Brian McNair
This chapter explores the representation of journalism in one of the most important popular culture forms, cinema. It advocates the use of movies about journalism in journalism studies teaching and research, and reviews the existing literature on the subject.
Cinema is the main location in our culture (apart from the news media themselves), where journalists have regularly been represented, their role and functions discussed and their performance scrutinised. Which is to say not only that more people encounter journalists in the cinema than in any other medium, but that cinematic representations of journalism tend to have greater cultural resonance than those contained in novels, TV drama, theatre or other popular cultural forms. There have been many great novels and non-fiction books written about journalism, to be sure, and one could easily write a substantial book’s worth of essays on those representations alone. TV drama, too, has frequently addressed the subject of journalism in sit coms, one-off plays, and series such as ITV (UK)’s 2008 production starring James Nesbitt, Midnight Man.1 Theatre has produced one of the all time classic stories of journalism, frequently adapted and remade for cinema – 1928’s The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur – as well as more recent productions such as Pravda (David Hare and Howard Brenton, 1985) and Frost/Nixon (Peter Morgan, 2006).
But theatre and TV drama tend to be localised within one country. Movies, by contrast, particularly those made by the dominant US industry and involving popular stars such as George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Kate Winslet (all of whom have played screen journalists in recent times) are prominent and much-in-demand elements in an increasingly globalised culture.
Novels and other forms of literary work, meanwhile, are hugely important as texts,2 and have been the source material for many of the greatest movies about journalism ever made (All the President’s Men perhaps being the best-known example), but in a predominantly televisual culture books are read by less people than will see a reasonably successful movie on the big screen (or later on TV and DVD). Woodward’s and Bernstein’s book sold millions, but Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film of All The President’s Men has been seen by tens if not hundreds of millions worldwide, and took more than $70 million at the US box office in its initial cinema run. When we think of the Watergate scandal, it is more likely to be the forever-young 1970s faces of Redford and Hoffmann we see, not the actual journalists who broke the story and are now ageing gracefully on the proceeds.
The importance of cinema in the representation of journalism goes beyond the question of ‘bums on seats’. If journalists are, as they like to believe and we non-journalists expect, a Fourth Estate charged with the critical scrutiny of political and other elite groups in liberal democratic societies, film-makers have the function of scrutinising the scrutineers, watching over the watch dogs, whistle blowing on the whistle blowers, measuring journalistic performance against the normative standards which are built into our democratic DNA. Cinema is the conscience of the journalistic profession, the key location in culture where its role and functions are held up to broad public inspection. Movies like The Insider (Michael Mann, 1998) and Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005) engage their audiences in thinking about how the news media operate in a world where commercial and political pressures abound, and media freedom is always under strain. They remind us what it is that journalists are supposed to do in a democracy, and then present scenarios in which how they actually perform is interrogated (often, as in both of the aforementioned movies, scenarios based on actual events). They are, in this sense, teaching tools for a mass mediated culture – educating, exposing errors and malfunctions in the smooth working of a core element of the democratic infrastructure, and in some cases advising on how to correct those errors. Jack Lule writes about “the mythological role of journalism” (2001), of how news media tell stories which are, in an anthropological sense, timeless and deeply functional for social reproduction. Movies about news, in turn, are a source of the legitimation myths of liberal journalism, dramatising and articulating those shared values and ideas about how news works which, alongside many other myth systems, bind us together as citizens in a democracy.
Cinema has been called the ‘dream factory’, and with good reason. Here, more than anywhere else in the cultural domain, issues circulating in the public sphere around the performance of journalism are played out before a mass, mainstream audience, most of whom will never have had direct experience of working in or with the profession, or have read scholarly books such as this one at college or university. Cinema is the key popular medium of the electronic era. It tells its stories by means of narrative shortcuts, stereotypes and the employment of familiar, attention-grabbing actors performing up there on the big screen in a darkened auditorium where the audience may lose itself for an hour or two. This escapist quality is the reason for its mass appeal, its iconicity the source of its myth-making power.
