“Print is permanent. It’s, like, true love,” Ned Sampson, the editor in chief of The Toledo Truth Teller, says in an early episode of “The Paper,” which premiered this week on Peacock.
“The Paper,” a spinoff of the NBC sitcom “The Office,” is Hollywood’s latest attempt to take on journalism through a fictional lens. Ned (Domhnall Gleeson) arrives at the dying paper eager to inform the public. But he is immediately confronted by a host of barriers: Budget cuts. A shrinking subscriber base and shrinking print space. Meddling corporate overlords.
As evidenced by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s announcement last week that it will be ending its print run, the struggles of print journalism continue to mount. In this respect, “The Paper” is one of the rare depictions of journalism that nails the anxieties of the industry.
“Like other institutions of American life, it was in transition,” Ben Silverman, one of the show’s executive producers, said of journalism in an interview. It seemed an opportune moment to portray the industry’s digital transformation “in the way a great impressionist painter would paint trains entering Paris,” he said.
“The Paper” isn’t even the first on-screen send up of journalists named “The Paper.” A 1994 comedy film of the same starred Michael Keaton as the harried metro editor of a fictional New York tabloid.
Here is a look at some other notable journalism portrayals in pop culture.
Journalists taking on the system.
One of the hallmarks of this genre is the 1976 film “All the President’s Men,” which tracked the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they uncovered the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s downfall.
“Spotlight,” directed by Tom McCarthy, from 2015, details The Boston Globe’s reporting around a Catholic Church cover-up of sexual abuse by priests. Perhaps this was atonement for McCarthy, who years earlier had played a whiny journalist exposed as a serial fabulist in HBO’s “The Wire.”
“The Post” (2017), directed by Steven Spielberg, revisited The Washington Post’s decision to publish parts of the Pentagon Papers.
Journalism is a challenging profession to make interesting for the screen. There’s a lot of sitting around and waiting for phone calls — unless you’re Denzel Washington as Gray Grantham in “The Pelican Brief.” This can lead to exaggerated portrayals of reporters onscreen.
“You do take some artistic license,” Rebecca Lenkiewicz recalled of writing the screenplay for “She Said,” a 2022 film chronicling The New York Times’s investigation of sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
To be effective, the characters must have a strong presence. Think Al Pacino as the crusading “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman as he takes on the tobacco industry in “The Insider” (1999).
Many shows and films about journalism have revolved around white characters, partly because for decades newsrooms were populated by white men. (A notable exception is the 2007 film “Talk To Me,” starring Don Cheadle, about the pioneering Black radio host Petey Greene.)
Aaron Sorkin has made earnest journalists a centerpiece of two television projects: “The Newsroom” and “Sports Night.” For “The West Wing,” he created the character of Danny Concannon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter played by Timothy Busfield.
“I think he was one of the last of the great journalists in a way,” Busfield said in a recent interview, referring to Danny. “He was from an era of breaking stories and just relaying the facts.”
Then there are the lampoons.
Sometimes the best, and most memorable, journalism portrayals are the ones that poke fun at the profession. And we don’t just mean Kermit The Frog reporting in “The Great Muppet Caper.” Will Ferrell did so in two “Anchorman” movies. Less famously, Ferrell plays Woodward in the 1999 comedy “Dick,” which reimagines everyone involved in the Watergate story as a bumbling moron. (Nixon is brought down by two teenage girls played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams.)
In “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring journalist who takes a job working for Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), a character said to be based on Anna Wintour, the steely longtime editor of Vogue.
A staple of the journalism-based comedy genre: the 1940 film “His Girl Friday,” starring Cary Grant as a big-time editor and Rosalind Russell as his former star reporter (and ex-wife) who team up once again.
The cynicism that veteran journalists sometimes accrue is embodied by Leon West (Brian Huskey) in the HBO satire “Veep.” A veteran reporter for The Washington Post, he breaks many big stories about Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), only to eventually join her team as press secretary.
“He was a ’70s journalism idealist,” Huskey said of the character. “But he’s sour,” he added. “He’s disappointed that he has to deal with these idiots.”
Journalists who find love.
“House of Cards.” “Never Been Kissed.” “Iron Man.” “Sharp Objects.” The list goes on.
Often, movies and films portray reporting as an ironclad way of finding love. Many employ the trope of journalists, often women, falling for sources, ethics be damned.
In “How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days,” Kate Hudson plays a magazine columnist who tackles the subject of dating turnoffs head-on by trying to get an unwitting paramour (Matthew McConaughey) to dump her in 10 days.
Rory Gilmore is an aspiring journalist in the millennial classic “Gilmore Girls.” But she’s not always a very good one, as she is seen both falling asleep listening to a source and sleeping with one.
The rom-com legend Nora Ephron, herself a former journalist, had the female protagonists of “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” working in newsrooms, both played by Meg Ryan. In “Sleepless,” she uses her work as a front to get a widower’s personal information. (It’s a young Tom Hanks. We get it.)
This phenomenon is not unique to women. A male journalist writes about a serial bridesmaid without her consent in “27 Dresses” before eventually becoming intimate with her. In “Runaway Bride,” a male columnist writes about a woman who has left several men at the altar without reaching out to her. She threatens to sue, but the two end up married. In “Long Shot,” a male journalist runs into his childhood crush and former babysitter who is running for president. She hires him as a speechwriter and he ends up being her “first mister.”
Female journalists are often painted as not good at their jobs, but there are some recent exceptions. In 2023, the Hulu film “Boston Strangler” followed Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) as they track vicious murders in the Boston area that appear to be connected.
And it is Mare Pritti — a reporter played by Chelsea Frei — who provides the moral center for “The Paper.” In the first episode, she sarcastically muses, “A.I. will never replace me,” after selecting a wire story with the headline, “Over Half the Content Creators on TikTok Are A.I.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
Rylee Kirk reports on breaking news, trending topics and major developing stories for The Times.
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