The Battered Remington Brigade - how the movies have treated journalism

A few weeks ago The Weekend Australian commissioned me to write a feature about the way journalists have been treated on film over the years (full story here).

It's a great topic with a rich history and though I was given what initially seemed like plenty of space, I was taken aback at how quickly that damn word limit approached as I was writing it.

Hence my relatively cursory treatment of films about foreign correspondents and TV reporters (really should have mentioned Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo) and recent trends in newspaper publishing (as one reader pointed out, I didn;lt discuss the very good Shattered Glass).

Still, this was a feature surveying the topic, not the book, and overall I'm pleased with the outcome. Below is an excerpt:


"...Younger journalists might assume that All the President's Men invented the Hollywood image of the fearless, crusading reporter but, as those union posters showed, the stereotype goes back decades.

"In 1952's Deadline USA (1952), for example, everyone's favourite tough-guy hero, Humphrey Bogart, played the upstanding editor of a financially challenged newspaper (showing, incidentally, that concerns over media financial problems are nothing new). At the film's climax, Bogie stood next to the presses in a tense phone exchange as his would-be nemesis tried to stop him printing a murder accusation.

Snapped Bogie in reply to threats, "As long as even one newspaper will print the truth, you're finished", before nodding to a print worker to start the presses. "What's that?" asked the startled gangster as the sound of creaking machinery and alarms came down the line, to be met by the reply: "That's the press, baby, and there's nothing you can do about it!"

Four years earlier another Hollywood icon of male integrity, James Stewart, played a courageous reporter out to prove the innocence of a convicted murderer in Call Northside 777. But it would be a mistake to think that Hollywood -- and yes, the cinematic obsession with reporters and newspapers is for some reason decidedly American -- has always viewed reporters through rose-tinted glasses.

"The notion that journalists could lie, manipulate and generally treat ethics as an obstacle in the way of a good story has a long tradition in film as well as real life. Conversely, not all contemporary stories of journalism take the cynical modern view that journalists are the moral equivalent of used-car salesmen, bent politicians and call-centre operatives, despite frequent polling showing that, alas, this indeed is how most of the public regards us..."