The myth-making quality of cinema is true as a generality, but the importance of journalism in our societies makes movies about news media of particular cultural significance. Barbie Zelizer’s 2004 book urges us to take journalism seriously, and that is precisely what movies do. In 1994 I introduced a book on News & Journalism In the UK with a chapter called ‘Why journalism matters’ (McNair, 2009). Journalism does matter, in a way that few other forms of cultural expression do, because it is directly bound up with the maintenance of the democratic polity and the wider social system. Cinema is a space where we are reminded of that fact, again and again from the 1920s and the birth of Hollywood to the most recent example of a journalism movie released in cinemas before this essay was sent to the printers – Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (2008), based on Peter Morgan’s play. Note that this reconstruction of the famous TV interview between British journalist David Frost and former US president Nixon was titled Frost/Nixon rather than Nixon/Frost, an order of billing which may be thought to reflect the relative cultural status of the two figures.
Journalism matters because of its watchdog functions in a democracy, and in a system of free market capitalism prone to excess and abuse. But journalism is not just about the serious issues of politics and the economy. Journalism is also, and has always been, a form of entertainment, providing readers, listeners, viewers and now online users with information intended to facilitate rest, relaxation, recreation and pleasure. News is entertainment when it shocks and scandalises with coverage of Britney Spears’ latest escapades. The early newspapers entertained with gory headlines about witch burnings and public executions. Today’s journalistic media are packed with ‘human interest’, and information about cooking, interior decoration, health and lifestyle, book and film reviews, sport, art and celebrity. The degree to which journalism entertains is key to its success as a cultural commodity, and to the survival of news organisations as businesses. With some exceptions, such as the public service broadcasters, news media are engaged above all in selling information, attracting customers, and selling those customers on again to advertisers. This has been the case since the very first news books, and journalism has always been required to strike a balance between the provision of information for the public good, and information which in one way or another provides an audience with pleasure (even the perverse pleasure of reading about crime and other horrors). In the century of cinema, however, many believe that the balance has been distorted, so that entertainment has become more important as a goal of journalism than the normatively preferred coverage of politics, business, foreign affairs. Journalism, it is argued by these critical observers, has become dominated by infotainment. Journalism has been commercialised, degraded, vulgarised, corrupted by market forces and the need to sell news.
This is not a chapter about the flaws of contemporary journalism, or a critique of the news values which govern media organisations. That there is intense and longlasting debate around these questions does, however, help to explain the cultural schizophrenia which surrounds the figure of the journalist in cinema, as it structures public perceptions. He, or she, exists in the public imagination, and on the silver screen, as both a hero and a villain; as an admired celebrity at one moment, akin in some cases to a rock star, and a reptile at another, loathsome and repellent (which is unfair to reptiles, I know, but bear with me). Journalism is perceived, and represented in cinema, as both glamorous and grimy, sexy and sleazy – a good tradition of love and hate, indeed. Hunter S. Thompson, the subject of a big screen documentary released in 2008, summed up this duality when he said:
Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.3
Thompson was famous for his ferocious literary style, directed in this case at his own journalistic peers. He was also a prime example of the glamour and celebrity which attaches to some journalists, and which makes journalism studies one of the most in-demand subjects in higher education. That glamour, juxtaposed with the ‘fear and loathing’ in which so many journalists are held (to use another Thompsonian phrase) infuses cinema and makes movies a rich source of knowledge and debate not just about how journalism works, but how it is perceived to work. Movies articulate the dualities of liberal journalism – the tensions between the production of knowledge for the public interest on the one hand and, and for personal pleasure and private gain on the other.
In all, more than 2000 films have been made for the cinema in which journalism is a significant plot element (in some more significant than others, of course. Richard Ness’ filmography [1996], from which this figure is taken, makes the point that journalists often play bit parts in the movies, or act as a kind of Greek chorus moving the narrative along – as in Cinderella Man [Ron Howard, 2005], about the mediadriven rise and fall and rise again of 1930s boxer James J. Braddock). Not all of those 2000 films will be ‘about’ journalism, therefore. There is no doubt, however, that the subject of journalism has fascinated film-makers throughout the history of the medium, and engaged some of the industry’s best talents.
