The movie poster for this fall’s The Hunting Party features a black-and-white photo of Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, press passes dangling from their necks, pasted on a blood-orange background that reads: LIARS—CHEATS—PLAYBOYS—THIEVES. The last word in this litany? JOURNALISTS.

The poster is meant, presumably, to attract audiences through the sheer force of its irony. (They’re liars and journalists? How intriguing!) But the real irony, most viewers would agree, is how un-ironic these labels are: the mighty fell a long time ago. “Once a cultural hero,” Russell Baker writes of reporters in a recent piece for The New York Review of Books, “he was glamorized in the movies by Clark Gable and she by Rosalind Russell.” But now, on film as in life, “nobody phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore.”

First: ouch. Second: granted. Gone are the days when a movie journalist—Citizen Kane’s Thompson, Deadline, USA’s Hutcheson, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein—occupied a black-and-white moral landscape where Right battled Wrong with the sharp sword of Truth. But gone, too, is the post-post-Watergate disenchantment that forced celluloid reporters to fall on that sword through treatments that portrayed them, as Christopher Hanson pointed out in these pages in 1996, as amoral (Absence of Malice), callous (The Paper), credulous (Bob Roberts), cartoonish (I Love Trouble), sensationalist (Network), ambitious (Broadcast News), manipulative (Hero), manipulated (Wag the Dog), murderous (To Die For), or some dastardly fusion thereof. Hollywood’s Janet Malcolmesque indictment of journalists as “morally indefensible” has had its fifteen minutes—well, fifteen years—of infamy. Its time, thankfully, is up.

In its place, we have Capote, which The New Yorker’s David Denby called “the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer’s working method and character.” And Good Night, and Good Luck, whose portrait of Edward R. Murrow is...

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