Frank Capra and the image of journalists in American film - Entertainment

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2002 by Joe Saltzman

Anonymous reporters chase popular actors. The audience, as always, identifies with the latter. For the most part, they now are rooting against reporters who are chasing familiar and friendly faces. It isn't Clark Gable or Barbara Stanwyck chasing after a story. It is now overzealous media newshounds chasing Bruce Willis or Julia Roberts.

This image of a harassing press with no valid reason for its insistence is a dangerous one. It undermines the public's trust in the media, and it directly conflicts with the movie and television image of the reporter as hero. One result is that the public has turned against reporters, concluding that journalists are obnoxious, interested only in their own egos, not the public interest, and that laws should be passed to stop reporters from harassing innocent people--often translated in the public mind to be a favorite movie or television star.

These conflicting images of the journalist contribute to the love-hate relationship between the American people and their media that is at the center of the public's confusion about the media in society today. Surveys continue to show that most Americans want a free press that is always there to protect them from authority and give them a free flow of diverse information. Those same surveys also show that most Americans harbor a deep suspicion about the media, worrying about their perceived power, their meanness and negativism, their attacks on institutions and people, their intrusiveness and callousness, and their arrogance and bias.

Anyone watching a Capra film involving journalists would understand the dichotomy. It's in every image of the journalist he helped put on the screen, in the countless images that came before him, and in the countless images that came after him. Whether on the movie or television screen, and augmented by real-life experiences and examples, they have been absorbed by generations through the 20th and early 21st centuries. They have more power in the American consciousness than the real thing.

In the end, it doesn't matter whether these images are true or not. They make up the image of the journalist in which we believe and upon which we act. And that's even scarier than media mogul D.B. Norton's sinister smile into the camera as he lights up a cigar and contemplates his next move in "Meet John Doe."

Joe Saltzman, Associate Mass Media Editor of USA Today: associate dean and professor of journalism, University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, Los Angeles; and director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (www.ijpc.org), a project of the Norman Lear Center, is the author of Frank Capra and the Image of the Journalist in American Film, from which this article is adapted.