In a Late Night segment, Seth Meyers spoofed the typical “newspaper movie,” creating a trailer for one focusing on “a brave team of journalists risking it all to break the biggest news story in history” and featuring “men in bad ties,” with reviews calling it a “thrill ride” of “middle-aged white people typing for two hours.”
We wanted our show to adopt a very different “tone”—as they say in Hollywood. Our writers room featured posters for The Paper, the 1994 Ron Howard comedy about a New York City tabloid. (We even named our fictional paper of record, The New York Sentinel, after that movie’s Times stand-in.) We worshipped at the altars of Broadcast News, James Brooks’s masterpiece starring Holly Hunter; Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s homage to his Rolling Stone gig; and Mike Nichols’s Working Girl. My journalistic hero is Nora Ephron, who was a reporter before writing When Harry Met Sally… and other classics. NPR critic Eric Deggans said our show “unfolds like a mind meld between The Paper and Primary Colors.” Exactly.
There are those who say that in such chaotic and terrifying times, when democracy is threatened and the free press is under assault, we need serious portrayals of journalists. Time suggested that All the President’s Men, Network, and the final season of The Wire are among the “straightforward dramas” that we need. So I have to wonder: By “serious,” do those people mean…male? The Los Angeles Times also longed for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “sifting through every request the White House made of the Library of Congress for an entire year.” Well, that sounds like riveting TV.
CNN’s Brian Lowry wrote that “the profession could use an image boost, in the way All the President’s Men highlighted reporting’s noblest ideals in the 1970s.” I miss a young Robert Redford too, but who’s going to tell Brian that that movie is nearly 50 years old? Woodward and Bernstein are busy writing Donald Trump books or being talking heads on CNN. Maybe instead of romanticizing an era of journalism that’s older than The Golden Girls, what we need is an honest accounting of how the profession has failed the public, too often coming off as arrogant and elitist.
After all, it’s a different era. Print is dead. Wordle is king. No one smokes in newsrooms…except our fictional editor, played by Griffin Dunne, who, as the son of Dominick Dunne and the nephew of Joan Didion, does know a thing or two about journalism. The internet has made us all a nation of enraged fact-checkers, and women hold senior newsroom positions. Wild, right?
And here’s the rub: This holier-than-thou, unbiased thing? It’s not working. Hunter S. Thompson called “objective journalism” a “pompous contradiction in terms.” And whether or not he was tripping on LSD when he said it, he was right. That doesn’t mean we can’t be tough and fair and scrutinize everyone equally, but to pretend that we have no emotions is, I think, being dishonest—and readers clearly feel that. We’re trying so hard to be great, objective newsmen whose only allegiance is to the truth…and yet no one believes us. You’re probably reading this not believing a word of it. Only 32% of people say they have “a great deal” or even “a fair amount” of confidence that what we report is accurate. That is basically the Upper West Side.
So why not take a different approach? Why not be honest? Why not admit that we genuinely try to get it right, but sometimes we fall short? That, like everyone, we bring our personal experiences and biases to a story? Why not show “the grimy ethics of what these kinds of journalists sometimes have to do,” as Washington Post critic Lili Loofbourow put it? It’s always bothered me that we can scrutinize everyone else, but we’re supposed to be righteous and perfect. The truth is that we try our best, but sometimes we chase each other down a rabbit hole (coughs “Russiagate”) and fixate on the wrong things (this is when Twitter yells, “BUT HER EMAILS!”). And yes, we have inappropriate hookups (um, half the DC press corps)?
Sometimes we take the bait. Sometimes we write it just for the likes. Sometimes we inadvertently help get a despot elected, because he returns our calls and makes for good copy. Hey, it happens. Journalists and fictional characters are complicated. We contain multitudes. In other words, we’re human.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where we want to see those nuances. Depending on where you get your news, everyone is either good (Biden! Trump!) or bad (Trump! Biden!). But that’s not how life works…and that’s not how TV works. We loved Tony Soprano not because he was so special, but because he was so ordinary—at times a sociopathic mob boss, and at others a put-upon suburban dad.