We all have favorite genres for our entertainment. Music can be country or punk or classical. Television can be situation comedy or police procedural. Sports can be t-ball or three-gun competition. Movies…
This feels like the moment when I should say that the golden age of the silver screen is over. Movies, as they say, aren’t what they once were.
One movie genre that consistently ranks at the top of my favorites is journalism. Within that genre are several sub-genre; some of these movies are about journalism itself, while others are centered around character and their tribulations while being set in a journalism context.
I am assembling this list after a phone call from a fellow journalist Dan Marsh. Dan loves movies, so we almost always end up talking about them. At the end of a recent call, I challenged Dan to make a list of his favorite journalism movies, and I would do the same.
You could shuffle the order of these films any way you like, since I think all of them are “dinner and a movie” quality.
Reds. John Silas Reed and Louise Bryant struggle to make a living writing for various American socialist publications, but then find their voices covering the First World War and the Russian revolution. It’s not just my favorite journalism movie, it might be my all-time favorite film.
Spotlight. The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team uncovers the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. My journalist friend Ashlynd cites Spotlight as the reason she became a journalist.
The Post and All the President’s Men, as one movie. The Post is about The Washington Post publishing The Pentagon Papers, while All the Presidents Men depicts Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Post covering the Watergate scandal. Either of these films are excellent depictions of the struggles journalists face, but as a double feature, they shine. The Post ends with a re-staging of the first scene in All the Presidents Men, stitching these two movies together perfectly.
The Killing Fields. New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and photographer Al Rockoff cover the civil war in Cambodia in 1973, along side Cambodian journalist Dith Pran. When the brutal Khmer Rouge take power two years later, journalists and intellectuals are evacuated, but Pran is left behind and forced to remain silent as the regime tortures and kills as many as two million Cambodians. Pran is finally able to escape and emigrate to America.
Zodiac. This film follows San Francisco Chronicle journalists Robert Graysmith and Paul Avery as they cover the manhunt for the Zodiac killer. It is a very tense, edge-of-your-seat movie, both when depicting the gruesome murders, and in the way it builds tension and fear in the characters.
The China Syndrome. Maybe the least-well-known film here, I first saw this at The Vaska in Lawton, Oklahoma when I was about to turn 16. A television news crew inadvertently witnesses and films a nuclear accident, and are drawn into a web of corporate corruption.
What are some of your favorite journalism films?
