Gradually we, and they, come to realise that the wife and husband
respectively (whom we never see in full shot) are conducting an affair. Chow
and Chan embark on their own relationship, taking comfort in each other’s
company but never sleeping together. ‘We won’t be like them’, says Mrs Chan.
As they fall more deeply in love, Chow moves first to Singapore, then to
Cambodia, where the film ends, his love for Chan never consummated.
This is a film about love rather than journalism. Chow’s status as a journalist
allows him to be presented as a thoughtful, intellectual character, dissatisfied
with journalism and an aspiring writer of martial arts novels. He and Chan
spend their happiest times writing together. The film has nothing of signifi-
cance to say on the nature of journalism, except that writing novels is better,
and only glimpses of Chow’s workplace are offered.
Box office: $12,854,953
2001
15 Minutes (John Herzfeld, 2001, 120 minutes)

Robert Hawkins (Kelsey Grammar) is a presenter for New York-based true
crime TV show Top Story – ‘the nation’s newsreel’. Robert De Niro plays Eddie
Fleming, an alcoholic cop who works with Hawkins to ‘break the big news’ by
allowing him to turn up at the scene of dramatic arrests with a camera crew in
tow. Comparable to Kevin Spacey’s character in LA Confidential, Fleming is a
cop aware of how the media operate, and how he can use them to professional
advantage. Hawkins and his producers are, meanwhile, hungry for the ‘bad
news’ stories to which he gives them access.
Into this scenario come two Eastern European criminal psychopaths, fasci-
nated by the power of media celebrity to make them famous (hence the title
of the film with its reference to Warhol’s ‘famous for 15 minutes’ aphorism),
and who embark on a campaign of murder and media manipulation. They, like
Eddie, understand that ‘it’s all about image’.
Unlike LA Confidential, this thriller-satire on the relationship between crime
and the media is crude and unconvincing. The violence is realistic, and the New
York settings authentic, but the characters are clichéd and one-dimensional,
and the tone uneven, veering from comedy to intense, sexualised violence in
an instant. This mix, and the extensive use of hand-held video recalls Natural
Born Killers, but the effect here is exploitative and irritating rather than
mesmeric. Its treatment of TV crime journalism is shallow, posing again the
question: why are good films about popular, tabloid journalism – films which
avoid caricatures and cliché – so hard to find and, apparently, so hard to make?
Box office: $56,359,980
The Shipping News (Lasse Halstrom, 2001, 107 minutes)

Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle, an emotionally damaged single father who moves to
Newfoundland after the death of his abusive partner. He takes a job writing the
shipping news for the local newspaper, The Gammy Bird, and begins to rebuild
his life. Adapted from the novel by E. Annie Proulx, the film presents a multi-
layered narrative of family dysfunction, personal self-discovery and emerging
love in which Quoyle’s developing journalistic identity is secondary, but an
important foundation for his broader personal recovery. As he is a novice to the
business of writing, the film takes him, and the audience, through the essentials
of local journalism. Car crashes, for example, of which there are many in this
foggy, snow-bound part of the country, always make headlines. The cynical
editor, played by Pete Postlethwaite, dishes out pearls of journalistic wisdom to
the rookie, who is a quick learner and soon delivering copy which is more inter-
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esting than that of his more experienced colleagues. Through his journalism he
discovers unknown depths in himself, and something at which he is naturally
gifted – finding and writing up colourful local stories for The Gammy Bird.
The film suffers from trying to pack in too many narrative strands, but the
treatment of local journalism in a rural backwater is funny, affectionate and
genuinely educational.
Box office: $24,690,441
The Cat’s Meow (Peter Bogdanovich, 2001, 112 minutes)

The film tells the (rumoured to be) true story of the mysterious and still
unsolved death of Hollywood producer Thomas Ince while on board the yacht
of media baron William Randolph Hearst in 1924. According to the script,
Ince was shot dead by accident, mistaken by Hearst for Charlie Chaplin, who
was having an affair with the baron’s mistress, Marion Davies. The shooting
is covered up, and the silence of rising celebrity columnist Louella Parsons
(Kirsten Dunst) guaranteed by Hearst’s promotion of her career thenceforth.
It is notable as a rare cinematic depiction of Hearst, but more a meditation
on the capacity of the powerful to preserve their secrets than a study of media
power in particular.
Box office: $3,646,994
Kissing Jessica Stein (Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, 2001, 97 minutes

A gay-themed variation on the romantic comedy sub-genre of journalism
movies, Jennifer Westfeld stars as a New York-based straight journalist who
embarks on a fling with a bisexual woman she encounters through a lonely
hearts advertisement. Jessica’s status as a journalist, and her colleagues and
friends at the newspaper where she works, are merely the backdrop to the story,
and journalism is not the subject of the film.
Box office: $10,013,424
2002
No Man’s Land (Danis Tanovich, 2002, 93 minutes)

The first full-length feature film by Bosnian director Danis Tanovich deals
with the same subject matter as Michael Winterbottom’s Welcome To Sarajevo
– the fratricidal civil war which engulfed Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early
1990s. The perspective is that of a local man, however, and the form chosen
that of satire, through which Danovich aims to penetrate the absurdity of a

conflict in which people who once were neighbours are now killing each other.
Like Welcome To Sarajevo, enacted sequences are punctuated with actual news
footage of the horrors of the war, including bodies of civilians lying dead in
the streets. Pitch black comedy is the film-maker’s main tool here, but the
violent reality of ethnic cleansing is never far from the surface, with shootings,
stabbings and other acts gradually reducing the protagonists Ciki and Nino
to bloodied wrecks. The film won the 2002 Oscar for Best Foreign Language
Film.
The story concerns a relief group of Bosnian fighters who get lost on their
way to the frontline somewhere outside Sarajevo. They come under fire from a
Serbian unit, and only one man survives – Ciki (Branko Djuric) – who hides in
a trench. Two Serbians come to check on the situation, and place a booby-trap
mine under the body of one of the fighters. Ciki kills one of them and wounds
the other. It then turns out that the booby-trapped body is still alive, but cannot
be moved lest the mine explode. The rest of the film follows the playing out of
this stalemate in ‘no man’s land’, where the three men squabble and debate the
issues, surrounded by fighters of the competing factions, as first the United
Nations (UNProfor) and then the world’s media become involved.
The film is clearly intended as an attack on the UN for its impotence in
dealing with the abuses which characterised this war at the heart of Europe,
and also on the global media, represented by the late Katrin Cartlidge’s Jane
Livingstone, a reporter for the fictional Global News Channel. Jane overhears
UN and Serb communication about the stalemate, and descends on the scene
with her camera crew, where she proceeds to turn it into a story of the type
which would have been enjoyed by Kate Adie at her peak, or Christiane
Amanpour. She is soon joined by other journalists, and the scene becomes a
media circus.
The film engages with a popular criticism of the media’s role in conflict and
catastrophe – that they both amplify and trivialise tragedy, turning harrowing
events into infotainment for the sake of audience ratings. But by comparison
with Winterbottom’s film on the same subject, the satire here is clumsy and
crude. Jane Livingstone and her employers back at home base in London are
portrayed as entirely shallow and self-serving in their efforts to get the story.
Initially, the arrival of Global News Channel is welcome, and we see some explo-
ration of the notion that the media can act as a journalistic conscience for the
world – a crucial witness, indeed – in situations such as this, where bureaucracy
and politics are preventing common-sense resolution of a resolvable situation.
But the script leaves us in no doubt that the media, in their desperation for
viewer-friendly visuals, their hunger for televisual drama, are equally culpable
in the unfolding absurdist tragedy.
The journalistic characters are shallow caricatures rather than real human
216 appendix
beings, evoking no sympathy from the viewer. The war correspondent in this
film is not a hero but an opportunist, feeding parasitically on the misfortune
of others, and adding nothing that is positive to the situation. In the end the
stalemate degenerates into violence, the leading protagonists are killed, and
the man under whose body the booby trap is placed is left to fend for himself.
Jane and her colleagues get in their car and drive away, presumably to the scene
of the next atrocity, where they will go about their work in precisely the same
way.
Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002, 121 minutes)

Like Superman, the adventures of the comic hero, Spider-Man take place
against the backdrop of news media, in this case the tabloid Daily Bugle. Mild-
mannered Peter Parker, though not a full-time journalist, is a freelance photo-
grapher for the Bugle. Editor J. Jonah Jameson is portrayed as a ruthless, amoral
hack, determined to portray Spider-Man as an evil force, and to uncover his
true identity. The tensions between Parker’s inherent goodness and Jameson’s
pursuit of an innocent hero have been a key structuring element in the Spider-
Man stories ever since their appearance in comic form, and are prominent
in the latest version, directed for the big screen by Sam Raimi. Jameson’s
character, and the representation of tabloid journalism in the form of the Daily
Bugle, reflect the critical views of many towards what was known then as the
‘yellow press’, a sub-species of journalism not to be trusted. The film and its
sequels were among the most commercially successful films of all time.
Box office: $821,708,551
Twenty Four Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002,

111 minutes)
The lead character in Winterbottom’s account of the Factory years is journalist
and music industry mogul Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan), whom we
first see filming an item for the TV current affairs programme on which he
is a roving reporter with a brief to do wacky, human interest-oriented stuff
like hang-gliding. Later we see him mess up a TV interview with the Conser-
vative cabinet minister Keith Joseph. Wilson, of course, was destined to be
not a great journalist, but a visionary manager of rock bands and founder of
the Factory record label, which established Manchester and the North as the
creative centre of the British music scene in the 1980s.
Life or Something Like It (Stephen Herek, 2002, 103 minutes)
In this romantic comedy Angelina Jolie plays Lanie Kerrigan, a TV news

reporter working for KGMO News, who is told by Prophet Jack, a ‘street
savant’ whom she interviews for a human-interest item on his apparent ability
to predict the future, that she has only seven days to live. The film unfolds
as an exploration of the dilemma such a revelation would pose for a person,
against the background of her awkward relationship with ex-boyfriend Pete
the cameraman (Ed Burns). Jolie’s character, who begins the film as a stereo-
typically shallow media bimbo (Jolie wears blonde hair, high heels and tight
sweaters throughout), is required to go on a journey of personal self-discovery,
involving reconciliation with her own deep-rooted neuroses about family and
childhood, and eventual union with Pete.
Like many other films in this sub-genre, and those starring Hollywood’s
leading ladies in particular, Life or Something Like It is not really about
journalism, although it is set in that world. Jolie’s status as a TV news reporter
provides the plot device for her encounter with the savant, and the milieu
within which the action unfolds, but the film does not engage in depth with the
nature of TV news. Her shallowness and vapidity as a person and a professional
are challenged, but these are not qualities the film associates with journalism in
particular. This is a minor work in the canon of journalism movies, then, and
also in the acting portfolio of Angelina Jolie, whose performance as Mariane
Pearl in A Mighty Heart later confirmed how good an actor she is. Here, she is
merely cruising.
Box office: $16,872,671
Black and White (Craig Lahiff, 2002, 99 minutes)

This true-life legal drama is notable for its depiction of a young Rupert
Murdoch, proprietor of the Adelaide-based News, who puts his then-still
fragile press power to the service of a legal campaign to save an aboriginal man
from the death penalty. Supporting Robert Carlyle’s persistent defence lawyer,
Ben Mendehlson plays Murdoch as a hard-headed but passionate, anti-estab-
lishment man of the people, delighted to set himself up against what he sees
as the stuffy South Australian elite of the late 1950s. The script is pedestrian
and the performances lacklustre, although Mendehlson’s Murdoch at least
holds the attention, probably because portrayals of him are so rare. The picture
presented here of the future media baron is broadly sympathetic, if not heroic.
The script allows us to see that his commitment to the aboriginal’s defence is
about selling newspapers and getting one over on the elitist snobs who hate his
journalism, as much as upholding justice. Nevertheless, Mr Murdoch cannot
218 appendix
have been displeased with this portrayal of him as an iconoclastic champion of

the popular.
Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002, 113 minutes)

Based on the successful Broadway musical, Chicago explores the relationship
between popular journalism, crime and celebrity in America of the 1920s.
Notwithstanding its generic focus on music and dance, the script tells a quite
sophisticated story of how tabloid celebrity is constructed, and deconstructed,
and constructed again, often with the help of skilful public relations (Richard
Gere plays lawyer and press agent Billy Flynn). There are no major journalistic
characters in Chicago, but the press pack as a whole is a constant backdrop to,
and catalyst for, the action.
Box office: $306,776,732
The Quiet American (Philip Noyce, 2002, 118 minutes)

Philip Noyce’s adaptation of the Graham Greene novel was perfectly timed for
the post-9/11 environment of contested US intervention in Iraq and Afghan-
istan. Michael Caine plays Fowler, a disillusioned foreign correspondent
in 1950s Vietnam who becomes involved with Pyle, the ‘quiet American’ of
the title. Pyle is a shadowy figure involved in covert US actions, and Fowler
becomes increasingly angry with what he perceives to be his (and America’s)
ignorance and hubris. The portrayal of a US agent complicit in bombings of
civilians and other nefarious actions in pursuit of a higher cause is prescient
of what would come in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. In this sense Greene’s
novel retains its relevance in the twenty-first century, and this is a watchable
adaptation. Fowler is the classic journalistic witness, seeking to maintain his
detachment from atrocity but compelled in the end to participate in the story.
Box office: $27,674,124
2003
Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003, 101 minutes)

Jim Carrey plays Bruce, a bored, cynical local TV news reporter, forever
condemned (as he sees it) to the humiliating trivia of community-based
journalism. Then he is endowed with God-like powers and embarks on a
fantasy-allegory about what happens when a man can have whatever he wants.
In the end he comes to value the things he has, and his job as a local journalist.
This is a phenomenally successful comedy, which nevertheless has a serious
message about the importance of community, and the role of local news in
binding it together.
Box office: $484,592,874
How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days (Donald Petrie, 2003, 116 minutes)

Much more successful at the box office than Angelina Jolie’s attempt at
journalistic rom com, this film stars Kate Hudson as style journalist, or
‘how-to girl’, Andie Anderson, commissioned to write a career-saving piece
on how to lose a guy in ten days. Andie is a frustrated graduate of journalism
from Columbia, who hungers for serious stories about politics, economics,
foreign affairs. Her editor at Composure urges her to make her ‘how to’ column
a must read, after which she can write what she likes. Until then, ‘you write
what we like’. A successful commission will give her more freedom, her editor
promises, and so she sets out to win and lose her guy. From this point on, the
film is essentially a battle of the sexes, in which gender stereotypes come into
mildly comic conflict before love prevails. Andie delivers her piece, but is let
down by her editor at the last moment and resigns from Composure.
As in other rom coms featuring female style journalists made in the
1997–2008 period, journalism is the setting for a flawed comic vehicle. The
journalistic challenge of writing an article about relationships provides the
plot, but apart from the contrast made throughout between ‘serious’ and ‘not
serious’ content, and the portrayal of the all-female offices of Composure, there
is little here to interest the student of journalism.
Box office: $177,371,441
Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003, 91 minutes).

