Films can be a great teaching tool. Kip Robisch picks a dozen on journalism.
Have you ever noticed how often the investigative journalist or war correspondent in a “news movie” wins the battle only to lose the war, and often dies doing so? When they do win—that is, the reporters who don’t sell out as flak jacketed “embedded” poseurs—their victories are often so Pyrrhic that sometimes the greatest effects resulting from their sacrifices are just catharsis and admiration, effects insufficient to check and right society. The sleazy brokers, political cheaters, Ponzi schemers, and robber barons are exposed, pilloried, sometimes jailed, but then just keep on coming, like rats running out of one abandoned building and into twenty occupied buildings all around it—to breed and give themselves raises. For every Pulitzer Prize winning exposé you get five Steve Jobs rip off con games or Senatorial malfeasances.
Within the decades of my generation, the worlds of corporate and political opportunism versus the world of journalistic policing of that opportunism have collided, and in at least one significant case the ethical side has lost. In a reality imagined as paranoid conspiracy thirty years ago, Rupert Murdock eviscerated the Murrow legacy in order to ensure that a newspaper or television news source would serve entirely as a commodifiable political delivery device. Some would say that the news has always been this way. Some would be wrong.
We could debate whether or not the old school of journalistic integrity really protected the truth, or set a higher bar, or was politically biased, or whether or not its staffing sexism and racism polluted the standards of evidence-driven reportage. I’ll lay money down that I’ll win that argument, at least against a relativist or presentist. Yes, Walter Cronkite had a political agenda. No, he did not have the freedom to engage it that Keith Olbermann did. Yes, he was a white man. Thomas Sowell is not. Ann Coulter is not. Is the news media better and more respected as a result? And, the bigger point here would be that almost no one influencing social media or coming up in the world of internet communication remembers or has been taught what the old school of journalism was.
So here, as a tool for social use, I’m going to turn to the movies. Movies can provide us with an application of the news that the news itself fails to provide. This happens if only through the retrospective position film is given by journalists who break the stories that film employs. What we know about journalism helps us receive and critique journalism beyond simply judging it by whether or not it is parroting our own politics. And what we know about journalism is a frequently examined subject on the big(ger) screen.
The following is a list of twelve films that I think are worth seeing, especially with a high school or young college student, for their handling of journalism—from war correspondence to network news to investigative reporting. If you have a 16-year-old who blogs and is wondering what good there is to be found in research, eloquence, and argumentation, here are some great retro/popcorn evenings together to consider:
1. Broadcast News (1987). One of my five favorite movies of all time, as much as I avoid choosing favorites. James L. Brooks’s comedic treatment of the serious issue of journalistic integrity was at the cusp of the “mainstream media’s” decline into its current state. This is the movie The Newsroom wants to be. When you watch it, see if your teenager even understands the ethical issue at stake—a litmus of the current generation’s comprehension of the difference between news and advertising, ethics and buccaneering.
2. All the President’s Men (1981). I have to tell you, the narrative speed does not hold up over time. I watched this film over and over in college, read Bob Woodward’s book, and sat rapt into the wee hours. My 10th summer, when we followed the Watergate scandal from my Aunt Z’s living room, comes back vividly. Twenty years after college I watched this film again and, despite the value it still holds for me, I fell asleep. It’s a great movie, but you’ve got to calibrate to a slower narrative arc and some real reaches for dramatic tension than we’re used to nowadays. As a historical document on film that will open the eyes of a new generation to the importance of news media as a check to political power (if your kid stays awake), you aren’t going to find better.
3. The Insider (1999). This is some of Al Pacino’s best second-stage work, in fact, as a supporting actor to one of Russell Crowe’s finest performances. Pacino here is reminiscent of his first-stage brilliance in Dog Day Afternoon or Serpico, less cartoonish than he sometimes comes off in more recent films. We get to see why 60 Minutes had the gravitas it did and why the mistrust of corporate lies and public endangerment is not a Cassandra effect. You can also tell your kid that it’s a depiction of the main reason America’s smokers have to stand outside in freezing weather during their lunch breaks.
4. The Killing Fields (1984). It would take a book to list all the reasons to see this movie. The most powerful one I can find is that the movie is a historical nexus for the entire cultural blast radius of Vietnam—in fact, more so than all but the very best Vietnam “war movies.” It’s as hard to watch as any gore-fest in the jungle, so get ready for some emotional work (I cried at least twice during the film). As a follow-up, watch Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, a different kind of meta-journalism in the form of one of the best dramatic monologues of the 20th century.
5. Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Great work by an actor who should get more props than he already does, David Strathairn (see especially the film Limbo), and by George Clooney, who as director polishes the silver of the silver screen era to brilliance. Edward R. Murrow is one of my heroes, and a hero to most journalists of what would probably now be considered “the old school,” which means the school at which you get an education.
6. The Wire, season five (2008). I do not like television shows, as a rule. They tend to drive me crazy with raised expectation and dashed hope. Now and then, especially after the 1990s move to sustained narratives that extend the “mini-series” model to a maxi-series, I soften to television. Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing was better than The Newsroom, but trumps them both is The Wire—pertinent to this list the season that focused on The Baltimore Sun newspaper’s part in an exceptionally well-crafted 60 episodes about the fictional Barksdale gang. What I’d recommend is watching the whole show, start to finish, through its five seasons.
