| The Big Picture
Garber, Megan
Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2007
"Gone are the days when a movie journalist—Citizen Kane’s Thompson, Deadline, USA’s Hutcheson, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein—occupied a black-and-white moral landscape where Right battled Wrong with the sharp sword of Truth. But gone, too, is the post-post-Watergate disenchantment that forced celluloid reporters to fall on that sword through treatments that portrayed them, as Christopher Hanson pointed out in these pages in 1996, as amoral (Absence of Malice), callous (The Paper), credulous (Bob Roberts), cartoonish (I Love Trouble), sensationalist (Network), ambitious (Broadcast News), manipulative (Hero), manipulated (Wag the Dog), murderous (To Die For), or some dastardly fusion thereof... Journalism is evolving, and Hollywood, cultural mirror that it is, is reflecting its growth. Today’s celluloid journalists may not be forged in the stark contrasts of the past, but their complexity makes them stronger characters, more empathetic and more tantalizingly, identifiably human—more, in short, like their audiences. On the big screen, as in life, they’re still worth looking up to." Megan Garber is an assistant editor at CJR.
Go to the
article at:
http://www.cjr.org/short_takes/the_big_picture.php
G10/07-07. Posted January 31, 2008
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