This is the story of journalist Stephen Glass, who in 1998 was discovered to
have been ‘cooking’ feature articles for the distinguished US public affairs
periodical, New Republic (that is, inventing sources and facts). Although it
would be unfair to assert that Glass’ successful fabrication of dozens of his
New Republic pieces was or is representative of the editorial standards applied
by the great majority of print media, the extreme nature of the case here
comes to symbolise a wider theme – the gradual decline in the authority of
even the most respectable and established of print publications, and the rise of
the online upstarts such as Forbes Digital, the first daily online business news
publication (launched in 1997).
The tension between print and online journalism is one strand of the
220 appendix
narrative; the other is the gap between the normative ideals of liberal journalism,
which Glass articulates with great eloquence and credibility throughout the
film, and his own blatant violation of those ideals. Glass (Hayden Christensen)
has a number of speeches in which he talks reverently about the nature of
journalism, and its function in a democracy. Journalism of the sort he practises
for New Republic is, he asserts to a classroom full of journalism students, both
‘a privilege and a responsibility’, because ‘what you write can influence public
policy’. Fully aware of this responsibility as he is, Glass’ blatant flouting of
the most elementary journalistic ethics is all the more breath-taking, and we
cannot help but sympathise with his editor Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard) as
the scale of Glass’ fraud becomes clear.
The script suggests that Glass succeeds in his fabrications (until he is caught
out by Forbes Digital Tool) because he is, in essence, a nice guy. His problem,
the roots of which are never explored in depth (although there are references
to a dysfunctional family background), is simply that he is desperate to be liked
so gives those around him, be they editors, colleagues or friends, what it is he
thinks they want to hear, even if it is not true. His niceness quickly transmutes
into creepiness, as the sociopathic aspect of his personality emerges. One
can feel some sympathy for his character, but more for the studious, civilised
Chuck Lane who, as editor, presides over what may justifiably be regarded as
the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on a journalistic publication in the US.
The film was co-executive produced by Tom Cruise. It is, however, a much
more powerful critique of the media’s excesses than the Mel Gibson-produced
Paparazzi. This is a sophisticated, nuanced tale of good, hardworking journal-
ists being cruelly conned by one of their own, and thereby becoming among
the first victims of the digital era. In the end, the film is a plea for journalistic
integrity, and against any tendency to fabricate or embellish the truth. ‘It’s
indefensible, don’t you know that?’, says Chuck to one of his staff who stands
up for Glass. She does, and so do we.
Veronica Guerin (Joel Schumacher, 2003, 94 minutes)

Cate Blanchett plays real-life Irish investigative reporter Veronica Guerin in
Joel Schumacher’s account of how tenacity in pursuing organised crime led to
a violent and untimely death. The script is brutal and bleak, following Guerin
as she encounters bureaucratic obstruction and criminal violence, including a
vicious beating at the hands of the crime boss she is pursuing. Her family are
threatened, and in the end she is assassinated.
Guerin is a classic journalistic hero(ine), but the script questions her
motivation. Is she brave, or just reckless? Is she intent on justice, or just
obsessed, to the point where nothing else matters but her story? Her perfor-
mance as a wife and mother are questioned and found wanting. It is a heroic
representation, then, and a cautionary tale for the aspiring investigative
journalist, but also a rebuke to those journalists who sacrifice their families and
friends for their calling.
The Life of David Gale (Alan Parker, 2003, 130 minutes)

Kate Winslet plays Bitsey Bloom, a principled investigative reporter working
for News magazine (her principles are signalled by lines such as ‘I play by
the rules, even if my colleagues don’t like it. It’s called objectivity’). Having
just served a week in prison for protecting her sources, Bitsey is assigned to
interview David Gale, a condemned murderer on death row (Kevin Spacey).
At first she is sceptical of his innocence, but is gradually drawn into the attempt
to save his life.
In the first half of the film Bitsey’s journalistic status is the vehicle for David
Gale to narrate his story. In the latter part, she becomes an investigator after
the truth, and the film shifts into thriller mode. The film never convinces as an
account of how investigative journalism works, and although there is a clever
twist to the tale, the thriller element is also weak. Like Eastwood’s True Crime,
it is a film built on clichés and overacting.
Box office: $38,955,598
City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2003, 131 minutes)

Set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this is the story of slum kid Buscape, who
grows into a photo-journalist and thereby finds a route out of the violence
which claims most of his contemporaries. The script positions Buscape, and
the newspaper in which he finds an outlet for his photographs of gang warfare
and slum life, as a kind of conflict journalist, a necessarily detached witness.
His perspective on the narrative allows the audience some distance from what
are often harrowing events.
Box office: $28,758,747
222 appendix
2004
Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004, 127 minutes)

The first sequel to the successful Spider-Man, containing more of the same.
Spider-Man is again being pursued by the Daily Bugle and its editor, J. Jonah
Jameson.
Box office: $783,766,341
Anchorman: the legend of Ron Burgundy (Adam McKay, 2004, 90

minutes)
Anchorman, produced by Judd Apatow, belongs to the genre of retro-chic
comedies made in the early 2000s which poked ironic fun at the pre-feminist,
pre-gay rights, pre-political correctness of the 1970s. This is the story of
super-sexy San Diego anchorman Ron Burgundy (as he sees himself), and
of local TV in the days ‘when women weren’t allowed to read the news’. Ron
gulps down a large whisky before going on air, everyone smokes in the studio,
and institutional sexism is taken for granted. Into this macho milieu comes
the beautiful and ambitious Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), who
proceeds first of all to be seduced by Burgundy then, by a sequence of tragi-
comic events, to replace him.
Corningstone represents precisely the stereotype of blonde beauty so
condemned by critics of TV news’s alleged dumbing down in subsequent
decades (the argument being that, for ratings reasons, beauty had gradually
come to be preferred over journalistic ability in the presentation of news).
Playing against type, however, she confronts the station boss from the outset
and demands access to serious news stories, while giving as good as she gets in
the battle of the sexes with Ron and his gang of overgrown school boys. She is
a feminist from the future arrived in a pre-feminist world, armed with a post-
Madonna understanding of the power of female sexuality.
As a parodic illustration of how institutionally sexist TV news journalism
(and journalism in general) used to be, Anchorman is knowing and funny. Men
and what look from this distance like their primitively patriarchal attitudes are
its targets, and female journalism students in particular will, from the security
of the post-feminist twenty-first century, enjoy this display of how things used
to be in their chosen profession. The script loses its tightness in the final reel,
but makes an ideal companion piece to James L. Brooks’ more sombre take on
sexual politics in the local TV news room, Broadcast News (1987).
Box office: $261,572,717
Paparazzi (Paul Abascal, 2004, 81 minutes)

Produced by Mel Gibson, who makes a brief appearance, Paparazzi was read
on its release as an act of vengeance by the Hollywood star on the celebrity
media, and in particular on the photojournalists who pursue movie stars and
other celebrities as they go about their public and private lives. This is a film
in which the paparazzi of the title are equated with evil, and savagely punished
for their crimes by a protagonist who literally gets away with murder.
Bo Laramie is a rising Hollywood action star who falls foul of a group of
paparazzi, led by Rex (Tom Sizemore). In a dangerous prank gone wrong, the
journalists cause Bo’s car to crash (in a manner unmistakably reminiscent of
the death of Diana), injuring his wife and son. In a subsequent freak accident,
Bo causes one of the paprazzi to run his motorbike off the road, and then delib-
erately allows him to die. Having got away with this transgression, Bo pursues
the rest of his tormentors, while detective Dennis Farina (playing his character
as a dead ringer for Columbo) becomes suspicious.
Bo Laramie is a decent fellow, family-oriented, willing to co-operate with
the media in their work, but driven beyond endurance by a group of feral
hacks who live for the stolen celebrity photograph. This is a potentially inter-
esting idea, but here the heroes and villains are drawn as caricatures. Next to
Bo’s good old boy the paparazzi are portrayed as vicious, predatory, parasitic,
relentless in their pursuit of the shot which will make the big money. In the
car crash scene we see the journalists desperately photographing the blooded
occupants, one even loosening Bo’s wife’s dress to allow a better view of her
breast (another reference to how members of the media allegedly behaved at
the scene of Diana’s death in 1997).
The lead journalist, Rex, is given a few lines to justify what he does. ‘The
public wants raw and real’, he tells a girl in a bar. ‘That’s what we give ’em’.
The public gets what the public wants, in short, and don’t blame us, the
journalists. There is some truth in this argument, of course, but his defence
is fatally undermined by the sheer monstrousness of Rex and his colleagues
as they go about their business. ‘Laramie’, says Rex elsewhere, ‘I’m going to
destroy your life and eat your soul, and I’m going to enjoy doing it’. There is a
defence of celebrity journalism, not least in the need to counter celebrity PR,
but this appeal to public taste is lazy and tokenistic, and weights the argument
wholly to one side, i.e., the celebrity’s.
The film has the look and feel of a TV movie pilot, notwithstanding a
big-screen budget, Farina’s involvement and eye-catching cameos by Gibson
and Vince Vaughn. Only eighty minutes long, it gives the impression of a good
idea left undeveloped, a wasted opportunity to explore the impact of celebrity
journalism on those who become celebrities. Fifty years after La Dolce Vita
the world still waits for a credible study of the paparazzi phenomenon. Here,
224 appendix
the journalists are simply too villainous to be believable, and the script too
wooden to be anything other than distracting, as when one of the hacks says to
the boss, ‘Rex, what’s your plan? You must have something up your sleeve?’ As
Anchorman-style comedy this might work. Here, it is delivered without irony.
Box office: $16,796,512
13 Going On 30 (Gary Winick, 2004, 97 minutes)

A romantic comedy in the same vein as Life or Something Like It, and in
the sub-genre of movies which play with the idea of a child inhabiting an
adult’s body. Jennifer Garner plays thirty-year-old Jenna, an editor of fashion
magazine Poised who wakes up one day to find that she is thirteen again,
and that seventeen years of her life have been erased from her memory. As a
successful thirty-year-old working in style journalism she is also an unscru-
pulous media bitch, shallow and materialistic. Suddenly viewing her glamorous
surroundings with the naivete and delight of a child in a sweet shop, she comes
to see how empty and worthless her lifestyle is, and to re-evaluate the role of
friends and family in her life. She also rediscovers her childhood sweetheart,
principled photographer Matt (Mark Ruffallo), and begins the task of winning
his love after seventeen years. Like Life or Something Like It a supernatural
occurrence forces Jenna to re-evaluate her relationships with her parents, and
to rediscover her essential inner goodness, which has been submerged by the
pressures of her fast-lane career.
Set in the world of the women’s magazine, the film explores contemporary
femininity and the style culture which supports it. In competition to find a new
design for the relaunch of Poised, in which Jenna participates with a ruthless
colleague, we see two models of women’s journalism exposed to scrutiny. The
first, developed by her rival, wishes to make Poised even more ‘heroin chic’ and
sexually graphic than it already is. Jenna, on the other hand, wishes to target
Poised at ‘real women, who are smart and pretty and like being who they are’.
This is, in post-feminist terms, a conservative pitch, which the script allows
to triumph. In this respect the film is a critical commentary on that strand of
women’s journalism featured in Sex and the City, and an appeal for women to
return to a less sexualised culture.
Box office: $96,455,697
Control Room (2004, Jehane Noujaim,103 minutes)

This documentary follows staff at the headquarters of Arab-language twenty-
four-hour news channel Al Jazeera as they cover the invasion of Iraq in March
2003. Shot on video, Control Room is an example of the rise of the low-budget
documentary in global cinemas in the 2000s, and one of only two in the
1997–2008 period which took journalism as its subject (see Alex Gibney’s
Gonzo, below). Its subject is the pressures faced by Al Jazeera journalists and
managers as they try to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom in the face of a hostile
US administration.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Vissou (Wes Anderson, 2004, 119 minutes)
Cate Blanchett plays features writer Jane Winslett-Richardson on an assignment
to write about eccentric oceanographer Steve Vissou. Her role is a secondary
one in the script, supporting a cast of endearing oddballs. Her journalistic
character provides the audience with a point of access to the narrative, but is
otherwise irrelevant to the story.
Box office: $34,808,403
2005
2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2005, 123 minutes)

The sequel to In the Mood for Love follows Mr Chow to Hong Kong in 1966–7,
where he is writing a sci-fi novel and trying to forget Mrs Chan. He earns a living
as a columnist, and the film depicts the inconclusive, unsatisfactory relation-
ships he has with the women who live around him, including the girl in room
2046 of the hotel where he stays. Like the earlier film, 2046 uses journalism
merely as a device for establishing Chow’s identity as a writer-intellectual; an
‘artist’, as the hotel owner calls him on discovering his profession.
Box office: $19,470,239
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005, 90 minutes)

George Clooney’s father was a news anchor who brought up his son to revere
the iconic US TV journalist Ed Murrow. This 2005 production, as Clooney
put it in one promotional interview, ‘is a tip of my hat to what my old man has
been fighting for all his life’.3 It is unmistakably an homage to the heroism of
a particular journalist and his co-workers as they strive to fulfil their role as
watchdogs in a free society.
The plot concerns an episode in 1953–4 when Ed Murrow and the producers
of the CBS current affairs show See It Now dared to challenge what is portrayed
in the film as an intensifying anti-communist witch hunt in American society,
226 appendix
led by the notorious senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy’s campaign against the
perceived threat of communist influence on, and infiltration of, US institutions
dominated the political environment in the country for a decade following the
end of the Second World War. Through the hearings of his Committee on
Un-American Activities, McCarthy and his allies targeted writers and film
directors, government officials and business people, indeed anyone who was,
or who might ever have been, connected to the communist movement. In an
ironic parallel to the Stalinist show trials, targeted individuals were required to
name others who might also be communist sympathisers, to make confessions
of their own complicity, or to publicly deny their left-wing views. Those who
did not were frequently blacklisted from working in their field.
In 1953 US navy pilot Milo Radulovich was discharged from duty on the
grounds of an alleged association with the communist party (his ex-wife had
been a member of a communist-supporting organisation in her youth). No
evidence was presented by the military in Radulovich’s case, and he was given
no opportunity to defend himself. In Good Night, and Good Luck (Murrow’s
catch phrase, used as a sign-off at the end of his nightly appearances) the
journalist spots the story in a newspaper. In a news room already tense with
mounting signs of anti-communist paranoia (Robert Downey Jr’s character is
required, for example, to sign one of the ‘I am not now and have never been
a member of the Communist Party’ declarations which came to symbolise
the witch hunts) Murrow decides to investigate the Radulovich case. His
producer Fred Friendly, played by Clooney, supports him, though not without
reservations.
Taking on the story puts See It Now in conflict with the US military, and also
with parent company CBS, which includes amongst its key advertising clients
the Alcoa aluminium company. Since Alcoa sponsors See It Now, and also has
lucrative contracts with the US military, the Radulovich story creates tension
between Murrow, Friendly and station boss William Paley (Frank Langella).
Reluctantly, Paley allows See It Now to cover the story but warns Murrow and
Friendly that they are playing for high stakes and better have their facts right.
He also warns the journalists of the dangers of trial by media, and requires See
It Now to give McCarthy a right of reply (which he takes).
As the narrative proceeds, the Radulovich story is reported and a favourable
outcome achieved. He is re-instated, and the episode is seen to contribute to
the end of McCarthy’s toxic influence over American political and cultural life.
The heroic watchdog is victorious, though not without cost. One CBS news
anchor, Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), commits suicide following a campaign
of harassment by pro-McCarthy columnist Jack O’Brien, and Hollenbeck’s
on-air defence of Murrow. As for Murrow and See It Now, the programme
is eventually moved to a lower-profile place in the schedule, signalling defeat
at the hands of corporate decision-makers. The film is topped and tailed by
speeches delivered by Murrow warning of the dangers of a media system – a

system of television journalism in particular – which does not take politics with
sufficient seriousness. These and other scenes connect the narrative to debates
going on in the USA when the film was released, in particular the policies of the
Bush administration in its post-9/11 attempts to deal with islamic terrorism.
The film is shot in monochrome, recreating the 1950s TV news room in
shades of black, white and grey. Cigarette smoke features prominently in the
frame, and a mellow jazz soundtrack combined with numerous nightclub
scenes reminds one of MacKendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. J. J. Hunsecker
can be regarded as a fictionalised version of the real-life ‘king-makers’ Jack
O’Brien and William Buckley, referenced in Clooney’s film. Punctuating the
scripted scenes with actors, the film contains several scenes of actual newsreel
footage, although its description in some quarters as ‘docu-drama’ does not do
justice to the warmth and energy of the piece.
Good Night, and Good Luck is a relatively short, concise film, telling its
story without much in the way of character development. A sub-plot involving
Robert Downey Jr and Patricia Clarkson’s secretly married couple (CBS policy
of the time does not allow employees to be married) allows for a small measure
of human drama, as does the descent into suicidal despair of news anchor Don
Hollenbeck. But Murrow himself and Friendly are given no back story. Their
emotional responses to the unfolding narrative, and the dilemmas they are
faced with as they take on the network bosses, the military and McCarthy,
are hinted at here and there, but they have little to say that does not directly
drive the heroic watchdog plot forward. This emotional minimalism is clearly
intentional on Clooney’s part, perhaps because the drama of the journalistic
story was considered sufficient to fuel the narrative. There is a parallel here
to All The President’s Men, which is similarly uninterested in the private lives
and emotions of its protagonists. In adopting this style Clooney, like Pakula in
1976, declares that this story is too important for the audience to be distracted
by dramatic clichés.
Box office: $54,641,191
The Weather Man (Gore Verbinsky, 2005, 102 minutes)

