American portrayals of journalists

1. American portrayals of journalists Fiction, cartoon and film

2. Early fictional representations • There was a large outpouring of ‘newspaper fiction’ in America, 1890 – 1930 • 78 novels and short stories with journalist as central character written 1890 – 1930 in US • Mainly produced by practising or former journalists who longed for a better, calmer life as a novelist • ‘A reporter is no hero for a novel,’ Stephen Crane scrawled in exasperation on a postcard as he struggled to complete Active Service (1899)

3. Similar ideas to Gibbs et al: reporters are heroes but the machine chews you up • From Dawn O’Hara (p.47): ‘After you have been a newspaper writer for seven years – and loved it – you will be a newspaper writer, at heart and by instinct at least, until you die. There’s no getting away from it. It’s in the blood. Newspaper men have been known to inherit fortunes, write books and become famous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossom into personages, to sink into nonentities, but the news nose remained a part of them, the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a newspaper was ever sweet in their nostrils.’

4. The newsroom may be killing you, but it’s irresistible too • Stephen French Whitman, Predestined, Scribner’s 1910: ‘He smelled dust, steam, hot metal. A persistent heavy rumbling seemed to make the whole building tremble….To the left, some, with armfuls of metal spools, were walking between lines of small, racketing machines. To the right, others, wearing eye-shades, were standing before type-cases. Ahead, some distance off, among a huddle of desks, in a fog of tobacco smoke, reporters in their shirt sleeves were writing, calling out to one another, waving above their heads large sheets of paper, which boys snatched from their hands and scurried off with.’ (pp.53-54)

5. Acquainted with the night: the image of Journalists in American Fiction 1890 – 1930 by Howard Good • ‘The emergence of newspaper fiction in the 1890s as a distinct genre followed the emergence of the reporter as a distinct type. ‘Social changes,’ literary critic George Santayana once said, ‘do not reach artistic expression until after their momentum is acquired and other collateral effects are fully predetermined (Justification of Art, Little Essays, Scribners1920)’ • ‘Between 1870 and 1890, the total circulation of daily newspapers in the United States rose 222 per cent, while the total population of the country rose only 63 per cent.’ • Tries to explain the largely negative portrayals of journalists in this period: ‘To become the target of violent criticism, it was first necessary for journalists to achieve a degree of influence…Important segments of the public refused to acknowledge that there was anything prestigious about journalism. It was treated by the ‘better people’ with bitter scorn. Behind the bravura of reporters who proclaimed themselves citizens of no mean state seethed self-doubt, self doubt that would echo and re-echo through the pages of newspaper fiction.’

6. Journalists in cartoons

7. Journalists as Superheroes • Both Superman and Spiderman, as their human selves, work in newspaper offices: • Superman as Clark Kent in the Daily Planet and Spiderman as Peter Parker, freelance photo-journalist working for the Daily Bugle • Other characters inhabit the stories: Lois Lane, the star reporter on the Daily Planet, and Superman’s girlfriend. • In Superman, while Peter Parker embodies the virtues of a good journalist, first with the news, but never forgetting the public. His editor, J Jonah Jameson is the opposite: ruthless, immoral, the classic tabloid hack.

8. Origins of Superman • Original comic book hero created by Jerome ‘Jerry’ Siegel and Joseph ‘Joe’ Schuster, published in Action Comics, June 1938. • They had been experimenting with storylines from as early as 1934, in the midst of the American Depression. Superman was supposed to offer Americans hope that in all the grim financial news, someone out there was looking out for them.

