The text for Honors Media Smarts (F08). Here’s a review from Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 85/2 (Summer 2008), pp. 454-456.
Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies
Howard Good, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2008. 192 pp. $75 hbk. $24.95 pbk
Journalists make great protagonists, and that’s why novelists and filmmakers love them. Accountants and mechanics rarely find themselves in the sorts of professional pickles that journalists do. And the very nature of journalism gives its practitioners complex lives in the path of action. What more could a storyteller want?
Beyond mere structural convenience, however, there’s something about the fundamental nature of the business that has attracted generations of writers and directors. It’s the ethical quandaries that journalists face. Reporters are rarely portrayed as simple heroes, and they are almost always portrayed as deeply flawed people, unhappy in love and usually with one or more substances regularly abused.
The focus in Howard Good’s Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies, which collects essays by Good and 11 other scholars, is on the complex relationship between journalists and truth. More than the rah-rah dig-us hero worship of All the President’s Men, the films dissected in this book of essays pose complex problems, perfectly suitable for discussion in journalism ethics classes.Reaching back to pre-Second World War America, the writers mull the conniving reporter of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and the hero-worshiping/truth-denying sports scribe in Pride of the Yankees. These sorts of movies have been around since Hollywood’s Golden Age. And Citizen Kane, of course, perhaps the greatest of all American films, serves up a couple of ethical whoppers that would be at home in any class discussion.
Beyond the devastatingly negative portrayal of journalists’ personal habits, films often focus on reporters skirting the truth for some other end than the public’s right to know. In Under Fire, a photojournalist fakes a picture. In His Girl Friday, a convicted felon is hidden by a reporter in need of a scoop. In Ace in the Hole, a down-on-his-luck reporter tries to resuscitate his career by hindering the rescue of a trapped cave explorer—at least until his story plays out.
Most of the essayists in Good’s volume look at fairly recent films, always with an eye not only toward the ethical issue presented onscreen, but how these films can be used to help student journalists develop richer morals and values.
Shattered Glass, from 2003, focuses on one of the most pernicious problems in the profession today—the fabricating journalist. Based on the story of New Republic reporter Stephen Glass, the film shows his utter disconnect from the world of the journalists around him. Yet most of the magazine staff seems charmed by the self-deprecating Glass. It’s only when the unpopular young editor of the magazine, Chuck Lane, is approached by an online journalist that he begins asking questions about Glass and the sources for his stories. Glass has gone to great lengths in his subterfuge, creating Web sites for the bogus companies he mentions in his stories, and setting up phone lines with answering machines to throw fact-checkers off track. He has the rest of the staff on his side, charming and flattering them, and so the editor emerges virtually as the lone hero trying to publicly do the filthiest of media laundry. Eventually, his diligence forces the other staff members to see beyond the smiling, well-groomed charmboy to the dark heart of a serial liar, whose fabrications cut to the very heart of the New Republic’s—and journalism’s—core commodity: credibility.
At the opposite end of the ethical spectrum is 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck (does that comma bother anyone else?), the rare film that shows a journalist modeling traditional heroic attributes. Like Shattered Glass, it comes from a true story—in this case, the oft-told tale of CBS broadcasting icon Edward R. Murrow’s lonely battle against the dangerous demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the red-scare 1950s. The movie, much like reality, probably doesn’t tip its hat enough to other journalists who began attacking McCarthy and his –ism earlier, suggests writer Michael Dillon, but the point is that when Murrow pulled the rug out from under the meglomaniacal McCarthy, it was on television, in front of a huge audience. Murrow is played spot-on by actor David Straithairn, and a bespectacled George Clooney tackles the supporting role of producer Fred Friendly.
Both of these films pose ethical questions that go to the heart of journalism, and Good’s contributors do a nice job of discussing this core issue. One portrays a villain, the other a hero. Films are generally limited to two hours by virtue of sitting-tolerance, and so naturally some messy accuracies and historical events are telescoped. In his essay on Shattered Glass, Matthew C. Ehrlich of the University of Illinois notes that we never get an indication of Glass’s motive: why did he deceive? The inside-the-office detective story provides the substance of the film. Yet that lapse in storytelling becomes a wonderful teachable moment. The motive is the part of the picture left blank, with room for the viewer to put in the coloring. Well, class … why did he do it?
And that’s true of most of the films covered in the book: The Paper, Wag the Dog, Absence of Malice, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Broadcast News, Veronica Guerin, The Year of Living Dangerously and Welcome to Sarajevo. None of these films, successful and complete as works of cinematic art, wraps their ethical issues up in a simple happy ending. If there is one consistent message, it is that nothing is simple and rarely are endings truly happy.
Journalism Ethics Goes to the Movies examines mostly recent films about reporters at a crossroads. But beyond the mere declamation of what the films show, Good’s book has imminent practical value, filled as it is with questions for further discussion and other teaching suggestions.
WILLIAM MCKEEN University of Florida