Nicolas Cage plays Chicago TV weatherman Dave Spritz as he passes through
a mid-life crisis. Although on the verge of moving to a better-paid, higher-
profile job in New York, he is separated from his wife and daughter and strug-
gling to find himself. His media work is the backdrop to an emotional drama,
and much less an element of the story than in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. Its
key function is to enable a contrast to be drawn between Dave’s humdrum
work as the deliverer of weather news with the glamorous literary profile of
228 appendix
his Pulitzer prize-winning father (Michael Caine). Throughout the film Dave
is pelted with smoothies, cups of coffee and other soft objects by mocking
audience members, as he struggles with the meaning of it all.
Box office: $19,039,770
Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005, 110 minutes)

This is the first of two films about Truman Capote and the writing of his book,
In Cold Blood, which appeared in quick succession in 2005–6. Bennett Miller’s
Capote, co-executive produced by and starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann, who
won an Oscar for his performance, follows the story from November 1959 when
the news report of the Clutter family killings appeared in the New York Times
to the execution in 1965 of killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock – the event
which permitted Capote to end the book and have it published. In the inter-
vening time we see Capote – already a celebrated writer when the film opens,
with acolytes hanging on his anecdotes and tales in New York literary salons –
stumbling upon the Clutter story and gradually coming to sense the potential
for what he characterises as ‘a new kind of writing, the non-fiction novel’.
Capote and Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) travel to Holcombe,
Kansas, and after some initial awkwardness work their way into the trust of the
community, including the police. Capote’s celebrity, and his tales of drinking
with movie stars such as Humphrey Bogart, open doors and allow him to
undertake research into how the Clutter crime has impacted on the community.
Then, after the killers have been arrested and throughout their trial and appeal
process, he interviews them with the aim, as he explains, of ‘returning them to
humanity’. He assists them in finding legal advice for their appeal, and provides
them with reading material in jail. In short, he befriends his subjects.
Capote engages throughout with the nature of the writer’s non-fiction
writing – it is journalism, reportage, but also literature of the highest quality.
We see the process of persuading sources to permit access, of interviewing and
then writing up (Capote boasts that he has 94 per cent recall of conversations
– ‘I tested myself ’). And then the film moves into the ethical dilemmas raised
by the project. Capote sees one of the killers, Perry Smith, as a kind of alter
ego, like him abandoned by parents, the victim of a troubled childhood, and he
develops a genuine affection for him. But as the appeal process drags out, and
the author is unable to complete his book, his frustration and personal conflict
grow. By the end he is ignoring letters from Perry, and only at the last moment
agrees to attend the execution. We also see him lying to Perry about the title of
the book, and refusing to allow him to read drafts.
This is a subtle, understated account of a key moment in the history of
twentieth-century journalism, boasting a script genuinely interested in the
processes of research and writing, and the ethics of the kind of personalised
reporting which would become routine later in the century. The clash of objec-
tivity and subjectivity, the mix of factual reportage and authorial intervention
and embellishment (if not fiction) which is now commonplace in journalism,
did not begin in Holcombe, Kansas in 1959, but Capote is celebrated here as
a pioneer of the style.
Box office: $49,233,161
Rag Tale (Mary McGuckian, 2005, 103 minutes)

If movies about journalism include what are widely regarded to be some of
the greatest films ever made, they also include some of the worst, and Rag
Tale has been judged by most critics to be among the latter. In his Guardian
newspaper review Peter Bradshaw typified the critical response when he called
it ‘a boring mess’, and ‘intelligence-insulting nonsense’.4 This is unfair. Rag
Tale is neither boring nor insulting, though its frantic camera work could give
some in the audience a headache. Described by director Mary McGuckian as
‘a farcical depiction of life on a fictional newspaper’, it has been under-rated
in the sharpness and effectiveness with which it explores British tabloid news
culture.
Released in 2005 and set on and around US presidential election day, 2004,
the film tells the story of a few days in the life of a tabloid newspaper, The Rag
(which could be any one of the UK red-top tabloids such as the Sun, the Star
or the Mirror). As the film opens, the Rag editor, Eddy, is having a torrid affair
with his deputy M. J. (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who also happens to be the wife
of proprietor Richard Morton (Malcolm McDowell), the chairman of Global
Media Incorporated. Mr Morton has discovered the affair, and warns Eddy
to desist. There ensues a struggle over editorial control of the Rag, centred
on whether the paper will pursue an anti- or pro-monarchy editorial line.
The tone is black comic, and the film is accurately described on the DVD
sleeve as ‘darkly satirical’. The shooting style and mise en scène are influ-
enced by the shaky camera angles of British sitcoms of the period such as The
Office, and those of a nervous disposition are advised to watch with a supply
of paracetamol at hand. Scenes shift constantly from colour to monochrome,
and grainy video to saturated colour. The camera rarely rests in one place for
more than a few seconds. Many of the film’s negative reviews highlighted this
feature of the production, although it can also be seen as an effective device
for accentuating the confusing, paranoic atmosphere of the Rag’s newsroom,
in which office intrigue and overheard conversations maintain the narrative
tension throughout.
The camera work may not be to every viewer’s taste, but this is a commendable
230 appendix
film in many other respects. The cast is of exceptional quality, including

Jennifer Jason Leigh in another of her many portrayals of female journalists,
and, alongside McDowell, a host of great British actors such as Simon Callow,
John Sessions, Bill Paterson, Rupert Graves, Ian Hart and David Hayman.
Lucy Davis from The Office plays a scheming secretary, and Sara Stockbridge
a ruthlessly believable celebrity and gossip news editor, apparently devoid of
any hint of human decency. Mary McGuckian’s script produces consistently
good acting, and the reconstruction of a tabloid newsroom in early twenty-
first century London is believable. Rag Tale is indeed one of the few films
in recent times to capture the sterility and open-planned agrophobia of the
modern newsroom.
The film is merciless in its portrayal of tabloid news values. We quickly
learn that the US presidential election (Bush versus Kerry) is regarded by
the editorial team as deadly boring. Stockbridge’s ideas for stories based on
celebrity and sport, and increasingly extreme suggestions for anti-royal stories
(such as the headline, ‘Bulldoze Buck Palace’) are much more appealing to
the editor, and mirror precisely the actual headlines regularly seen in the Sun,
Star and elsewhere. In one scene we see how a ‘serious’ foreign story about the
plight of Afghanistan is transformed into a campaign to find refugees a home
in the UK, its political content stripped away until only human interest is
left. Explaining this process, one editor points out that the Rag’s readers have
difficulty telling the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan, and can relate to
foreign stories only if they have an easily accessible angle.
The script also addresses the subject of class, snobbery and the taste
demographics of newspaper readership. In one scene, Morton and a coked-up
M. J. awkwardly entertain a group of advisors of the Prince of Wales. Morton
aims to prepare the way for an honour, such as a peerage, but M. J. badly lets
him down by flouting the elaborate protocol of such dinners, using four-letter
words, smoking during the meal, and proclaiming loudly on matters such as
European Monetary Union.
The film is also very good in depicting the thuggishness of the British
tabloid news room. One might say ‘macho’ thuggishness, but several of the
key villains of the piece are women, including Eddy’s ex-wife (played by Kerry
Fox), a rival editor who assists him in his illegal and immoral plot to frame
Morton for incest.
Here and throughout, Rag Tale successfully, and quite chillingly, portrays
a style of journalism from which all ethical and moral foundation has been
removed, where objectivity and other normative concepts are entirely irrel-
evant and news-makers will do anything, including framing their proprietor
on charges of drug abuse and incest, to get their story. This sub-plot, which
occupies the final third of the film, descends into farce, and suspension of
disbelief is required as we learn that Morton has married a woman who not
only looks like a younger version of his first wife (not a problem, plot-wise,
since trophy wives are well known to be one of the perks of power), but is in
fact his daughter, leading to tragic (and deeply improbable) consequences all
round. If viewed as a pastiche of Greek tragedy, this turn of events can, just, be
borne, but it seems like an unnecessarily contrived and exaggerated solution to
the plot problem of how to put the proprietor on the defensive.
Morton is not a convincing or credible global media baron, and the film’s
main flaw, from the perspective of its representation of this particular type of
journalistic king-maker, is to under-state his proprietorial power. We are asked
to believe that a figure of Murdoch-like proportions such as Richard Morton
would permit an editor of one of his newspapers to ignore his commands, even
after the latter has been caught sleeping with the boss’s wife. Aside from this
and its other flaws, however, Rag Tale did not deserve the critical disdain with
which it was received, and stands up as a powerful satire about tabloid news
culture – the most effective, indeed, to have been made in the period of this
survey.
Box office: unavailable
2006
Infamous (Douglas McGrath, 2006, 113 minutes)

Based on the 1997 book by George Plimpton, Infamous was released one year
after the Oscar-winning Capote, and addresses exactly the same episode in
the writer’s life – the writing of In Cold Blood. Starring Toby Jones as the
author, Infamous is very different in tone to Capote. Where the latter is shot
in autumnal shades appropriate to the Kansas winter in which the early parts
of the story unfold, Infamous is more colourful, even gaudy. The clothes and
personalities are bright and lurid, and the script plays Capote’s personality
for laughs. Toby Jones is generally agreed to look more like the real Capote
than Philip Seymour Hoffmann in Bennett Miller’s film, but his portrayal is
more camp, comic, lispy and stereotyped to the point of distraction. In this
version Capote invites mockery as much as critical admiration or emotional
sympathy. As befits its title, Infamous is more melodramatic, with scenes of
sexual violence, threatened rape, and even a passionate mouth-to-mouth kiss
between Perry Smith (Daniel Craig) and the author. Here the Capote-Smith
relationship is played like a Hollywood love story, right up to the execution
scene with its flashbacks to happier times of Perry playing guitar. Capote
also suggests a sexual attraction between Capote and Smith, but Infamous
exaggerates and invents beyond what is credible. Infamous entertains, and tells
the same story as Capote, if in a register which is less subtle and, for this viewer,
232 appendix
less satisfying. Many critics prefer this version to Miller’s, however, claiming it
to be a more faithful representation of what Capote was actually like.
Like Capote, Infamous engages with the nature of the writer’s project, if in
a less satisfying manner. At one point Capote says, ‘I’m trying to create a new
kind of reportage’ which incorporates the ‘emotional and psychological detail’
of the events being reported. Elsewhere, ‘I want to bring fictional techniques
to a non-fiction story’.
Thank You for Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2006, 88 minutes)

This is a film about public relations, and the lobbying of Big Tobacco in
particular. Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, ace lobbyist for the Academy of
Tobacco Studies. Usefully compared to The Insider, it tells the (fictionalised)
story of the people who were trying to smear Jeffrey Wigand and the evidence
that nicotine is both harmful and addictive. In his attempts to ‘spin the truth’
for Big Tobacco Naylor makes the mistake of getting too close to Washington
Probe reporter Heather Holloway, played by Katie Holmes. He is brought down
by her exposé of his cynical methods, before a final act in which he redeems
himself before his family, his friends and his own conscience.
The tone of the piece is satirical, and often effective, as in the scenes where
three friends – Naylor, and the lobbyists for alcohol and firearms – compete
as to which of their respective clients’ products is the most dangerous. We
see Naylor and a Hollywood agent discuss how to produce a movie in which
cigarettes can be smoked by stars Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta Jones, post-
coitally, while circling the earth in a space station. More seriously, a case is
made for the freedom of US citizens to choose whether they smoke or not,
and some penetrating darts are fired against anti-smoking zealots. But the
target is a straw man since, as we know when watching (and if we have seen
The Insider, we will be even more convinced) that Big Tobacco has systemati-
cally lied for decades about the research evidence on smoking, and long ago
conceded defeat on all the key arguments. Lobbying for tobacco is a lost cause,
and Naylor’s pleas for our sympathy are unconvincing, even to himself. In the
end he abandons his employers, disgusted by their back stabbing.
The script is revealing on the techniques of spin and lobbying, though the
ease with which the experienced and in-demand Naylor lets down his guard,
sleeps with the reporter and divulges all she needs to know for her knocking
copy lacks credibility. Her willingness to sleep with him to get her story likewise
contradicts the notion that she is a principled journalist.
Thank You for Smoking is notable for its rare treatment of the subject of
lobbying, rather than the depth of its engagement with the practice of inves-
tigative journalism. Like The Insider, this is the story of how the news media
prise damaging information from a tobacco industry worker, and as a case
study in the practice of lobbying in contemporary America it both educates
and entertains. But it is a slight piece next to Mann’s film.
Box office: $39,232,211
Scoop (Woody Allen, 2006, 93 minutes)

Scarlett Johanssen plays a journalism student on holiday on London, put on
the trail of a potential serial killer by recently deceased investigative reporter
Joe Strombel, who appears to her during a magic show by Sydney Waterman,
the great Splendini (Woody Allen). Other than providing the vehicle for a
comic thriller plot requiring its characters to indulge in investigation, the film
says nothing about journalism. The ‘scoop’ comes to the central character
by entirely supernatural means unlikely ever to be experienced by a real
journalism student, and the ghost of Joe Strombel provides further assistance
at key points as she goes along. Despite the involvement of a stellar cast, the
film is a self-indulgent mess of badly improvised dialogue, poor editing and
continuity, and ludicrous plot twists which insult the viewer’s intelligence. The
film is noteworthy only as an example of how bad Allen’s films got before Vicky
Cristina Barcelona rescued his reputation.
Box office: $39,215,642
The Good German (Steven Soderbergh, 2006, 107 minutes)