Both their quantity, and in many cases their quality, mean that films about journalism are an expanding and increasingly valuable resource for students, teachers and researchers of journalism. As a journalism educator for more than two decades I have always found movies in which journalists feature as central characters to be a catalyst for engaging students in discussion and critical thought about often complex and demanding issues. What does it mean for journalists to be independent of political and business elites, and why is it important? Let’s refer to Good Night, and Good Luck, or The Insider. How should the correspondent behave in a war zone – should they be detached and objective, as normative values declare, or become a participant, such as Michael Henderson in Welcome To Sarajevo (Michael Winterbottom, 1997, and based on the true story of ITN’s Michael Nicholson and his rescue-adoption of a Bosnian orphan). Was Daniel Pearl right to interpret his role as an objective foreign correspondent to include interviewing jihadis to get their side of the story – a decision which cost him his life? Let’s see what Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart has to say about it. What happens to journalistic trust when an ambitious young features writer such as Stephen Glass can fabricate dozens of articles for a leading US periodical of record such as the New Republic? Part of the answer to that very timely question can be found in Billy Ray’s film about the case, Shattered Glass (2004).
Films, of course, like journalism itself, are only versions of reality, and even at their best can only ever be part of the story of journalism which a society tells to itself; a part, moreover, which is by definition aestheticised, dramatised, invented, exaggerated. Even the words ‘true story’, or ‘based on true events’ on the credits of a movie signify only an interpretation or ‘creative reimagining’ of what happened, inflected by the subjective input of directors, writers, actors, as well as the production constraints imposed by the fact that movie-making is an industry with a product to sell, and investors hungry for profit. So Woodward and Bernstein become Redford and Hoffman, and Stephen Glass becomes that guy out of Star Wars (great performances all, but rather more photogenic than the actual people they portrayed, it is no great insult to say). To render them more palatable to a broad audience, and constrained by cinematic conventions of narrative, style and structure, even films based on welldocumented stories such as that of tobacco industry whistle blower Jeffrey Wigand (The Insider) compress episodes, add scenes which did not happen, or create combinatory characters made up of bits of several real people who on their own would not pack the required dramatic punch. Films – even those made with aspirations to stylistic realism and narrative authenticity such as All the President’s Men – represent journalism in a manner which is as subjective as the best journalists aspire to be objective. There is nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, the subjectivities of others are what makes art appealing, but we must be aware of their status as constructions when approaching the subject as scholars.
Recognition of the potential of movies for educating the public and engaging debate about journalism, and of their cultural role as a second order, meta-media mythmaking system for societies which take their journalism seriously (watchdogs over the watchdogs, to repeat) is not new, but scholarly studies of the subject are surprisingly thin on the ground. I have occasionally referred to movies such as Ace In the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1954) and The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) in books and essays where I am addressing the topics they explore – the tendency of popular journalism to manipulate events and ‘manufacture reality’ for the sake of a good story, and the excessive power of celebrity journalists respectively (McNair, 2005). Others have done so too, in similarly anecdotal and non-systematic manner. Morris and Goldsworthy’s 2008 book on PR: a persuasive industry? refers to The Sweet Smell of Success and its representation of press agent Sydney Falco (Tony Curtis), columnist JJ Hunsecker’s lackey and source. There is to date, however, no book-length study of journalism in the movies by a British or European author, despite the growth of journalism studies as an academic discipline in recent years.
The best (indeed only) scholarly work in this emerging sub-sector of the field comes out of the United States, where the academic study of movies about journalism goes back some decades. This might be explained by the fact that the USA is both the global centre of the film industry, and a country where the democratic necessity of liberal journalism is inscribed in the founding constitution with all the force of a religious dogma. Liberal journalism matters in the USA (as it does in many other countries, of course), but the notional importance of the news media as a check and balance against other institutions exists, as nowhere else, alongside a huge filmmaking industry employing many people who genuinely seem to care about how those roles are played out in practice. It has been noted by several commentators that some of the greatest films ever made in America have been films about journalism – Citizen Kane, obviously (Orson Welles, 1941); Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940); All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), of course, and Alexander Mackendrick’s The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – and while the question of what is or is not a great film is a matter of personal judgement, there can be no doubt that some of the most talented of that country’s cinematic artists have been drawn to the subject of journalism.
Perhaps this is because many have themselves been victims of celebrity journalism, and of the media circus which now routinely accompanies success in the popular arts, and wish to strike back. This is the explanation advanced for a film called Paparazzi (Paul Abascel, 2003), produced by Mel Gibson and widely panned by reviewers who saw it as a misguided attempt to avenge his own treatment at the hands of US hacks.
