The character of the journalist continues to be a trusty mainstay on both the big and small screen, but noble intentions aren’t enough to overcome cliche
If you grew up watching film and TV, you could be forgiven for believing that journalism was a popular, vaunted career. For nearly as long as writers have written movies, they have written about their jobs, and journalism – the work of chasing tips and collecting facts and creating news – is good for plot and some moral gristle. It’s also easy shorthand for a host of character traits, particularly for women – obsessive, frazzled, ambitious, independent, intelligent, perfectionist.
Media is also a famously self-obsessed industry, and for as long as there have been journalism movies, journalists like me have quibbled about their portrayals. The stereotypes nearly write themselves. In the serious journalism picture, such as Bombshell, She Said or Spotlight: female journalists doing their jobs well, confirming liberal sensibilities of the work’s importance (and of giving most of one’s life to it). In the romcom, a workaholic striver who can’t Type A their way to happiness, à la Anne Hathaway in the Devil Wears Prada or Reese Witherspoon’s frantic news anchor in Apple TV+’s the Morning Show. Sometimes the depictions are just laughably ridiculous – Anna Chlumsky’s New York mag reporter typing at her desk while going into labor, Amy Adams’s local crime reporter sleeping with the lead detective in Sharp Objects, Kate Hudson’s groundbreaking women’s magazine column titled “How to: Bring Peace to Tajikistan” in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