There are two kinds of film about foreign correspondents. One explores the
nature of journalism in a war zone, and the role of the journalist in mediating
conflict. Welcome To Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997) exemplifies this
type, with its account of journalistic confusion and frustration in the face of the
siege of Sarajevo. The second type is that which employs the character of the
journalist principally as a plot device, permitting the protagonist to be in exotic
locations at exciting moments in world history. Steven Soderberg’s The Good
German falls into this latter category. It is not a film about foreign correspon-
dence so much as a thriller in which the central character, a journalist working
for the New Republic (George Clooney), arrives in 1945 Berlin to cover the
Potsdam peace conference. There, he is embroiled in a mystery involving his
driver Tully (Tobey Maguire), his ex-mistress Lena (Cate Blanchett) and her
husband, a German rocket scientist wanted by all sides in the post-war frenzy
to recruit talent for the emerging Cold War arms race. At no point in the script
does Clooney’s character discuss the nature of his work, nor do we as viewers
gain any insight into the journalistic dilemmas such a figure may have faced in
234 appendix
those days. Instead, he acts like a private eye, employing his investigative skills
to the resolution of a whodunnit-and-why tale.
In this respect the film reminds us of Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Corre-
spondent, in which Joel McCrea plays a journalist in eve-of-war Europe,
similarly drawn into intrigue. In both films the central character’s journalistic
status facilitates what are essentially spy thrillers, opening doors, permitting
access. The Good German further encourages this comparison by being shot
in monochrome, with many cinematographic references to 1940s film-making.
The film is shot to look as if it belongs to another era, although the script is
contemporary in tone and register (the ‘f ’-word crops up regularly). Clooney’s
character is regularly beaten to a pulp, and occasionally flees the scene of
danger, in some contrast to the behaviour of 1940s celluloid heroes.
A work of homage by one group of film-makers to another, The Good
German fails as a thriller, with a plot which is contrived and clumsy. As a film
about journalism, it is of secondary interest only, and inferior to Clooney’s
other journalism-related projects in the decade covered by this appendix (Good
Night, and Good Luck, and Leatherheads).
The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006, 106 minutes)

Towards the end of the 1997–2008 period a number of films appeared which
took place in or around the world of style journalism. In this highly successful
example Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestley, reportedly inspired by Anna
Wintour, the editor of Vogue in the United States. Priestley’s magazine is
called Runway, and shares Vogue’s (and Wintour’s) seriousness about the
culture and journalism of fashion. Anne Hathaway plays Andy Stark, a recent
graduate and aspiring journalist who really wants to write what she regards
as principled investigative pieces, but finds herself (and despite her obvious
ignorance of the fashion industry) working as Priestley’s assistant. Thus
is set up the film’s central tension, between the consensual view of worthy
journalism as that which covers the injustices meted out to trade unions and
workers, and Miranda Priestley’s conviction that fashion is essential to life,
and that standards of undisputed excellence must govern its coverage.
Andy has a boyfriend, and principled friends who, like her, scoff at her
Runway job, confirming her view that it will do as a temporary bridge to better
things. Then, as Andy gets sucked into the working rhythm and lifestyle of
New York’s fashion elite, they accuse her of betrayal and shallowness. Her
colleague in the Runway office, Emily (Emily Blunt) has the film’s funniest
line, throwing out the accusation, ‘You sold out when you tried on your first
pair of Jimmy Choos’.
That the script takes fashion very seriously indeed, however, is demon-
strated in a key scene where Andy, having scoffed at the care taken by Miranda
and her advisors in choosing a belt for a designer dress they are going to
photograph for the magazine, launches into a withering lecture on how this
obscure accessory, and the detail of its colours and textures, perches at the top
of a cultural pyramid from which all mainstream style and fashion flows. Andy
learns her lesson and is soon to be seen ditching her ‘grandmother’s skirt’
and wearing only the most exclusive of haute couture. Even if in the end Andy,
having finally won the trust of Miranda, walks away from her glittering career
to rediscover her boyfriend and take a job in a worthy left-of-centre newspaper,
we are left in no doubt that style journalism is most certainly not frivolous or
an easy option. On the contrary, at this level at least, its standards are almost
impossibly high, the work hard enough to break up families.
One of the most moving scenes occurs when Miranda, having learnt of her
husband’s intention to divorce her, opens up to Andy about the difficulties of
being a woman in her position – ‘the dragon lady’ who goes through husbands
like outfits, and is always the subject of press gossip. ‘Rupert Murdoch should
write me a cheque’, she says, ‘for all the tabloid papers I’ve sold for him’.
This is a film which, though pitched as a comedy, engages with rare sophis-
tication in the high-low culture debate, and the social role of style journalism
in particular, as well as the status of women in a branch of journalism which
has increased in economic power and cultural status with the rise of feminism.
Box office: $326,549,816.
Borat: cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of

Kazakhstan (Larry Charles, 2006, 81 minutes)
The feature film of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character created for TV in the UK
and the US, Borat Sagdiyev, this mock-documentary takes the audience on
a journey through America as seen through the eyes of a Kazakhstani TV
journalist and his producer. What begins as a merciless assault on the sexual
and identity politics of the central Asian country (so severe it provoked official
protests from the Kazakh government) becomes an equally unsparing exposé
of the worst of US racism, jingoism and class snobbery. Cohen’s characters
(Ali G, Borat, Bruno) typically operate by persuading their real-world inter-
viewees first that they are real journalists, and then into revealing more about
their social and political attitudes than is wise. Borat’s encounters with a
succession of individuals and groups, including ‘veteran feminists’ in New
York, members of a fine dining club in Georgia, and an elderly gentleman at a
rodeo in Virginia, serve to reveal a shocking level of racism displayed towards
muslims, Arabs, and above all jews. As a jew himself, Cohen is licensed to
236 appendix
entrap his subjects into breath-takingly anti-semitic remarks and gestures. In a

gun shop, Borat asks what kind of weapon is best for ‘shooting jews’. Astonish-
ingly, he receives a polite and helpful answer.
Those who visited the further reaches of the old Soviet Union before its
collapse will recognise the set of primitive ideas and attitudes towards mental
disability, women’s rights, homosexuality and other identity issues which
Borat’s character brings with him from Kazakhstan (albeit exaggerated
for comic effect). The biggest target of Borat’s fake journalism, however, is
the United States itself, revealed to harbour more than its share of deeply
reactionary attitudes. It was, nonetheless, very successful in that country,
taking some $130 million at the box office.
The film’s style draws on the wave of first-person documentaries made both
for TV and cinema from the 1990s on, utilising (or giving the appearance of
using) cheap, portable cameras, minimal production values, and frequent video
diary segments where Borat describes his feelings straight to camera.
Box office: $261,572,717
Interview (Steve Buscemi, 2006, 75 minutes)

Based on an original work by the late Theo Van Gogh, Interview is a chamber
piece of a movie, with the feel of a stage play and lasting only seventy-five
minutes. Written, directed by and starring Steve Buscemi as a political corre-
spondent in professional decline, it explores the culture of celebrity and
the ethics of journalism, neither of which emerge particularly well. Sienna
Miller plays Katya, a successful young TV and movie star, and Buscemi her
reluctant interviewer. As Pierre Peder, he would rather be doing his proper job
as political correspondent in Washington, following a breaking scandal within
the president’s administration. There is irony in this, since he makes it clear
from the first frame that he is dismissive of celebrity journalism’s triviality and
shallowness, and sees this assignment as a punishment for his own professional
sins. The world of political journalism, we might conclude from Pierre’s fasci-
nation with political scandal, is hardly less salacious and sensational than the
world of apolitical celebrity.
Katya is late for her interview in a chic restuarant, but Pierre has not
bothered to prepare and is practically ignorant of his subject’s back story
and career profile. She rails at his unprofessionalism, which he does not even
bother to deny, and abandons the interview, but when Pierre hurts his head in
an accident, she takes pity and leads him back to her apartment, where the rest
of the film unfolds.
In the course of the film Pierre reveals himself to be not only a lazy researcher
when it comes to preparing for interviews, but a journalist prone to inventing
facts. He admits to this, in explanation of why he is here, interviewing Katya,

rather than in Washington where the big news is: ‘My editor doesn’t trust me
anymore’. In an echo of the Stephen Glass story he admits to having invented
sources in the course of his journalism, and we realise that he is in some kind
of professional purgatory. To obtain material for his profile of Katya, he sneaks
a look at what he believes to be her personal diary, and then prepares to reveal a
secret she has shared with him in strictest confidence. Thus we see his untrust-
worthiness in pursuit of a story, which is all the more damning because he has
taken the moral high ground from the outset.
Katya’s character is more sympathetic, and can be read as a riposte to
those who place politics and the ‘serious’ issues of the public sphere (such as
Pierre) above the fluff of celebrity. Katya is a serious, thoughtful actor, albeit
blonde and physically attractive, with more integrity and honesty than Pierre,
who routinely mixes fact and fiction in everything he does. She is proud of
her B-movie roles, and her TV soap, where Pierre is full of self-loathing and
cynicism. Their encounter ends with Katya’s victory, in that Pierre’s duplicity
fails to get him the scoop he seeks (for all that he denies any interest in celebrity
culture), and she retains the physical evidence of a damning secret which could
destroy him.
The film is mainly shot within the confines of Katya’s loft apartment in
New York, and suffers from lazy editing (Pierre’s whisky at one point changes
magically into a glass of red wine). The script and acting are at times so
histrionic as to challenge credibility. The film is notable, however, as a rare
attempt to explore the taste distinctions so often applied to journalistic culture
by lazy critics; distinctions which elevate the male worlds of politics, economics
and the like to worthiness, while downgrading the feminised world of celebrity
and entertainment. The two are not so far apart, says Buscemi. More than that,
the trivial world of celebrity may be more honest and worthwhile than the one
valued by Pierre.
Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006, 154 minutes)

The iconic Marvel superhero is re-invented to great effect for the twenty-first
century. The most heroic of all journalistic heroes – a benign alien with super-
human powers who uses his journalistic occupation as a means of masking
his true identity – Superman and his adventures are deeply embedded in the
news-room culture of the America in which they are set, and that of the Daily
Planet in particular, where Clark Kent, Lois Lane and the other supporting
cast spend their working time. From the first appearance of Superman in
the 1930s he has been linked by scholars and critics to a view of journalism
238 appendix
as a benevolent force (although, of course, it is not as journalist Clark Kent

that Superman performs his most heroic deeds). More than any praise by
association, however, the world of news journalism is a logical backdrop for a
do-gooding super hero because it provides him with a convenient location for
early warning of events requiring his attention. News is his vehicle for finding
things out quickly. Moreover, this is a world in which the news is global,
and events happening anywhere on the planet are instantly reported in the
offices of the Daily Planet. Consequently, the twenty-first century Superman
is globalised, able to be anywhere, anytime, just like the news from which he
hears about this or that dastardly deed.
The film is alert to the changed cultural politics of its era, as compared with
the late 1970s/early 1980s of the earlier Superman (Richard Donner, 1978).
When at the start of the film Superman (Brandon Routh) appears back on earth
after a five-year absence, the editor of the Daily Planet convenes an editorial
meeting to demand coverage of his lifestyle, his tastes in clothes and food,
his politics. In 2006 Superman is quickly incorporated into a popular news
agenda dominated by human interest and celebrity. He becomes a celebrity,
fielding news conferences and issuing sound bites wherever he goes. This is
a superhero genre movie well aware of the nature of public relations and the
dynamics of the celebrity media machine.
Also notable is Lois Lane’s transformation from mere love interest in earlier
versions of the tale to fully empowered equal of Superman. As the film opens,
we learn that Lois (played by Kate Bosworth) is a single mother (she has a
boyfriend, but does not wish to marry him), and that she has won a Pulitzer
prize for an article entitled ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’. This
choice of subject matter is because, on one level, she has been jilted five years
before. But it allows for her character to be portrayed as an independent, more
than averagely skilled professional – the Daily Planet’s star reporter, in fact.
She is resourceful and fiercely protective of her young son. She is a better
reporter than Clark Kent. More than that, it is she who saves Superman’s
life when evil Lex Luther has stabbed him with deadly Kryptonite. To the
audience of post-feminist women who see the film, she is unambiguously the
equal of Superman in courage and determination. She is, in fact, superwoman.
Box office: $391,081,192
Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006, 138 minutes)

Jennifer Connelly plays a foreign correspondent reporting the civil war in
Sierra Leone, who becomes involved with a diamond smuggler (Leonardo Di
Caprio). Her supporting role in the drama is to provide the liberal conscience
to Di Caprio’s mercenary mind set, gradually prevailing upon him to use the
diamond he seeks to steal to help Sierra Leone and its people, rather than
enrich himself. Journalist and smuggler help each other to gain access to infor-
mation and logistical support respectively, and her insider knowledge allows
the film to end with her journalistic exposé of the ‘blood diamond’ trade
which continues to plague Africa. Connelly’s character is that of the witness
to appalling injustice and inhumanity, and thus heroic, although the script has
little interest in the detail of her work.
Box office: $171,407,179
2007
Leatherheads (George Clooney, 2007, 105 minutes)

George Clooney’s next film as actor-director after Good Night, and Good Luck
is another period piece with journalism at its core. This time the tone is comic,
in the tradition of classic screwball comedy, rather than the austere drama of
the earlier film. A lovingly reconstructed 1920s setting stars Clooney as Dodge
Connolly, a pro football team boss struggling to survive as the sport becomes
more commercialised and rule-bound. The film is a mild attack on the celebrifi-
cation of sport occurring in the 1920s, and also on the manufacture of celebrity.
A central strand in the narrative is the ‘war hero’ status of star player Carter
Rutherford, first created by journalists in the aftermath of World War One,
but who now seek to bring him down with a damaging exposé. Reporter Lexie
Lyttleton (Renee Zellwegger) is assigned the task of exposing Rutherford, but
quickly realises that he is a nice guy and begins to feel the conflict of personal
betrayal. ‘You know, Harry’, she says to her editor at one point, as he urges her
to deliver the damaging story, ‘sometimes this job stinks’.
The popular press are central to this story, implicated both as the manufac-
turers of myth such as ‘war hero’ Rutherford, and in the pressure they apply
to undermine the integrity of authentic sporting culture with commercial
sponsorship and celebrity. The film plays with journalistic stereotypes, in the
form first of Lexie Lyttleton’s girl reporter, who is aware of her status as a
woman in a man’s world and is determined to find professional success. To do
so she must resist the urge to ‘get out of this dull newspaper business’ and get
married to one or other of her suitors (Dodge and Carter both pursue her, in
classic screwball manner). Feminist assumptions are embedded into the script.
She is allowed to be much raunchier than, say, Rosalind Russell in His Girl
Friday, and her character is never defeated. We also see, in Suds, the classic
‘drunken journalist’ type – a reporter who drinks more or less all the time, but
is still lovable and friendly, as well as remarkably competent when it comes to
delivering copy.
240 appendix
Combining Lexie’s mission to bring down a war hero who is also a nice guy,
and Suds’ inebriation, we are presented with a film which presents a caustic,
unflattering view of popular US journalism in the 1920s, already mired in
commercial compromise and ethical inadequacy, already deserving of our
contempt. In the end, Lexie and her editor are redeemed, but it is a hollow
victory.
Leatherheads is shot, scripted and performed with skill, and works as an
affectionate homage to the films of the period in which it is set (bar fights and
extended fisticuffs in which no one is hurt, and so on). It suffers, however,
from an unevenness of tone, slow pacing, and some confusing plot twists, and
is inferior – as a film about journalism – to Good Night, and Good Luck. Part
of its achievement is in demonstrating that contemporary concerns about the
celebrification and commercialisation of sport, and the unholy alliance between
journalism, business and sport, are far from new. Celebrity culture was alive
and kicking in the 1920s, we see, as was the worst of sleaze journalism.
Box office: $41,299,492
Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007, 156 minutes)