9. Why set these cartoons in newspaper offices? • Working as a reporter for a major newspaper enables Clark Kent to investigate criminals without their suspecting that he's really Superman and provides him with the best opportunity for being free to help people as Superman without having to explain his frequent absences from his place of employment.  "As a reporter," notes Kent in December, 1949, "I have a hundred underworld and police contacts that make it easier for Superman to fight crime!" • Over and above his usefulness to him in his career as Superman, it is clear that Clark Kent values his career in journalism purely for its own sake. "Just remember," he exclaims in 1945, "a good reporter gets the news - and gets it first!  But there's more to being a reporter than that!Helives by the deadline!  The thunder of the presses is the pounding of his heart!  And most important - all his personal feelings remain in the background!  It's his story that counts!  Always remember that!" • But don’t forget: it was a canny move on the part of Siegel and Schuster to set a comic strip hero in a newspaper office – they earned millions from syndicating their strips to American papers keen to be associated with the Daily Planet.

10. Why, in 1930s America was the idea of a superhero journalist accepted by the public? • The recognition of the role the press plays in safeguarding the people in a democratic society is embedded in US Constitution: • Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.— The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

11. Bill of Rights • The Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — went into effect on December 15, 1791, when the state of Virginia ratified it, giving the bill the majority of ratifying states required to protect citizens from the power of the federal government. • The early Americans, having been controlled unfairly by the British for centuries, were determined that a free press should form the basis of their new just society: • “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”— Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 16, 1787

12. The ‘Freeman’s Journals’ roles in early independent US society • Newspaper accounts helped to frame the debate for the public over whether the press was entitled to a written guarantee of freedom. In Philadelphia, the Freeman’s Journal published the following opinion: • “As long as the liberty of the press continues unviolated, and the people have the right of expressing and publishing their sentiments upon every public measure, it is next to impossible to enslave a free nation. Men of an aspiring and tyrannical disposition, sensible of this truth, have ever been inimical to the press, and have considered the shackling of it, as the first step towards the accomplishment of their hateful domination, and the entire suppression of all liberty of public discussion, as necessary to its support.” • There have been many cases where the US Government has tried to restrain papers from publishing leaks from other Government Departments. In each case the US Supreme Court has upheld the newspaper’s right to publish by citing the First Amendment.

13. In America, journalism is seen more as a civic duty than in UK • ‘The Americans are stuffier and more cautious. But they are also more careful and take the idea of journalism as a civic duty much more seriously. Much as it pains me to say this, I fear the Americans are closer to being right than the British…American journalists, I realized, regard themselves as members of a respectable profession – like lawyers or bankers. Their British counterparts generally prefer the idea that they are outsiders.’ Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs writer for the Financial Times • This analysis goes to the heart of the way journalists are viewed by US and British society

14. Balance • Studies of American journalism as opposed to British journalism is that American journalists appear to strive for balance more than their British counterparts. Although this results often in fairer coverage of news, it can also lead to a blander style of news reporting

15. Balance • ‘From virtually their first day in the classroom and on the job, the nation’s best journalists have had instilled in them several bedrock principles of sound and responsible news writing: an uncompromising personal detachment from the subject they are writing on so they can ensure their objectivity; a fidelity to accuracy and fairness; and an abiding commitment to ensuring that audiences have access to a ‘balance’ of competing judgements and opinions to serve as the basis of their decision-making about the important issues of the day’ (Ward, 2008)

16. 1978 Superman film • In the opening of the 1978 Superman film, the Daily Planet is given almost mythical status: • ‘In the decade of the 1930s, even the great city of Metropolis was not spared the ravages of the worldwide Depression. In the times of fear and confusion the job of informing the public was the responsibility of the Daily Planet. A great metropolitan newspaper, whose reputation for clarity and truth had become a symbol of hope for the city of Metropolis.’ • You couldn’t have that in Britain without irony

17. Clark Kent is the Daily Planet's star reporter.  Renowned for his ability to root out local news, particularly stories dealing with crime and corruption, he has performed in numerous other capacities for the Daily Planet, including that of war correspondent, lovelorn editor, editor of the Daily Planet's Bombay edition, and editor of the entire newspaper in the absence of editor Perry White. • In pursuit of a news story, Clark Kent has worked as a private detective, a fireman, and a policeman; he has joined the Marines; and he has become a skid row bum.  He has been a police commissioner, a department store clerk, a sheriff, a vacuum cleaner salesman, and a disc jockey.  He has even gone to prison voluntarily in order to investigate a series of prison riots and to learn where a hardened convict hid his $1,000,000 in stolen loot. • To the readers of the Daily Planet, the name of Clark Kent signed over a story means integrity and honesty.  His newspaper reporting on crime has won him countless awards.

