At The Movies – Reporters As Boobs (Or Worse)

Journalists are having a bad time in the movies these days. “The media’s image has taken a long downward slide from the 1976 film “All the President’s Men,” which (even more than the book) lionized Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and, by extension, all of journalism. The heroic reporters that followed, in movies like “The Killing Fields” (1984), now seem quaint. If a film depicts a serious reporter today, he is likely to be as ineffectual as the cameraman played by Joaquin Phoenix in “Hotel Rwanda,” desolate about his inability to draw attention to the genocide. It isn’t hard to spot what’s behind this erosion of the journalist’s image.”