A study of the real-life case of the Zodiac serial killer who preyed on the San
Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From an early stage the
killer used the media to communicate messages, and the film explores the
respective frustrations and often conflicting agendas of journalists and police
officers as they seek to decode the killers’ ciphers and establish his identity
(which remains unknown to this day). Like Stone’s Natural Born Killers, the
film is interested in the ‘good business’ which such a case provides for media
and law enforcers alike, though this is a thriller rather than a satire, and much
less critical of the press. Robert Downey Jr (Wayne Gale in Stone’s film) plays
the central journalistic character, Paul Avery, for whom the case proves to be
a turning point in his descent into alcohol and drug addiction. He, like other
characters, is brought to the edge of self-destruction by his obsession with the
Zodiac.
The film’s representation of editorial meetings and the early 1970s ambience
of the San Francisco Chronicle news-room have been widely praised for their
authenticity. The film is an effective thriller stepped in the print journalistic
culture of the pre-digital, pre-mobile age where people still used public call
boxes and not every office had a fax machine.
Box office: $84,785,914
A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2007, 103 minutes)

The prolific and stylistically versatile British director Michael Winterbottom
returned to the subject of the foreign correspondent in this film about the
post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. Based on the tragic, true story of Wall Street Journal
correspondent Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman), who was kidnapped and then
executed by jihadi militants in Pakistan in 2002, the film is a moving tribute
to the personal and professional courage of the correspondent in time of war,
and a plea for the sanctity of the witness role to be upheld by all sides. The
film is based on the book by Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), who was with her
husband in Karachi and was herself at the time a reporter for French public
radio. The poignancy of the story is enhanced by the fact that she is heavily
pregnant as the drama unfolds.
Daniel Pearl was the first western hostage of an islamic group, and the first
journalist, to be a victim of the terror tactic of decapitation, carried out as if on
an animal, filmed and then broadcast to the world. The nightmarish quality of
the act made it far more horrific than the experiences of hostages such as Brian
Keenan in 1980s Lebanon, and it became a much used tool of islamic groups
in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
Winterbottom’s film begins by emphasising that Pearl and his wife are
journalists who, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of
Afghanistan, genuinely want to know the jihadi side of the story, and to under-
stand it. It is his desire to obtain one final interview, with an islamist leader
known as Sheikh Gilani (who turns out to be unwitting bait placed in Pearl’s
way by a group led by UK-born islamist Omar Saaed Sheikh) which leads
him to captivity and death. Pearl wants the interview because he wishes to
report the islamist point of view. He is, in short, no propagandist, despite
his status as a reporter for one of the United States’ most politically conser-
vative newspapers. This status is cited early on as a source of vulnerability. As
Pakistani guests sit around Mariane Pearl’s dinner table in Karachi, before
she knows he has been kidnapped, one says, only half-joking, ‘All American
journalists are CIA agents’. When the kidnappers make contact, they accuse
Pearl of being, first, a Mossad agent, then CIA. He is also jewish, which further
exposes him as a target for the anti-semitic islamists. We are also informed,
by way of explaining why this particular journalist was targeted, that the Wall
Street Journal had provided the CIA with a computer containing information
about jihadi suspects.
Pearl’s professionalism as a journalist, his desire to report the conflict with
a degree of objectivity, even at great risk to himself, are portrayed as quietly
courageous. He and his wife are seekers after truth who, Winterbottom suggests,
do not deserve this fate. Moreover, it is clear that they respect the culture they
are working in. One of the film’s most notable features, and one which sets it
242 appendix
apart from many of the post-9/11 films which appeared around this time, is its
sympathetic portrayal of the confusion, noise and chaos of Karachi. The police
officers who investigate the kidnapping are shown torturing their suspects for
information, but also as committed and competent. Although they are unable
to save Pearl’s life, they track down Omar Saaed and others involved. This
is not a story of western knights coming to the rescue of Mariane’s damsel
in distress but of Pakistani police and security, notwithstanding their relaxed
attitude to torture and other ethically dubious behaviour, doing their job with
dedication and skill. The local US embassy staff are portrayed as helpless, and
at times unsympathetic and intrusive.
As in his earlier Welcome To Sarajevo Winterbottom packages this tale of
journalism in time of conflict within a very human drama. The earlier film
spends most of its running time narrating the plight of the civilian victims
of civil war. Here, the focus is on the suffering of Mariane Pearl, from her
initial sense that something is wrong when her husband does not turn up for
dinner as arranged, to the horror of being told that he has been beheaded.
This strand of the story and the Pakistani police investigation take up by far
the greatest proportion of the film’s running time. Jolie’s howls of anguish as
her character digests this news makes for one of the most distressing scenes
ever shot in a mainstream movie, and entirely redeems her earlier perfor-
mance in the disposable rom com Life or Something Like It. In the end, in
an interview given to an American news organisation, she reaches out to the
Pakistani people with a declaration that they have suffered more from islamist
kidnappings than foreigners. Then she states that terrorism feeds on poverty
and injustice. She also attacks her interviewer for asking if she has watched
the video of her husband being beheaded. ‘Have you no decency?’ she asks,
in French, and then, in English. ‘How can you ask me that?’ Running through
the film is a tone of disapproval at the way in which the western media treat the
story and its victims.
The quiet courage of Daniel Pearl as depicted in this film and the dignity
of his wife in dealing with such an appalling predicament make this one of the
most heroic cinematic representations of journalism made in the 1997–2008
period, and in the context of the post-9/11 political environment, one of the
most measured. The horror of the kidnappers’ methods is not downplayed,
but Winterbottom ensures that we are reminded of the link between this
incident and the treatment of the Guantanamo detainees. Pearl is portrayed
as a dedicated professional who gives his life in the pursuit of truth. Winter-
bottom’s film is a plea for the combatants in such a conflict to respect that
aspiration, if only for the selfish reason of having their views represented with
some degree of objectivity.
Box office: $18,935,657
Dan in Real Life (Peter Hedges, 2007, 98 minutes)

In this romantic comedy Steve Carell plays Dan, a depressed advice columnist
recovering from the death of his wife. He meets a woman – Juliette Binoche
– who happens to be his brother’s girlfriend. The humour extracted from the
dilemma he thus faces – to pursue the woman he senses is the love of his life,
but whom his brother is devoted to – is light rather than dark, and the film
ends well, with Dan getting his girl and everyone living happily ever after.
Dan in Real Life is a minor representation of journalism, in so far as Dan’s
profession is never explored as an issue, or a practice. We never see him at
work, and apart from a few words of wisdom extracted from his columns and
delivered as voiceovers, we learn nothing about the journalism of lifestyle
commentary. His journalistic status qualifies him as a writer, and there is irony
in the fact that, as a lifestyle advice columnist, his own life is so chaotic, but
is otherwise incidental. His lines are quoted here and there in the film, and
he is cited as an inspirational figure by at least three other characters. His
journalistic identity services the story by giving him depth and intellectual
distinctiveness, in contrast to his brother, who eventually finds his true love in
the arms of the local floozy.
Box office: $67,791,529
The Brave One (Neil Jordan, 2007, 117 minutes)

Jodie Foster stars as Erika Baine, a New York radio presenter who becomes a
vigilante – the ‘subway shooter’ – following the murder of her fiancé. She sees
herself as ‘a different kind’ of reporter, interested in capturing the sights and
sounds of urban life, and moulding them into a broadcast show, Street Walker.
After the attack which leaves her fiancé dead and her gravely wounded, the
show becomes darker, her optimism and love for the city more guarded. She
interviews the detective involved in the subway shootings case, and gradually
he becomes suspicious of her.
Erika’s status as a radio presenter functions in the script to provide a
mechanism for her to articulate her rage at the impotence of the law in ‘the
safest big city in the world’. Her radio performances set out her motivation for
the killings which, in the manner of Michael Winner’s Death Wish, begin almost
by accident but become more calculated as the vigilante gets sucked into the
cycle of revenge and satisfaction. Being a journalist also gives Erika the opening
to establish a relationship with Terrence Howard’s detective, who shares her
frustration with the slowness and inadequacy of the law and order process.
Although the film’s ending is abrupt, and inconsistent with the tone of all
that has gone before, Foster’s is a convincing performance as the wounded
journalist. Scenes of her at work are credible, and her radio scripts have the ring
244 appendix
of authenticity. The film touches only rarely on the ethics of her very personal
form of journalism, and there are some digs at the sensationalism of crime
reporting in general. Neil Jordan’s film says little that is new or profound about
journalism, then, but effectively uses the ambience of the sound-deadened,
darkened radio studio, and the access Erika’s professional status allows the
detective, to fashion a gripping thriller.
Box office: $69,787,663
Spider-Man 3 (Sam Raimi, 140 minutes)

The third in the franchise, and outdoing the first two in box-office receipts.
Once again Peter Parker is engaged in a duel with J. Jonah Jameson and the
Daily Bugle, which wants to expose Spider-Man as a criminal.
Box office: $890,871,626
Perfect Stranger (James Foley, 2007, 109 minutes)

Halle Berry plays Rowena, an investigative reporter for the New York Courier,
specialising in exposés of the scandalous behaviour of powerful men such as
the US senator she rudely ‘outs’ in the opening sequence. The film follows
her as she investigates the role of advertising executive Harrison Hill (Bruce
Willis) in the murder of her old childhood friend, Grace. With the help of her
researcher Miles (Giovanni Ribisi), Rowena goes undercover as a temp at Hill’s
office. Assisted by Miles’ skills in computer hacking, she embarks on an online
chatroom relationship with her suspect, hacks into his personal email account,
and eventually has him convicted of murder, before a final, unexpected twist.
Apart from a few references early in the film to journalism as ‘the pursuit
of truth’ the script employs the world of investigative reportage primarily as
the vehicle for a psychological thriller plot, since it allows Rowena and Miles
to do things which no ordinary citizen could contemplate, such as impersonate
people in chatrooms and steal private email. There is an exploration of the
ethics of spying in pursuit of a story, and neither Rowena nor Miles emerge
as particularly positive characters. Miles’ computer skills come to be linked
to sexual deviance, while Rowena’s highly-sexed character invites disapproval.
The film misfires on many levels, satisfying neither as a thriller nor as
an exploration of journalistic ethics. Bruce Willis is effective as the targeted
executive, but disappears from the script after his (subsequently shown to
be unjust) conviction for murder. Reviews were generally, and deservedly,
negative.
Box office: $73,090,611
The Hunting Party (Richard Shepard, 2007, 101 minutes)

Loosely based on an Esquire feature article by TV news reporter Scott Anderson,5
this is a fictionalised account of an expedition by a group of journalists into
Serbia to find a fugitive war criminal, known as the Fox. Richard Gere plays
Simon Hunt, a burnt-out TV news reporter whose pregnant lover has been
killed by the forces of the fugitive in question (a character inspired by Radovan
Karadzik), and who goes in search of him. Ostensibly, the aim is to gain an
exclusive interview. In reality, he wishes to capture the fugitive. He brings along
his old cameraman, Duck, who despite having become a successful network
news staffer in the meantime, is persuaded to risk his life for what is clearly a
wild goose chase, and a young, inexperienced son of a network vice-president
just out of journalism school. The latter addition to the team allows for some
easy jokes along ‘journalism school won’t teach you jackshit’ lines. There are
many other clichés – the too-smooth network anchorman who is by definition
not a ‘real’ journalist; the evil Serb leader and his demonic associates; the
several escapes from near-death which the journalists go through. In the end
the film disappoints by being more boy’s own adventure than a realistic account
of a genuinely interesting episode in the murky and unprincipled aftermath of
the wars in former Yugoslavia.
The original Esquire article dismisses conspiracy theories such as the
allegation that Serbian war criminals were allowed to go free by the US and
NATO forces at the end of the war, but this film takes them much more seriously.
Hunt’s contempt for what he sees as UN and US complicity in Serbian war
crimes ends the film with a strong note of cynicism towards authority, and the
final exchange between Hunt and his CIA rescuer bears little resemblance to
the more measured account given in Anderson’s article (Radovan Karadzik
was finally taken into the custody of the Hague war crimes tribunal in 2008).
This is far from a ‘true story’, then, and suffers by comparison with the
much more sombre and moving A Mighty Heart, released around the same
time. The tone of the script veers uneasily from wacky comedy to scenes of
torture and massacre, punctuated by the accentuated craziness of the central
character, who in one scene risks death by shotgun for the sake of a stolen $20
bill. Hunt is a mixture of Hunter Thompson and Richard Boyle in Salvador,
but without the magnetism or profundity of either. Although elements of the
original source material are retained (and captions acknowledge that much of
the story is invented), The Hunting Party has little to say about foreign and
war correspondence, except that it is very dangerous and best undertaken by
journalists who are practically insane to begin with.
246 appendix
Control (Anton Corbijn, 2007, 113 minutes)

Telling the same story as Winterbottom’s Twenty Four Hour Party People – the
rise of Factory Records and Joy Division – Anton Corbijn’s film is listed here
for the same reason; one of its key characters, Tony Wilson, begins the film as
a current affairs TV journalist. The script also has an important role for Ian
Curtis’ Belgian lover, Annik Honore, who first meets him in her capacity as a
music journalist reviewing a Joy Division concert.
Global box office: $8,009,646
REC (Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza, 2007, 70 minutes)

A low-budget Spanish horror film in the tradition of Blair Witch Project and
Cloverfield, premised on the expanded use of hand-held video technology
by TV journalists. In this example of the sub-genre, a Barcelona-based
documentary team working on the show While You Sleep – Pablo who holds the
camera throughout and is never seen, and Angela, the increasingly distraught
presenter – go out with a fire crew on a routine call to assist an elderly woman
in an apartment block. Once inside the building, a policeman is bitten by the
woman, and the firemen attempt to get medical help. The building has been
sealed by the authorities, however, trapping firemen, journalists and residents
inside. Eventually it is revealed that there is a contagious infection which causes
those affected to become murderously violent. Angela and Pablo, having set
out to make a routine fly-on-the-wall documentary, find themselves recording
an escalating sequence of bloody attacks. With no route of escape from the
building, they decide that their goal as journalists is to ‘tape everything’, to
bear witness. This they do to the bitter end, and their own grisly demise.
The film uses the grainy, jerky quality of hand-held video to represent
familiar genre movie scenes (people being chased, attacked, monsters being
killed in appropriately bloody fashion) in a way which enhances their realism
and heightens the horror for the YouTube generation. This is not a film about
the ethics of such journalism, although it robustly defends the right of the
journalist to report events which the authorities might prefer hidden. We see
events through the journalists’ eyes, as in Blair Witch, providing a degree of
narrative distance which somehow intensifies the horror.
Box office: unavailable.
Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, 2007, 98 minutes)

Robert Redford directs and stars in a critical study of US government policy
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the role of the US media in promoting the policy
to the public. One of three narrative strands follows TV news reporter Janine
Roth (Meryl Streep) as she interviews a pro-war senator about the opening of
a new military offensive. The senator (Tom Cruise) wishes to enlist the support
of Roth and her news organisation in order to ‘change the subject’ on the war
on terror, and win back public support. He offers Roth an exclusive, if she will
tell the story his way. She refuses, and is forced by her editor to choose between
her own principles and her career. Streep’s portrayal of the journalist is under-
stated and sombre as she concedes that, despite her criticism of the senator’s
gung-ho approach, she and her organisation enthusiastically endorsed the
2003 invasion of Iraq. If the senator and his like are monsters, then she has
contributed to their making.
The journalistic strand is engaging, but represents around one third of an
overly didactic film which plays like a lecture on the political science taught by
Redford’s college professor, crammed with speeches and sermons designed to
make the liberal, anti-war perspective on the war on terror seem self-evident.
Made at a time when the unfinished Iraq war was the big story, and Afghan-
istan still a sideshow, the script has already been overtaken by events.
Box office: $63,215,872
The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007, 110 minutes)

This action-hero film features features fictional investigative journalist Simon
Ross (Paddy Considine), working for the real Guardian, in a supporting role
alongside Matt Damon’s Bourne. Ross gets on to Bourne’s story, but is killed
around twenty-five minutes in to the film.
Box office: $442,825,653
2008
Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle, 2008, 89 minutes)