7. Network (1976). Iconic of 1970s Orwellian film, and famous for its “I’m mad as hell” line, this movie looks at the very nature of corruption and informational power, as well as martyr-level activist rage. It is for teenagers of the 21st century era what watching Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent would be for a 40-something parent. Just the project of a 21st century being adjusting to the concerns of a world in which television held the power the internet now holds is reason enough to re-visit this movie, as if three Oscar-winning performances and evidence that Ingmar Bergmann can stand toe to toe with Orwell and Huxley isn’t enough. Watch it with the kid’s grandparents—the people who invented television shows.
8. Where the Buffalo Roam (1980). Take issue with this one over Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) if you wish, and I’m willing to admit that by Fear and Loathing I’d had more than enough Johnny Depp, as much as I like him. The Bill Murray/Peter Boyle version of Hunter S. Thompson and his Samoan attorney Lazlo (who was actually the Chicano attorney and novelist Oscar Zeta Acosta) is closer to the feel of Thompson’s book. It’s rough-edged and more gonzo than the slick effect carnival of the 1998 movie. I’m not picky; see them both.
9. The China Syndrome (1979). This is one of perhaps three movies that defined the Cold War generation. It helped turn “duck and cover” into “head in the sand” and alerted the nation to grass-roots skepticism about literal power greed over large-scale environmental catastrophe. You want a concise review? It scared the shit out of me almost as much as The Exorcist. The film is worth watching now in the context of Fukushima, given that the Three Mile Island incident would probably have had through the news a tenth of the cultural force it had through the big screen. An entire social movement gained traction from this project, one that prepared America to receive Chernobyl with greater intelligence and provided the kind of emotional resonance coupled with scientific interest that is at the heart of strong investigative journalism. And your kid (and you, if you’ve forgotten) will learn what “the China syndrome” is—something well worth learning.
10. The Soloist (2009). I’ve tried to avoid movies only marginally about journalism, but this had to make the list because it is very much about telling someone else’s story who cannot or will not tell it, especially when the story is one we should literally hear. Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx handle the almost entirely two-actor picture with bravery and considerable talent. For someone considering what it means to ask a question, to break from one’s own narcissism into the care and empathy required to do the good work, this is a movie to watch.
11. Talk Radio (1988). I chose this Eric Bogosian project over The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)—apples and oranges—although I’d rank Talk Radio as perhaps the lesser movie. I did so because of Talk Radio’s historical position as a movie about the social effects of shock jock radio agitprop that has become the evil empire of Rush Limbaugh and company. For entertainment value, and for what talk radio should have remained (which is pirate radio) I like Pump Up the Volume (1990) with Christian Slater. Bogosian nailed down the genre via his trademark cross-genre approach: the movie is a collaboration with Oliver Stone that converts a stage play to a film about radio. It’s also about liberal talk radio—another phenomenon all but relegated to our journalistic past.
12. The Front Page (1931 or 1974). I’m putting this on the list at the risk of looking like I’m trying to be a film expert, which I’m not. In addition to just being a wonderful goofball comedy—once you make that critical adjustment from your 21st sensibilities to the style of the previous economic depression era—this is a film of significant historical interest. It’s been remade at least four times, from Howard Hawks’s 1940 His Girl Friday to the 1988, and avoidable, Switching Channels. I’d recommend starting with The 1974 Lemmon and Matthau version, more of a romantic, though equally ridiculous, farce. Both the 1931 and 1974 versions (quite different from each other though built on the same premise) are a good study in comedy’s evolution through the “get the story no matter what” trope. Your kid might also ask who Sacco and Vanzetti were, which would be terrific.
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I’ve got maybe another ten films on a runner-up list that I’ve partially revealed by cheating on #11. These would include Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face in the Crowd and might include the Anchorman movies (against the voice in me that says Ferrell’s creation won’t hold up through the 2020s). Feel free to jump on—this is a website with comments, remember, in the democratic demographic 21st century amateur journalism mode. Argue for your choice knocking one of these other movies off my list.
If you have a daughter, do The Year of Living Dangerously and The Pelican Brief after Broadcast News and The China Syndrome, if only to avoid watching men as the sole focus so often. The news is most certainly a sexist racket—just watch the weather. Tell your college-bound daughter who Joan Didion is and get her reading great essays.
But, above all, sit down with your kid who hates English class and wonders why writing and researching a topic matter, or what ethical integrity means, and watch these movies on movie night. I mean, what good is the news if we don’t talk about movies that talk about it?
Would your students appreciate this?
https://archive.org/details/StudioOneTheTrialOfJohnPeterZengerPaulNickell
Getting back to basics… In an hour of 1953 TV.
Especially interesting for the portrayal of Anna Zenger as the spirit behind her husband’s agreeing to print an anti-establishment newspaper and go to jail for it.
Coincidentally, actress Marian Seldes’ muckraking uncle George was the subject of the c.1997 Oscar nominated documentary “Tell the truth and run”
Anna is even more the hero of the novel and radio play “Mother of Freedom.”
http://jheroes.com/2011/03/14/anna-zenger-romance-or-history/
This is great, Bob.
I’m not teaching a course on this now, but wanted to get something started for people who wanted different subject matter and good films to watch with their kids or students in a class. I think the Zenger film would be perfect for a class. I didn’t know about this material; thanks for the addition.
Glad to help. I like your choices for presenting positive messages about journalism. My other two favorites not on your list are Sam Fuller’s “Park Row” and Bogart’s “Deadline USA.” More films about newspapers have strong “don’t” messages (or reporters with flexible codes of ethics; even Clark Kent was known to invade privacy with his super hearing and x-ray vision to get a story). And of course Fuller couldn’t resist smashing a bad guy’s head against a statue of Ben Franklin. But we’ve all felt that urge. 🙂 My last class was for college seniors, and rambled a bit because… Read more »