It may also be due to the fact that film-makers are immersed daily in the workings of the media, and more than a few have liberal political convictions making them predisposed to an interest in how journalists relate to power in their society. George Clooney’s father was a journalist, which by his own admission has fuelled his interest in the subject. Clooney had, as of this writing, directed two films about journalism (Good Night, and Good Luck; and Leatherheads, his less successful 2007 homage to screwball comedy of the 1930s) and starred in two: Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1998) in which journalism (and a passable impersonation of CNN celebrity reporter Christiane Amanpour in particular) features as a key plot element; and Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (2005). Robert Redford has shown a similar interest in the Fourth Estate, most recently with Lions for Lambs (2005), his study of a political journalist (Meryl Streep) under pressure to collaborate with a pro-war Senator (played by Tom Cruise). Angelina Jolie has played Mariane Pearl, a reporter for French public radio and wife of the murdered Daniel Pearl in A Mighty Heart (Michael Winterbottom, 2006), and a TV news reporter in the romantic comedy Life Or Something Like It (Stephen Herek, 2002). Richard Gere has also played a journalist in a comedy (Runaway Bride, Gary Marshall, 1998), as well as in a more serious, based-on-actualevents drama (The Hunting Party, Richard Shepard, 2007).
Many of these films have won awards, stimulated public debate, and achieved significant commercial success both in the US and internationally. They have become part of the mythology not just of American journalism, but of American society and culture more broadly. We think of Cary Grant, or James Stewart, or Rosalind Russell, and we see in our minds those classic screwball comedies in which they played wise-cracking, sexy journalists with clothes to die for and lines to match. We think of George Clooney, and see his quietly understated portrayal of Fred Friendly, Ed Murrow’s producer in Good Night, and Good Luck.
Given the importance of film in American and global culture, then, and of journalism as a subject for American film-makers down the years, it is probably not surprising that journalism studies in the US has pioneered the study of the journalism movie, producing a body of work which remains essential for the contemporary student of the subject. Richard M. Ness’s encyclopedic filmography, From Headline Hunter To Superman (1996) is an invaluable reference work, documenting every film made about journalism in the USA (and some in other countries) since the 1920s, ending in 1996. Alex Barris (1976), Thomas Zynda (1979) and Lynda Ghiglione (2004) have addressed the subject, while Howard Good has written a series of books on The Drunken Journalist (2000), The Girl Reporter (1998) and Media Ethics Goes to the Movies (2002, with Michael J. Dillon). Matthew Ehrlich’s Journalism in the Movies (2004) is the most recent book-length study by an American author (see also Ehrlich, 2006).
In addition there are a number of useful scholarly articles, some journalism about journalism-in-the-movies4 and, last but not least, an online journal based within the Annenberg School for Communication, The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (http://www.ijpc.org/). According to its website:
The mission of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture is to investigate and analyze, through research and publication, the conflicting images of the journalist in film, television, radio, fiction, commercials, cartoons, comic books, music, art, demonstrating their impact on the American public’s perception of newsgatherers.
Led by Joseph Saltzman, Professor of Journalism at the University of Southern California, IJPC publishes scholarly articles, as well as making available archives, lists and other resources for research and teaching.
This mainly US work above has examined the stereotypes which have evolved in American film-making about journalism (such as the drunken journalist, a figure seen most recently in George Clooney’s Leatherheads. The character of Suds is always drunk, often asleep, yet never bad tempered or in the least depressed by his obviously chronic alcoholism, and surprisingly efficient in delivering his copy). It has explored the mythological role of Watergate and All the President’s Men not just to subsequent generations of US journalism but to American society as a whole (Schudson, 1992, 1995; Brennen, 2003; Ghiglione, 2004). Some films about journalism, notably Citizen Kane, have been judged sufficiently ground-breaking and important as texts to be written about within academic film studies (Mulvey, 1994). Welles’ film continues to be voted the greatest of all time by authoritative panels of judges such as those organised by Cahiers Du Cinema and Sight & Sound.
As noted above, the approach of those US-based authors has been focused on the identification of generic stereotypes such as the ‘drunken journalist’, or tracing the evolution of gender roles and other aspects of the professional environment of the journalist. As such, they present a valuable record of historical change within the profession.