A remake of REC (see above), relocated in Los Angeles and lacking the pace
and scariness of the original. In this version we see the cameraman briefly (in
REC he is never seen).
Box office: $39,769,976
Sex and the City (Michael Patrick King, 2008, 135 minutes)
Sex and the City was an era-defining success on American and global TV in
the 1990s, signalling the rise of the young, professional woman with money to
248 appendix
spend and sexual appetites to satisfy. Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, the series
followed the lives and loves of four New York-based women, including Carrie
Bradshaw, a successful sex and lifestyle columnist. The TV series was based on
the New York Observer columns of Candace Bushnell.
This is not really a film about journalism, although its lead character is a
journalist. Unlike The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City is about the life
of a woman who happens to be a journalist, and whose journalism provides a
narrative device for plot, as well as making credible her lifestyle of conspicuous
consumerism and designer clothes.
The film’s greater interest, for the purposes of this book, lies in its status
as an index of the rise of the kind of ‘new girl writing’ which Carrie Bradshaw
practises, and which is in turn one element of an expanding, post-feminist,
post-Madonna culture of female consumption and sexual assertiveness. One
can safely say that Sex and the City, and the kind of loose-living, free-thinking
woman whom Carrie represents, would not have been possible without the
previous thirty years of feminist activism. What she and her friends do with
their economic power and social status, however, is far removed from what the
pioneers of feminism thought they were fighting for, making this kind of ‘post-
feminism’ a focus of intra-feminist debate in recent years.
Box office: $415,129,126
Definitely, Maybe (Adam Brook, 2008, 107 minutes)

A minor romantic comedy in which divorcee Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds)
attempts to explain the identity of her natural mother to his daughter. One
candidate is journalist Summer Hart (Rachel Weisz) who features in the story
as one of three women he may or may not have had a child with in the past.
Summer’s status as a journalist has significance to the film only in that, when
they were pursuing their relationship, she had to write a critical story about
the political candidate whom Will was working for as a paid party campaigner.
Faced with the dilemma of writing the story and staying true to her journal-
istic principles, or suppressing it and saving the relationship, Summer opts for
the former. Beyond this brief moment of ethical exploration, the resolution of
which lacks credibility (would true lovers allow such an issue to separate them?)
the film has nothing to say about journalism. The Rachel Weisz character is
never seen engaged in her professional activity.
Box office: $55,447,968
How To Lose Friends and Alienate People (Robert B. Weide, 2008, 110
minutes)
This is the fifth in a series of big-budget Hollywood movies concerned with
the world of style journalism released between 2002 and 2008. How To Lose
Friends and Alienate People is based on the heavily fictionalised autobiog-
raphy of British journalist and self-styled cultural guru Toby Young (renamed
as Sydney Young in the film). Somewhat improbably, Sydney finds himself
promoted from a dead-end editorship of the London-based Postmodern Review
(the real-life Young edited a journal called Modern Review) to a much sought-
after post at the high profile Sparks magazine (modelled on Vanity Fair).
Although a complete newcomer, and bearing no obvious talent as a journalist,
he has conveniently regular access to the editor, Claydon Carter (Jeff Bridges,
based on Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter), and gradually makes his way up the
ladder of style magazine success, acquiring a journalistic girlfriend (Kirsten
Dunst, as a copy editor) along the way.
The film is pitched near the style of British comedy Simon Pegg had success
with in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but also has aspirations to satire at
the expense of celebrity culture and the journalism which both fuels and is
dependent on it. Sydney’s self-appointed role at Sparks is to represent journal-
istic integrity in the face of a corrupt system of celebrity endorsement and PR
puffery. He is, we are told, what Claydon Carter used to be – independent,
critical, honest. The film takes us through a series of encounters with those
who are the opposite, and thus traitors to the journalistic cause: Sydney’s line
manager, Laurence, the culture editor who sleeps with rising movie stars and
promotes them shamelessly in the magazine; Gillian Anderson’s publicist – ‘I
hate that word’, she says, reminiscent of Tony Curtis’ turn as Sydney Falco in
Sweet Smell of Success; Sophie Maes (Megan Fox), the empty-headed starlet
whose pet chihuahua Sydney inadvertently sends to meet its maker. The only
characters, apart from Sydney, with whom we are allowed to sympathise are
Kirsten Dunst’s wannabe novelist, working on Sparks only to pay her bills
until she finishes her novel, and Sparks editor Claydon himself – he may be
jaded and cynical – but he is human enough to allow Sydney to make the kind
of faux pas and professional balls-ups that would see him shown the door at any
real-life magazine.
As light comedy, fusing British humour with Sex and the City/Devil Wears
Prada locations, How To Lose Friends … succeeds in providing two hours of
pleasing entertainment. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, and Simon
Pegg is very likable as the initially unlikable protagonist. As satire, however,
the jokes are obvious to anyone at all familiar with celebrity culture and its
journalism. Its impact is undermined by the central character’s fundamental
lack of credibility – we never see any evidence of Sydney’s talent, or what it is
250 appendix
that allows him to cut such an iconoclastic swathe through Sparks’ cosy inner
world.
The film’s broader significance is in its confirmation of the rise of style
journalism as an important sub-sector within the media, linked of course to
the rise of celebrity culture in the late twentieth century. Magazines such as
Vogue and Vanity Fair were always glamorous, but rarely taken seriously as
journalism, suffering from the low status attaching to women in the profession.
In the post-feminist world, figures such as Carrie in Sex and the City or
Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada can still be swooned over for their frocks,
but have acquired a cultural weight in keeping with the size and affluence of
their audience – young, professional women whose feminism is lived in work
and at home, and who expect to be taken seriously by their entertainers. In
this respect, too, How To Lose Friends … fails. The Devil Wears Prada and Sex
and the City feature strong women at their narrative core; How To Lose Friends
… is an old-fashioned film in which male characters dominate throughout.
Kirsten Dunst’s main function in the story is to be mistreated by the cad
Laurence, then rescued, damsel-in-distress like, by Sydney. We are never in
any doubt that this intelligent, ambitious woman, whose favourite film is the
Fellini classic La Dolce Vita, needs a man much, much more than she needs a
good job as a journalist.
Box office: $17,286,299
Gonzo: the life and work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson (Alex Gibney, 2008,
120 minutes)
This documentary (see Control Room, above) is one of two about journalism
made for cinema in the 1997–2008 period. Alex Gibney had previously made
Enron: the smartest guys in the room, and Taxi to the Dark Side, both part of
the wave of big-screen documentaries which characterised global cinema from
the late 1990s, and here turns his attention to one of the most iconic figures
in the history of journalism. Hunter Thompson shot himself in 2005, in the
spirit and in the manner of his hero, Ernest Hemingway. For forty years he
produced a unique form of literary journalism, combining stylistic brilliance,
iconoclastic satire and a perceptive eye for what was going in the world around
him. His best years were over by 1975, as this film shows, but by then he had
made ‘gonzo’ a byword for a new kind of reportorial style, appropriate to the
postmodern sensibilities of the late twentieth century – difficult to define as
either journalism or not-journalism, subjective or objective. Gonzo was aware
of its capacity to change the world it was ostensibly observing, and put the
interaction of the journalist and the real at the centre of its project. Wildly
successful with Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and
Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Thompson achieved the level of outlaw-ish

celebrity hitherto reserved for rock stars, and became an inspiration to gener-
ations of would-be journalists who came after.
This account of his life and work provides admirers of Thompson’s writing
with rare access to home movie footage photographs, interviews with both
of his wives (including the extraordinarily generous Sondi who, according to
more than one biography suffered physical violence at Thompson’s hands –
here she remarks only that he could be ‘difficult’) – and with some of the key
figures in supporting his career: Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone editor who
published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Douglas Brinkley, his editor; Ralph
Steadman, his illustrator on the key books. All of this is fascinating simply
because we have not heard so much from them before, in this public context.
There is little that a follower of Thompson’s work would not already know, but
it is engaging.
If the film has a flaw, it is that it spends rather too much time on the political
journalism – the period after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas up to the election
of Jimmy Carter in 1976 – and not enough on the life behind the work. What
fans of Thompson really want to know is: how did he do it? How did he produce
such a volume of great writing when under the influence of so many drugs, and
with such an apparently chaotic lifestyle? That he did so is self-evident, and
the work will last forever. But for all that the director takes two hours to tell his
story, the life remains elusive, touched on with nods and winks from the key
players. We await the definitive account.
Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008, 122 minutes)

The final film about journalism released during the period covered by this book
was Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s 2006 stage play. Its subject is
the 1997 interviews of former president Richard Nixon undertaken by British
journalist David Frost in California. The interviews are presented as a ‘duel’,
with one of Nixon’s minders conjuring up the image of a boxing match. The
contest also has the feel of a chess match, or poker game, as the two opponents
each seek to outsmart the other with smiles and wiles.
The central tension of the script lies in the contrast between Frost’s
allegedly light-touch style, his status as a comedian and satirist, and now an
entertainer specialising in quirky, family-oriented programmes such as Frost
Over Australia, and the demands of confronting one of the world’s leading
politicians (albeit a disgraced one). Can nice, smiling Frost get what he wants
out of a Nixon still in denial – that is, a confession?
Ding, ding, seconds out for round one. Nixon dominates with banal
252 appendix
anecdotes which last twenty-three minutes. Frost is unable to contain him,

and the former president’s handlers are ecstatic. Rounds two and three, more
of the same. Nixon is in control, Frost unable to pin him down on issues such
as his performance on the issue of Vietnam. As his researcher exclaims in
exasperation, ‘you’re making him look good’. But then, in round four, as Frost
faces financial ruin (as his own producer, he needs to sell the interviews, and
will only succeed in doing so if they extract the confession), he comes across
some key facts, and lands the killer blow. Nixon is forced on the defensive, and
a kind of confession emerges. The suspicion that a ‘talk show host’ such as
Frost could never succeed in pinning Nixon down is dispelled.
Writer Peter Morgan invented a key scene in which Nixon calls Frost late at
night and reveals his motivation for doing the interviews, and there are other
creatively imagined moments to propel the narrative. But this is a relatively
faithful adaptation of a stage play, which effectively conveys the dynamic
between a fallen emperor and the court jester who nailed him where so many
others had failed.
Box office: $26,518,282
NOTES
1. Gilbey, Ryan, ‘Open Mike’, Sight & Sound, volume 14, number 10, October 2004.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, figures given are for global box office receipts on initial
release, as supplied by the website Box Office Mojo.
3. Interview, Vanity Fair, March 2006.
4. Guardian, 7 October 2005.
5. Anderson, S., ‘What I did on my summer holidays’, Esquire, October 2001.
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Index
Abascal, P. 10, 45, 51, 144, 223 Arutunyan, A. 132

Abrams, M. 113 Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Absolute Power 185 Robert Ford 29, 38
Absence of Malice 49, 103, 168 Associated Newspapers 169
Abu Ghraib 69, 92 Avnet, J. 36
Accidental Hero 20, 65, 155–7
Ace in the Hole 4, 27–9, 36, 49, 138, 148–9, Badlands 152
151–3, 157–8, 168–9, 204 Baghdad Blogger 182, 197
Adie, K. 12, 97, 215 Bakewell, J. 5, 8
Al Jazeera 47, 89–90, 224–5 Balaguero, J. 47, 246
Ali G 235 Bancroft, A. 190, 192
All The President’s Men 13, 19–20, 25–7, 36, Banks, I. 44, 212
38, 48, 59, 60–6, 70, 72–4, 138, 199, Barber, L. 62, 64–6, 74
227 Barnett, S. 21
Almost Famous 205 Baudrillard, J. 86
Allan, S. 93, 173 BBC 7–8, 11, 21, 69–70, 77, 86, 160–1,
Allan, T. 10, 21, 197 163–5, 169, 172, 175, 185, 193, 197
Allen, J. 68, 189 BBC News 90, 92, 96, 97, 131
Allen, W. 51, 207, 232 Bale, C. 195, 205
Alterman, E. 169–70, 173 Beatty, W. 36, 122–3, 129
Amanpour, C. 12, 24, 80, 88, 96–7, 175, 209, Bell, M. 86
215 Belushi, J. 82
Amsterdam 7 Bergman, L. 45, 73, 137–8
Anchorman 6, 33, 46–7, 99, 102, 104, 223 Berlusconi, S. 67
Anderson, G. 249 Bernstein, C. 13, 19–20, 36, 45, 48, 64–8,
Anderson, S. 45, 245, 252 72, 74
Anderson, W. 104 Berry, H. 244
Antonioni, M. 24, 31 Big Brother 146
Apatow, J. 102 The Big Carnival 148
Apocalypse Now 27 Binoche, J. 31, 243
Applegate, C. 99, 102, 105 Biskind, P. 122, 133,
Appleyard, B. 200 Bizzinger, B. 166, 173
Armstrong, S. 48–9, 54, 139, 157–8 Black, C. 193
258 index
Black and White 192, 217 Burke, D. 44

Blair, J. 68, 162, 166, 176 Burke, E. 9, 21
Blair, T. 10, 80,163, 185 Burns, G. 6, 216
The Blair Witch Project 246 Buscemi, S. 51, 236–7
Blanchett, C. 35, 51, 53, 104, 109, 220, 225, Bush Administration 80
232 Bush, G. 70, 74, 84
Blood Diamond 238–9 Bushnell, C. 112, 248
Blow Up 31
Blumler, J. 177 Cahiers De Cinema 22
Blunt, E. 234–5 Cage, N. 42, 227
Body of Lies 23 Caine, M. 78, 218, 227
Bogart, H. 228 Call Northside 777 113
Bogdanovitch, P. 195, 213 Callow, S. 230
The Bonfire of the Vanities 132 Cambodia Year Zero 175
Borat 46, 93, 168, 235–6 Campbell, A. 10, 184
Born Yesterday: the news as a novel 7 Capa, R. 82, 113
Bosworth, K. 238 Capote, T. 30, 36, 44, 114–7, 124–9, 133, 160,
Bourdieu, P. 117 203, 227
The Bourne Ultimatum 247 Carey, J. 117, 178
Bowie, D. 195, 206 Carrell, S. 30–1, 33, 41, 44, 243
Box Office Mojo 252 Carrey, J. 33, 218–19
Boyle, R. 81–4, 245 Carlton TV 161
Bradlee, B. 61, 64 Carlyle, R. 218
Bradshaw, P. 148, 229 Carter, G. 108
Branagh, K. 207 Carter, J. 252
Brando, M. 27 Cartlidge, K. 85, 97, 215
Brass Eye 7–8 Caryn, J. 48, 54
The Brave One 41–2, 243–4 The Cat’s Meow 195, 213
Breakfast with Frost 193 CBS 70–3, 164, 169, 225
Breaking The News 11, 180 CBS Corporate 73
Brennen, B. 60, 74 CBS Sixty Minutes 210–11
Brenner, M. 71, 74 Celebrity 51, 147–8, 207
Breslin, J. 118, 132 celebrity culture 37, 45, 146–7
Bridges, J. 26, 108, 249 celebrity journalism 12, 67, 145–8, 178
Brinkley, D. 251 celebrity journalists 12, 64–7, 96–7, 105, 115,
British Ministry of Defence 163 146
Broadcast News 20, 32, 104 The Celluloid Ceiling 53
Bromley, M. 197 Chambers, D. 95–6, 111–13
Brook, A. 248 Channel 4 7, 161, 196
Brooks, J. 20, 32, 104 Channel 5 News 169
Brooks, R. 133 Chaplin, C. 195, 213
Brown, H. G. 107 Charles, L. 235
Bruce Almighty 17, 33, 38, 218–19 Che 80
Bruni, C. 67 Cheung, M. 21
Bruno 235 Chicago 5, 37, 47, 218
Bryant, L. 122–3 The China Syndrome 26
Buckley, W. 227 Chomsky, N. 80–4, 93, 184–5
Buerk, M. 77, 87 Christensen, H. 220
Bulman, D. 177, 197 Churchill, W. 76
Burchill, J. 7, 107, CIA 83, 224–5, 241
index 259
Cineworld 197 Curtiz, M. 187

