Abstract
In the 1939 movie Nancy Drew, Reporter, the exuberant teenage heroine (played by Bonita Granville) ignores an assigned puff piece to investigate a murder. Idealistic and determined, she sneaks a camera into jail, breaks into a house, concocts a fake news story, and wiretaps a hotel room—all in the search for truth and justice. “It says right in my textbook on journalism that a newspaper man or woman must stop at nothing to get the news,” Nancy tells her editor.
This Hollywood blend of journalistic zeal and ethical stumbles illustrates the deeply ambiguous depiction of journalists in popular culture, where dramatic storylines prevail and journalists are routinely portrayed as either saints (Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck) or villains (poison-pen columnist Rita Skeeter in the Harry Potter books and movies).
Despite such simplified depictions, authors Matthew Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman make a convincing case that fictional journalists are both ubiquitous and significant in pop culture—in plays, movies, television, novels, short stories, comic strips, graphic novels, video games, and so on. These images matter, they argue, because they “are likely to shape the people’s perception of the news media as much if not more than the actual press does.” At the societal level, the authors note that popular stories of fictional journalists “illustrate our expectations and our apprehensions regarding the press and its relation to democracy.”
Ehrlich, professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and Saltzman, director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC) project at the University of Southern California, focus their research largely on 20th-century popular culture in the United States. They catalog a range of journalistic myths perpetuated in popular culture and offer insights into the meanings and consequences of these myths. Importantly, too, they examine stories by female, minority, and gay or lesbian authors for their “unique take on issues of difference that many journalists confront.”
Ehrlich and Saltzman document many cases where pop culture venerates journalism, offering idealized examples of reporters serving the public good, as in All the President’s Men. At the other extreme, pop culture trashes journalists as self-serving liars and moral deadbeats. “Fabrication, deception, obfuscation, plagiarism, and arrogance are all too common,” they write. In cases such as Nancy Drew, Reporter, “Popular culture implies that whatever the niceties of ethics codes, journalists can resort to whatever means are necessary to serve the higher end of promoting the public interest.” Not surprisingly, such mixed messages distort the public’s view of the press.
The authors organize their analysis following six themes—history, professionalism, difference, power, image, and war—all of which involve fundamental issues about journalism ethics and practices. In the chapter on imagery, for example, Ehrlich and Saltzman note that the debate about fakery in photojournalism became an issue decades before Photoshop when a fictional newsreel photographer (played by Clark Gable in the 1938 film Too Hot to Handle) used firecrackers and toy airplanes to fake the bombing of Shanghai.
Regarding female journalists, the authors note the persistent theme of women falling in love with their sources or trading sex for stories (as in Katie Holmes’s character in Thank You for Smoking). When it comes to war, pop culture formulas alternate between reporters and photographers as heroes “whose job requires day-to-day courage and toughness” (see Barbara Taylor Bradford’s romantic novel Remember) and, in the post-Vietnam era, journalists who are morally compromised, wracked with grief and guilt (as in The Killing Fields). In these and many other examples, the narrative formulas that dominate popular culture come at the expense of more complicated (and accurate) depictions of journalists and journalism.
With scores of examples and an extensive appendix of media sources, Heroes and Scoundrels is a terrific resource for courses in mass communication and society, contemporary issues in journalism, journalism ethics, media history, and related courses. Instructors will find numerous examples of journalistic stereotypes, exaggerated characterizations, and breezy ethics that can spark classroom discussions and research assignments.
Beyond the book, the authors offer a wealth of sources—as well as updates, supplementary materials, a database, and thousands of scholarly articles—at the IJPC website (http://www.ijpc.org). The website also includes the IJPC Archive, which includes thousands of videos and audiofiles as well as novels, short stories, and plays. Finally, the authors have produced a DVD set that includes excerpts of movies and television shows featured in the book.
Journalists, as Ehrlich and Saltzman note, have always complained about how popular culture depicts them—with good reason. Despite such complaints, popular culture has kept journalism in the democratic conversation, a presence the authors believe has benefited both journalism and American society: “Pop culture routinely makes the press matter by showing good journalism saving the day and bad journalism wreaking pain and havoc,” they conclude. “It suggests that in spite of formidable obstacles and occasional wrenching change, the press and its noblest ideals will somehow endure.” Let’s hope so.