On the first point, movies represent a particular place and time which may now have passed, such as the 1930s newsroom, with its noise and smoke and bottles of strong alcohol stashed away in desk drawers. The difference between the newsroom depicted in His Girl Friday and the air-conditioned, health-and-safety approved sterility of Rag Tale (Mary McGuckian, 2004), and the story of how we got there as reflected in movies like All the President’s Men (1976) and Broadcast News (1983), could be the subject of a fascinating lecture for students who know only mobile phones, wireless lap tops and the Internet. As for the ‘drunken’ journalist, or Lunchtime O’Booze as we have known him in Britain, he (and indeed she) still exists here and there, but is a much rarer beast in the contemporary professional culture of journalism.
In the area of gendered journalism representations we can see in cinema, as one would expect a steady increase in the number and status of female journalists as the impact of feminist ideas and workplace politics has been felt. Strong, senior women feature in the aforementioned Rag Tale (though that film was so savagely reviewed by most critics – unfairly, in this writer’s view – that Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kerry Fox and Sarah Stockbridge who play the women in question may prefer not to be reminded of it).
Sexism in the journalistic profession has been a long-standing concern of both scholars and professionals,5 especially as the success of feminist politics since the 1970s has raised expectations about the imminent shattering of the ‘glass ceiling’ which has held women back in media organisations (Chambers et al., 2004; Djerf-Pierre, 2007). For today’s female students of journalism, who frequently outnumber men in the lecture theatre, cinematic representations can be both inspirational and depressing, sometimes ahead of their time, sometimes deeply reactionary. One of the very first female journalists on screen – Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday – appears to the contemporary gaze as a rare example from that period in American culture of a strong, powerful woman working extremely effectively in a man’s world, combatting patriarchal prejudice with exemplary professional ability, and balancing her own desire for family with that for a successful career. As Laura Mulvey has observed in a review of the film, ‘Hildy is a perfectly credible professional journalist, equal in the male group.’6
Made more than 70 years ago, and with no conscious articulation on the part of the male producers of anything we would recognise today as ‘feminism’,7 Hildy Johnson can none the less be seen as a radical, positive role model for women working in the news media, ahead of her time and pointing the way to the post-feminist future. And when one looks at representations of women journalists in films of that period and since, one sees a remarkable number of such portrayals – Torchy Blane in the sevenfilm series of the 1930s; Jean Arthur as a tough reporter in Mr Deeds Goes To Town (Frank Capra, 1936), Jane Fonda as a TV news reporter in The China Syndrome (James Bridges, 1979). In general, as Saltzman and others have noted, portrayals of journalists have been one sub-genre of the movies where women have often had access to complex and satisfying roles which challenge patriarchal stereotypes of femininity. Women have, of course, also been presented in movies about journalism as superbitches, manipulating and destroying all around them, including quality journalism (Faye Dunaway in Network; Gina Gershon in The Insider; Nicole Kidman in To Die For), or as fluffy creatures in search of nothing more than a wedding ring and a designer frock (Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie in Sex & the City).
Then again, if women have advanced in capitalist societies as a result of feminism, one measure of that change is the extent to which they can be portrayed in negative as well as positive terms. There is a gap in the journalism studies literature for a substantial, book-length study of the complex and often contradictory ways in which the representation of female journalists has changed over the decades since Torchy Blane and Hildy Johnson. As a male author and a film-lover, my sense is that movie makers have with some sincerity sought to include more realistic and politically correct images of women journalists in films which, after all, are marketed to young women impatient with being patronised. Katie Bosworth’s portrayal of Pulitzer Prizewinning single mother Lois Lane in Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) is very different in tone from that of earlier Superman films. Angelina Jolie’s Mariane Pearl is a tribute to the courage not only of the growing number of women journalists working in war zones, but to the dignity and strength of women in their grief when they lose loved ones in those wars. Meryll Streep’s style mag editor in The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) may be a super-bitch, but underneath the tough surface we are permitted see a woman only too aware of the sacrifices she has made for her career.
The representation of female journalists is just one example of how cinema can provide a narrative or running commentary on the changes going on in the journalistic profession. The films listed above reflect the changing status of women in journalism, and of women’s journalism – that is, the journalism of style and fashion – within the public sphere. Once dismissed as ‘women’s issues’ and ‘new girl journalism’ (even by feminist scholars – see Chambers et al., 2004), The Devil Wears Prada can also be viewed as a film about style journalism premised on the counter-argument – that what women want in their newspapers and magazines matters, and that it is part of journalism’s function to deliver it, without shame or apology. Anne Hathaway’s character in Prada eventually abandons the world of style journalism, but not before she has been firmly apprised of the importance of fashion in modern life, and warned against the snobbery of those who dismiss it as trivial. The film is a feminist text, in that it takes femininity seriously.