Citizen Kane 13–14, 22, 24–25, 28–9, 31–3, Cusack, J. 104, 203
49, 191–5, 205 Cutting Edge 161
City of God 8, 221
Clark, A. 9, 21 Daily Express 97
Cleese, J. 197–8 Daily Mail 107, 190, 196
Clifford, M. 174 Daily Mirror 163, 166
Clinton, B. 34, 64, 66, 165–6, 182, 185, 187 Daily Sport 160–1
Clinton White House 189 Damon, M. 247
Clooney, G. 3, 6, 14, 16, 20, 28–9, 30, 36, Dan In Real Life 30–1, 41, 243
44, 60–2, 68–71, 79–80, 88, 93, 139, Davies, G. 21
142–3, 158, 199, 209, 225–7, 233–4, Davies, N. 184, 197
239–40 Davis, L. 230
Cloverfield 43, 246 The Day Today 7, 8
CNN 12, 87–8, 96–7, 124, 131, 160, 169, 209 De Burgh, H. 74, 158
Coen Brothers 113 De Niro, R. 51, 158, 187, 213
Cohen, L. 154 Death Wish 243
Cohen, S. 46, 93, 235–6 De Vito, D. 178, 202
Cold War 21, 60 Deedes, B. 78
Communicating War 93 Deep Impact 47, 53, 206–7
Compassion Fatigue 87 Definitely Maybe 248
Complicity 44, 212 Del Toro, B. 130, 204
Conboy, M. 38, 74 Depp, J. 130, 204
Connelly, J. 238–9 The Devil Wears Prada 21, 32, 44, 52–3, 95,
Conrad, J. 27 106–12, 234–5, 248–9
Considine, P. 247 Di Caprio, L. 207, 238–9
The Contender 43, 68, 189 Dickens, C. 116, 118–19, 132–3
Control 246 Dinan, W. 197
Control Room 37, 47, 224–5, 246 Djerf-Pierre, M. 96
Coogan, S. 8, 216 Djuric, B. 215
Cook, J. 161 Dominick, A. 38
Coppola, F. 27 Donner, R. 238
Corbijn, A. 246 Douglas, K. 27, 36, 150
Cordero, S. 48 Douglas, M. 26
Cosmopolitan 52 Dowdle, E. J. 37, 43, 47, 247
Costa-Gavras 20, 44, 65, 148, 151–2 Downey Jr., R. 12, 35, 49, 51, 153–4, 226–7,
Cox, A. 204 240
Cox, D. 133 drama, representations of journalists in 7, 19
The Creation of the Media 38, 74 Drop the Dead Donkey 7
Cronicos 48 Drudge, M. 182
Cronkite, W. 12, 66 Drudge Report 166, 170
Crosby, B. 187 Dunaway, F. 103
Crowe, C. 205 Duncan, S. J. 96, 113
Crowe, R. 71, 132, 210 Dunst, K. 105, 108, 213, 249–50
Cruise, T. 220, 247 Dyke, G. 21
Cukor, G. 29
The Cult of the Amateur 173 Eastenders 43
The Culture Show 93 Eastwood, C. 29, 44, 116, 203, 208, 221
Curtis, I. 246 Eckhart, A. 187, 232
Curtis, T. 6, 186–8, 224 Ehrlich, M. 6, 16–17, 20, 25
260 index
Eisenstein, E. 132 French, P. 148

Eisenstein, S. 122 French Revolution, 57
Ellroy, J. 178, 202–3 Friendly, F. 70
Engel, M. 197 From Headline Hunters to Superman 5, 36–7,
Engelby 7 45
Enron: the smartest guys in the room 250 The Front Page 7, 37, 54, 101, 142
Esquire 45, 245, 252 Frosh, P. 93
Evans, M. 43 Frost, D. 12, 45, 175, 182–3, 251–2
Evans, R. 187 Frost/Nixon 5, 7, 13, 44–5, 54, 75, 182–3,
Eve’s Century 107 251–2
Frost On Sunday 175
Factory Records 44, 246 Frost Over Australia 251
Fallows, J. 11, 180 Fugit, P. 205
Farrell, G. 102 Fukuyama, F. 84
Farrow, M. 207 Fullalove 7
Fahrenheit 9/11 74 Futterman, D. 24, 90,
Faulkes, S. 7 Fry, S. 185
Fawcett Society 113
Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas 54, 114–15, Gable, C. 29, 139
129–31, 144, 204–5, 250–1 Gabler, N. 177, 197
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail Garcia, A. 157
250–1 Garner, J. 224
Fellini, F. 8, 24, 146–7, 250 Garnham, N. 8
Ferrell, W. 3, 34, 104 genre 28–9
Field, S. 49, 103, 168 Gentileschi, A. 112
15 Minutes 51, 158, 213 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire 146
Financial Times, 62, 64, 74 Gere, R. 3, 32, 36, 44, 47–8, 139, 143–4,
Finch, P. 103 188–9, 208-9, 218, 244, 259
Fincher, D. 36, 44, 153, 240 Germaine, G. 112
Flat Earth News 197 Gershon, G. 103
Flowers Company 210 Ghiglione, L. 9, 99–100, 102–3
Flynn, E. 187 Gibney, A. 12, 37, 47, 54, 131, 225, 250
Foley, J. 45, 51, 244 Gibson, M. 10, 144–5, 220, 223
Fonda, J. 26 Gilliam, T. 54, 130, 144, 204
Forbes Digital Tool, 167–8, 173, 219–20 Gilligan, A. 10–11, 21, 163
Ford, G. 182 Girl Reporter 113
Ford, R. 7 Gladiator 210–11
Foreign Correspondent 78–9, 234 Glass, S. 20, 68,167–9, 176, 219–20, 237
Foreman, A. 146 Glasgow University Media Group 133
Foroohar, K. 167–8, 173 Glover, S. 21
Foster, J. 42, 243–4 Goldenberg, S. 113
Fountain, T. 7 Goldsworthy, M. 186–7, 196
Four’s A Crowd 187 gonzo 128–31
Fox Entertainment Group 193 Gonzo: the Life and work of Dr. Hunter S.
Fox, K. 230 Thompson 12, 37, 47, 54, 131, 133, 225,
Fox, M. 249 250–1
Fox News 68–9, 70 The Good German 44, 233–4
Frankel, D. 21, 51, 95, 234 Good, H. 6, 22, 100, 113
Frears, S. 20, 28, 65, 155, 157 Goodnight, and Good Luck 6, 16–17, 20, 28,
Freeman, M. 206–7 30, 32, 44, 49–50, 59–61, 68–9, 70,
index 261
72–4, 83, 116, 138–9, 158, 199, 225–7, Hershey, J. 114

234, 239–40 Herzfeld, J. 51, 158, 213
Goody, J. 146–8 Hickock, D. 228
Gosnell, R. 210 Higgins, M. 74, 197
Gotcha: life in a tabloid world 74 higher education, journalism in 13
Grammar, K. 51, 158, 213 Hill, A. 54
Grant, C. 29, 101, 140–1, 144 His Girl Friday 7, 20, 29, 51, 99–100, 102,
Graphic 177–8 138, 140–3, 150–1, 157, 239
Graves, R. 230 Hitchcock, A. 28, 78–9, 233
Greene, G. 7, 78, 119, 132, 218 Hitchens, C. 132, 166–8
Greengrass, P. 247 Hoberman, J. 93
Greenwald, R. 198 Hoffman, D. 60–5, 156, 187
Groundhog Day 38, 42 Hoffman, M. 142
Guardian 10, 12, 48, 54, 74, 113, 132–3 139, Hoffman, P. S. 127, 205, 228–9, 231
145, 148, 157–8, 161, 163, 172–3, 229, Holmes, K. 232
247, 252 Honore, A. 246
Guerin, V. 2, 35–6, 44, 47, 51, 53, 95, 97, Hooking Up 133
104–5, 220–1 Hopper, D. 35, 197–8, 204
Guevara, C. 80 Hot Fuzz 249
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place 88 H.R.H. Prince Charles 10
Gurevitch, M. 197 How To Lose Friends and Alienate People 44,
Gutenberg, J. 58 48, 52, 105, 108, 110, 249–50
How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days 108, 219
Habermas, J. 3, 58 Howard, H. 7, 20, 25
Halstrom, L. 30, 213 Howard, R. 7, 13, 44, 54, 175, 182–3,
Hammill, F. 107, 112–3 199–200, 251
Hannity, S. 70 Hudson, K. 205, 219
Hanson, C. 5, 178, 202 Huffington Post 170
Happy Mondays 86 Humphries, B. 192
Harrelson, W. 35, 81, 152, 202 Humphrys, J. 180–1
Hart, I. 230 Hunter, H. 32, 104
Hartley, J. 38, 146 The Hunting Party 44–5, 85, 245
Hathaway, A. 53, 110, 234–5 Hurt, W. 32, 104
Hathaway, H. 113 Hussein, S. 21, 80, 84–5, 88, 163, 209
Hawks, H. 99, 140–1, 149, 151–2 Huston, A. 197–8
Hayman, D. 148, 230 Hutton inquiry 10, 163
Haynes, T. 195, 205
Hayward, A. 196 I am Charlotte Simmons 133
Hearst, W.R. 190–1, 193, 195, 213 Iannuci, A. 8
Heat 210 Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture 21
Hecht, B. 7, 37, 142 impact, of films about journalism 19–21, 28
Hedges, P. 243 In Bad Blood 133
Hell’s Angels 129, 250–1 In Cold Blood 124–8, 133, 203, 227
Hemdale Film Corporation 83 In The Loop 8, 197
Hemingway, E. 119, 129, 131, 197, 250 In The Mood for Love 212, 225
Here Comes Everybody 173 Ince, T. 197
Herek, S. 47 Infamous 115, 117, 125, 127, 231
Herman, E. 80, 82, 84 The Insider 59–60, 70–3, 75–6, 103, 116,187,
Herman-Wurmfield, C. 214 210–11, 232–3
Hersch, S. 67 Intellectuals and the Masses, The 117–8, 178
262 index
internet 89, 132, 164–72, 196 Kipling, R. 116

Interview 51, 236–7 Kissing Jessica Stein 214
Introduction to Political Communication, 132, Klein, J. 189–90
196 Knightley, K. 146
The Invention of the Newspaper 38 Kyle, J. 34
Ipsos-MORI 11, 21
Irving, J. 133 L.A. Confidential 5, 51, 178, 202–3, 213
It Happened One Night 29 La Dolce Vita 8, 24, 108, 145–7, 158, 223, 250
ITN 69–70, 85, 87 Lahiff, C. 192, 217
ITV 7, 169, 190 Lancaster, B. 27, 138, 158, 178–80
Izzard, E. 195 Lane, C. 167–8
Langella, F. 226
James, N. 71, 74, 133 Lauzen, M. 53–4
Janssen, F. 207 Lawrenson, E. 38, 158, 172–3
Jarvis, J. 70, 74, 93 Leatherheads 44, 239–40
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell 7 Leder, M. 47, 206
Johanssen, S. 232 Lee, N. H. 228
Johnson, E. 117 Leguziamo, J. 48
Jolie, A, 3, 14, 17, 28, 35–6, 44, 47, 53, 90–1, Lehman, E. 178–9
99, 105, 216, 241–2 Leibowitz, A. 169
Jones, C. Z. 232 Leigh, J. 95, 103, 107, 113, 148, 229–30
Jones, T. 231 Lenin, V. I. 191
Jordan, E. 169 Leoni, T. 53, 206–7
Jordan, N. 41, 243–4 Levinson, B. 34, 38, 43, 187, 197
Joseph, K. 216 Lewinsky, M. 34, 66, 165–6, 182, 187
Journalism: a critical history 38 Lewis, J. 35, 152–3
Journalism After September 11, 93 Levinson, B. 34, 38, 43
Journalism and Democracy 74, 197 Lichtenberg, J. 133
journalism in literature 7, 77–8 The Life Aquatic with Steve Vissou 104, 225
journalism in TV drama 7–8 The Life of David Gale 48, 104, 208, 220
Joy Division 246 Life or Something Like It 17, 47, 99, 105, 216,
Julie Burchill Is Away 7 224, 242
Lions for Lambs 65, 104, 246–7
Kamm, O. 165, 173 Lippmann, W. 121, 132, 177–8, 180, 197, 203
Karadzik, R. 245 literary journalism 121, 124, 132–3
Kashner, S. 178, 180, 197 Litvinenko, A. 58
Keeble, R. 93, 132 Live AID 77
Keenan, B. 241 Lloyd, J. 11, 163, 172, 181
Keener, C. 228 Loos, A. 112
Kelley, J. 162 Lowe, R. 198
Kelly, D. 21, 163 Luhman, N. 18, 58
Kelly, R. 113 Lule, J. 118–9
Kemp, P. 68, 74 Lumby, C. 74
Kennedy, J. F. 67, 183 Lumet, S. 34, 103, 138, 188
Kennedy, W. J. 130 Lurie, R. 43, 189
Kermode, M. 73, 90
Kidder, M. 104 MacArthur, C. 7, 142
Kidman, N. 34–5, 42, 49, 99, 103, 138, 154 McCann, G. 11
King, L. 12 McCann, K. 11
King, M. P. 47, 95, 247 McCann, M. 11
index 263
McCarthy, Senator J. 70, 74, 76, 225–6 A Mighty Heart 90, 92, 105–6, 139, 158, 216,
McCrae, J. 78, 234 241, 245
MacDonald, K. 115, 132, 200 Miller, B. 115, 128, 228, 231
McDowell, A. 38 Miller, D. 197
McDowell, M. 148, 195, 229–30 Miller, L. 113
McEwan, I. 7 Miller. G, 44, 212
McGuckian, M. 51, 53, 95, 98, 148, 195, Miller, J. L. 212
229–30 Miller, L. 95, 113
McGuire, T. 233 Miller, S. 236–7
McGrath, D. 115, 128, 231 Miranda 32
McGregor, E. 195 The Mirror 16, 164, 229
MacKay, A. 33, 102 Modern Review 249
MacKendrick, A. 25, 28, 16, 158, 168, Moeller, S. 87
178–9, 182, 186, 227 Molders of Opinion 177
McLaughlin, G. 93 Monica-Gate 64, 66, 74
McNab, G. 68 Moore, M. 70, 74, 116, 175, 184–5
McNair, B. 74, 132 Morgan, P. 7, 163, 166, 251
Mad City 20, 44, 65, 148, 151–2, 204 Morris, C. 8
Madonna 46, 248 Morris, T. 186–7, 196
Magnum 113 Morton, A. 67
Mailer, N. 133 Midnight Man 7
Major, J. 10, 21 Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle 107
Making Journalism 158 Mulvey, L. 140, 158, 193–4
Maltby, S. 93 Murdoch, K. 117, 191
Mamma Mia 111 Murdoch, R. 117, 174, 190–3, 195–6, 203,
A Man in Full 13 217–18, 231, 235
Man of the Year 43, 197 Murray, B. 38, 42,133
The Man Who Knew Too Much 74 Murrow, E. 12, 20, 66, 69–70, 72–3, 137–8,
The Man Who Owns The News 197 158, 225–7
Manhattan 207 Museum of Hoaxes 172
Manhunter 210 My Three Stooges 133
Mankiewicz, J. L. 93 My Little Eye 43
Mann, M. 16, 26, 210–11, 233 myth, movies as 16–20, 27, 48, 59, 73, 99,
Mann, B. 67 119, 139
Manufacturing Consent 93 myth, Watergate as 64, 66
Marber, P. 8
Marshall, G. 3, 17, 33, 47, 143, 208 National Enquirer 160, 176
Marshall, R. 47, 218 National Observer 128
Marx, K. 116 Natural Born Killers 138, 148, 152–4, 213,
Maxwell, R. 190, 193, 195 240
Media and Their Publics 74, 197 Nesbitt, J. 157, 201–2
The Media In Russia 132 Ness, R. 78, 102–3
Media Witnessing 93 Network 103, 138
Meiselas, S. 113 NBC 209
Mendehlson, B. 192 Never Been Kissed 210
Menendez brothers 35 New Journalism 128–9, 133
Mereilles, F. 8, 221 New Priesthood: British Television Today, The
Miami Vice 210 5, 8
Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil 203 New Republic 166–8, 176, 203, 219
Midnight Man 157 New York Observer 248
264 index
New York Post 143 Peace, D. 7, 196

