1 | Bob Woodward
All the President’s Men, 1976
Which role would an aspiring hack love most? Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, delivering one-liners by William Goldman? Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, full of puppy enthusiasm? No: it’s got to be Robert Redford doing Bob Woodward, clean cut, boyishly charming, the man who looked down Deep Throat and made history. He’s foul mouthed, always chickenshitting and ratfucking away. But he’s an angelic straight arrow too. “If you’re gonna do it, do it right. If you’re gonna hype it, hype it with the facts.” He gets the big story and goes on to get more of them for the Washington Post for the next 35 years. Look like Redford, scoop like Woodward. What’s not to like?
2 | Veronica Guerin
Veronica Guerin, 2003
Dublin’s Guerin, like Moscow’s Anna Politkovskaya, is a brave female investigative journalist who followed a perilous path to assassination. Real-life tragedy as a familiar movie script? Up to a point. But Cate Blanchett, adept at delivering the chilly surface of complicated human beings, doesn’t set out to soften Guerin’s edginess as she puts marriage and family ties to one side and attempts to crack a big drug ring. She’s a driven reporter, teeth dug deep into a story she feels must be told. It’s heroism in a way, but almost suicidally daring. We know the ending. Two cars drawn up side by side. A burst of gunfire – and an Ireland finally aroused to round up the killers, pass new laws and honour the memory of a journalist who died for her job.
3 | Jeff Jefferson
The Day the Earth Caught Fire, 1961
A total curiosity. Here’s an archetypal Daily Express lead story: floods, droughts, tempests, the end of an overheating world. Too many nuclear tests have changed Earth’s axis as we lurch closer to the sun. This is the famous old Express of Beaverbrook yore with its great editor, the real, dynamic Arthur Christiansen, retired but leading a mythical newsroom team again as Jeff Jefferson. Christiansen looks a bit perplexed at times. Can he play understated when Leo McKern is in full, pre-Rumpole mode? Why are so many histrionic Brit character actors sweating so hard pretending to be reporters? There’s Bernard Braden playing news editor. “World Saved” says one waiting headline; “World Doomed” says another. But at least we know that Christiansen managed to leave his pulsating paper to Richard Desmond and massive redundancies in the end. Farewell Arthur: this is what it was like when journalism really could catch fire.
4 | Marty Baron
Spotlight, 2015
Marty’s the new editor at the Globe, up from Miami and making his market. Liev Schreiber, in a clipped dream of a beard, is the force of change and inspiration. It’s he who spots a case of Catholic priests abusing boys. It’s he who tells the Spotlight investigators to go for the big picture of abuse rather than settle for a few individual exposures. Schreiber plays Marty cool, calm and distant. He’s not one of the boys. But this Baron’s the editor who makes a difference from start to glorious finish: a true general back at base camp – and in reality now, as editor of the Washington Post.
5 | Chuck Tatum
Ace in the Hole, 1951
Tatum, cold eyed, relentlessly cynical, is the reporter you never hope to hire (before he gets fired for sleeping with the publisher’s wife). He’s a big city journalist desperate to claw his way back to glory via a hick paper in New Mexico. There’s a guy trapped underground in a mine disaster. “Human interest,” Tatum says. “You pick up the paper, you read about 84 men or 284 or a million men, like in a Chinese famine. You read it, but it doesn’t stay with you. One man’s different, you want to know all about him. That’s human interest” – and a story that can make him big again (if he sleeps, lies, tricks and bullies his way to the front pages again). A bravura turn from Kirk Douglas, brute physical force in an ethical vacuum. “Bad news sells best. Good news is no news”. Welcome to the cesspit – and don’t ask Hacked Off friends round for tea.
6 | Walter Burns
The Front Page, 1974
You surely know the great Ben Hecht plot – grizzled Chicago editor wants to keep love-struck ace reporter and wallows in farcical efforts to save an amiable dolt from death row: but what you probably din’t know was what a feast Jack Lemmon, Billy Wilder and the immortal Walter Matthau make of it. He’s not a tabloid editor; he’s Volpone in a green eye shade, a master of confected sensations, broken promises and ruthless betrayals – but smirkingly lovable with it. There’s no better ending than the watch he gives Lemmon as parting wedding gift, and the phone call to the next station down the line saying Jack’s stolen it.
7 | Billie Newman
Lou Grant, 1977-82
Passionate, naive, intuitive, questioning, dogged, empathetic, ethically challenged – and much, much more. Linda Kelsey’s young reporter in TV’s definitive series about newspaper life is gold standard stuff. Lou Grant ran for five hit seasons because it had the time to develop and explore fundamental issues – and of reporting them. There’s a touch of Hollywood gloss, a soupcon of schmaltz, but when Kelsey goes out on a story you’re straining to go with her. Billie gives you the “whys” and the “wherefores”.
8 | JJ Hunsecker
The Sweet Smell of Success, 1957
JJ, played by Burt Lancaster, isn’t a reporter or editor: he’s a syndicated gossip slug, destroying reputations, marriages and careers as he sits at his favourite Manhattan club table while acolytes pay court and feed stories. “Match me, Sidney,” he says to a fawning Tony Curtis. “What is this thing called integrity?” A good question, too, for Walter Winchell, the McCarthy-loving super slug with 2,000 papers paying to run his column at its height. Lancaster, like Winchell, is malignity incarnate. But at least, as Winchell once said: “Nothing recedes like success”.
9 | Lois Lane
Superman
Born on an artist’s pad in 1938 and then, as now, the star reporter on the Daily Planet. She’s Margot Kidder, Amy Adams, Teri Hatcher and many more on screen. She’s feisty and fearless – and a delectable damsel in distress when the man of steel comes zooming to the rescue. She’s an early pre-feminist icon for women in journalism and what they can become. Lois once won a Pulitzer prize for investigation. Think how many more she might have netted if she’d twigged just a tad faster that Clark Kent was Superman.
10 | Elliot Carver
Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997
Who needs Citizen Kane flailing away when you can have Jonathan Pryce hamming it up as a non-Oz Citizen Rupert bent on starting a nuclear world war so his is the only media empire left? “Good morning, my golden retrievers. What kind of havoc shall the Carver Media Group create in the world today? News?” Newsman: “Floods in Pakistan, riots in Paris, a plane crash in California.” “Outstanding!” James Bond obliterates him but you’re rather sorry to see Pryce go. If only he could have married a tall Texan blonde and retired happily instead…