One could undertake similar analyses of the changing representation of the war correspondent as the world has moved from cold war, to ethnic conflict, to war on terror. Or of the investigative journalist in an era when many fear for the future of this key specialism. Journalism in the movies remains a rich terrain of exploration, and the work of excavating it has just begun.
1 For an interview with Nesbitt, and a discussion of some key movies about journalism, see Armstrong, Stephen, ‘From hero to zero ‘, Guardian, May 12 2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/12/itv?gusrc=rss&feed=media).
2 Novels about journalism range from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, through Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) to Sebastian Faulks’ Engleby (2007) and Born Yesterday: the news as a novel by Gordon Burn (2007).
3 Quoted in Wise, Damon, ‘Gonzo’s back’, Guardian, December 6 2008.
4 See for example James, Caryn, ‘The decline and fall of journalists on film’, New York Times, July 19 2005. (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/movies/19jame.html).
5 See the work of the Fawcett Society for research and other resources on the representation of women in journalism, and their status as journalists (http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/).
6 Mulvey, L., Sight & Sound, volume 7, number 3, 1997.
7 Mulvey recounts Howard Hawks’ explanation of how the male character of The Front Page became a female. “I asked a girl to read Hildy’s part and I stopped and I said, ‘Hell, it’s better between a girl and a man than between two men’ ” (Mulvey, L., Sight & Sound, volume 7, number 3, 1997).
Barris, A. Stop the Presses! The Newspaperman in American Films, New York, Barnes and Company, 1976.
Brennen, B.’sweat and melodrama: reading the structure of feeling in All the President’s Men’, Journalism, volume 4, number 1, 1998, pp 115–133.
Chambers, D., Steiner, L., Fleming, C. Women and Journalism, London, Routledge, 2004.
De Burgh, H., ed., Making Journalists, London, Routledge, 2005, pp 15–25.
Djerf-Pierre, M. ‘The gender of journalism’, Nordicom Review, volume 28, 2007, pp 81–104.
Ehrlich, M. Journalism in the Movies, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2004; ‘Facts, truth and bad journalists in the movies’, Journalism: theory, practice and criticism, volume 7, number 4, 2006, pp. 501–19.
Ghiglione, L. ‘The American journalist: Fiction versus Fact’, unpublished paper, 1990 (ijpc.org/ghiglione.htm).
Good, Howard Outcasts: the image of journalists in contemporary film, Lanham, Md., Scarecrow, 1989; Girl Reporter: gender, journalism and movies, Lanham, Md., Scarecrow, 1998; The Drunken Journalist: biography of a film stereotype, Lanham, Md., Scarecrow, 2000.
Good, Howard, Dillon, Michael J. Media Ethics Goes to the Movies, New York, Praeger, 2002.
Keeble, R., Wheeler, S., eds. The Journalistic Imagination: literary journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter, London, Routledge, 2008.
Lule, J. Daily News, Eternal Stories: the mythological role of journalism, New York, Guilford, 2001.
McNair, B. ‘What is journalism?’, in De Burgh, H., ed., Making Journalists, London, Routledge, 2005, pp 15–25; News & Journalism in the UK, 5th edition, London, Routledge, 2009.
Morris, T., Goldsworthy, S. PR: a persuasive industry?, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Mulvey, L. Citizen Kane, London, British Film Institute, 1994.
Ness, Richard M. From Headline Hunter to Superman: a Journalism Filmography, Lanham, Md., Scarecrow, 1997.
Saltzman, J. ‘Analyzing the images of the journalist in popular culture: a unique method of studying the public’s perception of its journalists and the news media’, IJPC, 2003. (http://www.ijpc.org/AEJMC%20Paper%20San%20Antonio%20Saltzman%202005.pdf)
Schudson, Michael Watergate in American Memory, New York, Basic Books, 1992; The Power of News, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995.
Zelizer, B. Taking Journalism Seriously, London, Sage, 2004.
Zynda, T. ‘The Holywood Version: movie portrayals of the press’, Journalism History, volume 6, number 2, 1979, pp 16–25.