New York Times 48, 54, 160, 162, 164, 166, Pearl, D. 35–6, 45, 48, 51, 71, 90, 92, 106,
172, 176, 228 158, 241–2
New Yorker 124, 169, 173 Pearl, M. 48, 105, 217, 241–2
Newman, P. 103 Pearson 190
News and Journalism in the UK 172–3 Pegg, S. 48, 249
News and Power 43 The Pelican Brief 35
News of the World 97 Penn, S. 28
Newsweek 90 Pennenberg, A. 167, 173
Nichols, M. 43, 189 A Perfect Stranger 45, 244
Nicholson, J. 123 Petrie, D. 108, 219
Nicholson, M. 85–7 Pew Centre for the People and the Press 11,
Nixon, R. 60–1, 64, 73, 76, 175, 182–3, 21
199–200, 251–2 Peyton, K. 92, 97
No Man’s Land 214 Pfeiffer, M. 36, 140
No News Is Bad News 197 The Philadelphia Story 29
Nordicom Review 112 Phillips, T. 33–4
Northcliff, Lord 190, 196 Pilger, J. 175, 196
Noyce, P. 93, 218 Pinchevski, A. 93
Nykvist, S. 207 Pitt, B. 232
Plaza, P. 47, 246
Oates, S. 196 Plimpton, G. 231
Obama, B. 46, 53 Plommer, L. 197
O’Brien, J. 158, 227 Plumber, C. 211
Observer 96, 158 political communication 174, 183
The Obstacle Race 112 Political Economy of Human Rights 93
Odets, C. 178–9 Politovskaya. A, 58, 97
The Office 229–30 Pollack, S. 49, 103
Oldman, G. 68, 189 Pop, I. 195
One Day In September 115 Postlethwaite, P. 213–4
One Fine Day 142–3 Power 188–9
O’Reilly, B. 69–70 Presley, E. 161
Orwell, G. 114, 116–7, 119, 123 Preston, R. 175
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Pretty Woman 143, 209
Journalism 198 Price, K. 147
Primary Colors 43, 189
Pacino, A. 71, 210–11 primary representations 23–4, 41, 43
Paine, T. 116 The Printing Revolution in Early Modern
Paparazzi 10, 45, 51, 144–5, 158, 161, 220, Europe 132
223–4 Project for Excellence in Journalism 11–12
The Paper 54 propaganda model 84
Paris Match 74 prose fiction 7, 13
Parker, A. 48, 208, 221 Proux, E. A. 213
Parker, D. 107, 112–3, The Proud Highway 129–30
Parker, S. J. 47, 248 Pryce, J. 195, 203
Parsons, L. 66, 195, 203, 214 Public Opinion 132, 180
The Passenger 24 public relations, representations of 6, 43,
Paxman, J. 12, 183 121, 174, 183–90, 196
Partridge, A. 8 public sphere 58, 107, 116, 166, 174, 178,
Pakula, A. 19, 25, 27, 35, 60–3, 68, 71–3, 227 181, 186–7
index 265
Pulitzer Prize 42, 161, 238 Sampson, A. 11, 21

pundits 176–82, 185 Sarkozy, C. 74
PR: a persuasive industry 196 Sarkozy, N. 67, 74
Sarsgaard, P. 168, 220
Quarantine 37, 43, 47, 247 Saltzman, J. 6, 96, 98–102, 112–13
The Quiet American 78, 218 Savage, J. 82
Savitch, J. 36
Radulovich, D. 69–71, 226 Salvador 80–1, 83, 86, 99, 158, 245
Rag Tale 95, 98, 101, 103, 138, 145, 148, 157, San-Antonio Express News 162
195–6, 229–31 San Francisco Chronicle 240
Raimi, S. 44, 215, 244 Saunders, K. 196
Ramis, H. 38 Schiller, D. 132
Ray, B. 16, 20, 30–1, 166, 168, 199–200, Schudson, M. 19, 20, 64, 66, 132
219 Schumacher, J. 21, 35, 44, 51, 220
Raymond, J. 38, 74 Scoop 78, 148, 232
Reagan, R. 81, 83, 122 Scott, R. 23
Reality of the Mass Media 58 Secchiaroli, T. 145
reality TV 42–3 secondary representations 23–4, 41, 143
Reality TV 54 Secrets of the Press: journalists on journalism
REC 47, 246–7 9, 21
Red Riding 7, 196 See It Now 70, 225–6
Redford, R. 36, 61–2, 64–6, 246–7 Seib, P. 93
Reds 36, 122–3, 129 Sessions, J. 148, 230
Reed, J. 36, 114, 121–4, 129 Sex and the City 52, 95, 106, 108, 111–12,
Reeves, C. 104 224, 247–9, 250
Reitman, J. 43, 187, 232 Shadyac, T. 17, 33
Restyling Factual TV 54 Shattered Glass 16, 20, 30, 70–3, 166–9, 182,
Reynolds, D. 204 199–200, 219–20
Reynolds, R. 248 Shaun of the Dead 249
Ribisi, G. 244 Sharp Practice 198
The Right Stuff 133 Shepherd, M. 85
Rippon, A. 96 Shepherd, R. 245
Robards, J. 61 The Shipping News 30, 213
Roberts, J. 32, 35, 140, 143, 208–9 Shirky, C. 73
Rockwell, S. 182 Sierstad, A. 114–15
Rodger St. Johns, A. 102 Sight and Sound 22, 54, 74, 93, 113, 119–20,
Rolling Stone 205–6, 251 133, 158, 172–3, 197–8, 252
Rosie the Riveter 103 Simpson, O. J. 144
Rothermere, Lord 190 The Simpsons 115, 192
Routh, B. 238 Singer, B. 237
Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics 172 60 Minutes 71–3, 103
Rudolph, A. 107 Sizemore, T. 225
Ruffalo, M. 224 Sky News 69
The Rum Diary 128–9, 131 Smith, N. 158
Runaway Bride 3, 17, 32–3, 37, 38, 47–8, 140, Smith, P. 127, 228–9, 231
143, 208–9 Sob sisters 112–13
Russell, D. O. 12, 24, 79–80, 88, 209 Soderberg, S. 80, 233
Russell, R. 99, 100–1, 104, 140, 239 Spacey, K. 202–3, 213, 221
Spears, B. 143–44
Sachs, A. 110 Spectator 119
266 index
Spencer, D. 223 127–31, 133, 144, 160, 172, 202,

Spider-Man 216 204–6, 250–1
Spider-Man 2 74 Thompson, Sondi 251
Spider-Man 3 244 Three Kings 12, 23, 44, 47, 79–80, 88, 104,
Spin City 185 209
Spitzer, E. 67 Tickle The Public 197
The Sportswriter 7 Tilly, J. 195
Spottiswood, R. 93, 195 Times119, 190
Springer, 190 To Die For 34–5, 41–2, 103, 138, 154, 157,
Springer, J. 34, 161 227–8
The Star 229–30 Today 163–4
Stark, F. 96 Tolland, G. 193
Starsky and Hutch 33 Tomorrow Never Dies 45, 195, 203
State of Play 132, 200 Touching the Void 115
The State of the Media 11 Travolta, J. 204
Steadman, R. 44, 251 True Crime 44, 208, 221
Steinbeck, J. 133 The Truman Show 43
stereotypes, of journalism 13,18 Tuchman, G. 133
Stewart, James 29, 113 Tulloch, J. 118
Stewart, Jon 70 Turner, G. 198
Stone, O. 12, 28, 35, 41, 81, 89, 93, 148, Tutle, F. 187
152–3, 158, 240 TV drama, representations of journalists in
Stone Roses 86 7–8, 13, 19
Streep, M. 24, 44, 53 110, 234–5, 247 Twain, M. 116
style journalism, representations of 32, 52, Twenty Four Hour Party People 44, 205, 215,
94–5, 106–12 246
Sun 97, 143, 160, 174, 192–3, 229–30
Sunday Herald 74 Under Fire 93
Sunday Telegraph 97 Understanding Popular Culture 38
Sunday Times 21, 190, 200 Unforgiven 29
Superman Returns 45, 104, 237–8 Up Close and Personal 36
Survivor 146 Updike, J. 133
Sweet Smell of Success 6, 25, 27, 29, 49, 66, USA Today 162, 208
98, 138, 158, 168, 175, 178, 180, 182,
186–8, 227, 249 Van Gogh, T. 236
Van Sant, G. 34, 99, 103, 148, 154, 227
Talese, G. 118 Vance, N. 29
Talk Show 41 Vanessa 161
Tanovitch, D. 8, 24, 85, 97, 214–5 Vaughn, V. 223
Taxi To the Dark Side 250 Vanity Fair 48, 51, 71, 74, 107–8, 122, 132,
Taylor, A. J. P. 122 166, 173, 197, 198, 249–50, 252
Ten Days That Shook The World 36, 121–3 Vantage Point 31
Thank You for Smoking 43, 187, 189, 232–3 Variety List 38
Thatcher, M. 192 Velvet Goldmine 195, 205
Thaw, H. K.113 Verbinski, G. 42, 227
Theron, C. 207 Vicky Christina Barcelona 233
Thick Of It, The 8, 185, 197 Vogue 107–8, 110, 234, 250
Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy 197 Von Trier, L. 29
13 Going On 30 52, 108, 244
Thompson, H. S. 9, 12, 47, 54, 114–16, Wag the Dog 34, 43, 187, 189, 197
index 267
Waikiki Wedding 187 Winslet, K. 3, 4, 36, 104–5, 221

Wall Street Journal, the 175–6, 190, 192, 241 Winston, B. 172
Wallace, M. 71–73, 137–8 Winterbottom. M, 14, 21, 28, 35, 44, 51, 81,
Warhol, A. 146, 158, 213 85–7, 89, 158, 199, 201–2, 214, 233–4,
Washington, D. 35 241–2
Washington Post 59–60, 64, 161 Wintour, A. 110, 234–5
Watergate 19, 20, 27, 59–61, 64–7, 175, Wise, D. 21, 132
199–200 Wise, R. 226
Watergate and the Press 66 Witness 6
Waugh, E. 7, 78 Woods, J. 82, 208
The Weatherman 42, 227 Woodward, B 13, 19–20, 36, 45, 48, 61, 64–8,
Weaver, S. 31 72, 74
Weide, R. L. 44, 249 Wolfe, T. 12, 114, 117–8, 124, 128–9, 132–3
Weir, P. 43 Woolf, M. 117, 192–3, 198
Weisz, R. 248 Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture
Welcome to Sarajevo 14, 20–1, 44, 48–51, 81, Between the Wars 112
84–7, 106, 201–2, 214–5, 233, 242 women in journalism 45, 52–3, 94–113, 154
Welles, O. 14, 24–25, 59–60, 193–4, 206 Women In Journalism 112
Wenner, J. 251 Women’s Realm 96
Westfeld, J. 214 Wong Kar Wai 212, 250
What the Media Are Doing To Our Politics 11, World Trade Centre 84, 89
18, 172
Wheeler, S. 132 YouGov 11
Where the Buffalo Roam 133 Young, K. 113
White House 62, 67, 69 Young, T. 48, 108, 249
Whitehorn, K. 86 YouTube 246
Wigand, J. 45, 71–3, 75–6, 103
Wikipedia 29, 31, 44 Zelizer, B. 93
Wilder, B. 4, 28, 17, 148, 168, 204 Zellwegger, R. 239
Williams, R. 38, 197 Ziggy Stardust 95, 206
Willis, B. 244 Zinoviev, G. 123
Wilson, T. 44, 246 Zodiac 6, 36, 44, 153, 240
Winchell, W. 27, 66, 97, 177–8 Zola, E. 116, 132
Winner, M. 243 Zwick, E. 238
Winnick, G. 108, 244 Zynda, T. 13

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BRIAN MCNAIR

Heroes and Villains

Edinburgh University Press

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by

A CIP record for this book is available

ISBN 978 0 7486 3446 0 (hardback)

The right of Brian McNair

List of figures vii

Part 1: Introductions and overviews

Part 11: Heroes

Part 111: Villains

Appendix – Films about journalism, 1997–2008 201

Table 1 Journalism in the movies, 1997–2008

Figure 1 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Source: BFI

Figure 21 Infamous (Douglas McGrath, 2006). Source: BFI

prevailing cultural zeitgeist in relation to journalism. Film-makers, like the rest

Who this book is for

Apart from being an academic in the field of media studies, a journalism

review essays) I hope it will be used by researchers, teachers and students of

I begin in Chapter 2 with a discussion of what it is we as publics in democratic

A good tradition of love and hate

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs

That might be overdoing it, though it is not uncharacteristic of the great

illustrative, however, of the extreme reactions journalism provokes, even from

AND NOW … FOR SOME GOOD NEWS

If journalists are loathed by large numbers of people, or at least disliked and

a celebrity around whom everything else must revolve, utterly convinced of

Film, as Thomas Zynda observed in 1979, and Hollywood film in particular,

Figure 1 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). Source: BFI

• educational (and normative, imparting public knowledge about what

on screen is the work of a collective. Sometimes the influence and signature

THE REGULATORY ROLE OF THE JOURNALISM MOVIE

Within even the most mainstream of cinematic genres the performance of

To Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997) addresses the role of the foreign

Heroes and villains – an overview

R ichard R. Ness filmography of journalism in the movies lists some 2,166

Figure 2 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). Source: BFI

gradually unearthed through interviews with protagonists and the assemblage

Figure 3 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957). Source: BFI

job, ordained by four centuries of liberal democratic history and enshrined

THE JOURNALISM GENRE

Many writers about journalism in the movies refer to them collectively as a

which journalists appear as characters, and can be further sub-divided into

Figure 4 Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003). Source: BFI

JOURNALISM IN THE MOVIES: A GENERIC MATRIx

If films about journalism are a category defined by their subject matter

Defined by Wikipedia as a genre that ‘depends on in-depth development of

Speaking of romantic comedies, this genre is among the most common

Figure 5 Runaway Bride (Gary Marshall, 1999). Source: BFI

exaggerated vision of the industry might be read as an indictment of the self-

THE ACTION HERO MOVIE

Richard Ness titles his filmography From Headline Hunter to Superman,

SOME OTHER GENRES

Journalism in Film: 1997–2008

became entertainment. As leisure and affluence increased, journalism became

THE CULT OF REALITY