18. (He’s just quit the Daily Planet though) • “Growing up in Smallville, I believed that journalism was an ideal, as worthy and important as being a cop, a fireman — a teacher or a doctor. I was taught to believe you could use words to change the course of rivers — that even the darkest secrets would fall under the harsh light of the sun. But facts have been replaced by opinions. Information has been replaced by entertainment. Reporters have become stenographers.”

19. Verdict of one Superman fan on the blogger for the site ‘Clarkcatropolis’: • ‘If the New 52’s Superman book has convinced me of anything, it’s that the man of steel is a whole lot more interesting when he’s living the life of a struggling blogger than when he's saving the world.’

20. Lois Lane

21. An impeccable CV • Lois Lane is “the Daily Planet’s star woman reporter” ( 1950), ranking alongside Clark Kent in the Daily Planet’s reportorial hierarchy. Described as the newspaper’s “sob sister” ( Nov Dec 1940; and others) and as its lovelorn columnist ( Jan 1942; and others) in many early texts, Lois Lane has risen through the journalistic ranks to become one of the Daily Planet’s “star reporters” ( Mar/Apr 1941) and, with Clark Kent one of the newspaper’s “two brightest satellites” (Jan/Feb 1944). • Particularly adept at covering local news she has performed the full range of journalistic duties, including stints as war correspondent; weather editor, described as “one of the lowliest jobs on any newspaper”, question and answer editor and head of the lost and found department; editor of the Daily Planet’s Paris edition (Apr’55) and “acting editor” in the absence of editor Perry White (Sep 1958)

22. Based on the wise-cracking Torchy Blane • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm8aMTDMe1w

23. The Daily Bugle in Spiderman

24. Like the Planet, its offices dominate the cityscape

25. The Daily Bugle • The Daily Bugle is not just featured in the Spiderman Comics (since 1963) but in other Marvel Comics creations. • The offices have been blown up twice, once by the Graviton and second by the Green Goblin • Over the years dozens of reporters, columnists, interns and editors from the Daily Bugle have all had bit-parts in various Marvel Comics stories

26. Why is a journalist such a good alter ego for a superhero? • Captain Marvel’s alter ego is radio journalist Billy Batson • comic books seem to have embraced the image of the tough yet honest reporter after the story and the baddies more than any other genre. • Catwomanwriter Will Pfeifer, a working reporter at the Rockford Register Star has said, “A reporter is tough to top as a secret identity – not exactly blue collar, but hardworking • nonetheless, down there in the trenches, trying to get the story. The access to breaking news … the newsroom has always been a fun environment to set stories, full of colourful characters and fast-paced dialogue. Though, I admit, as someone who’s spent most of the last 20 years in anewsroom, I never thought the Superman stories ever really captured the oddball spirit of the place.” • (From Bill Knight, Comic Book Journalists Beyond Clark Kent, published in IJPC)

27. Jane Arden • Jane Arden was the star of her own long-running comic strip for over forty years, a record that not many other strips can say.  Starting all the way back in the late 1920s, Arden was quite a groundbreaking series for her day.  She sought to expose criminals, and by infiltrating and going undercover into their world, a very mould-breaking move for many in that era, especially for a female character.   •  The character would become a template for future female fictional reporters.  Many may look to Lois Lane and Brenda Starr as the true archetypes of the hard as nails girl reporter, but Jane Arden came before them all, even spawning radio programs and a film.  Many characters owe a debt to her, and not just for her bravery, but for the way she conducted business in those early comics.  

28. Jane Arden – Crime Reporter

29. More recent comic book journalist-hero Matty Roth in DMZ, 2007

30. ‘For the first time ever I really thought I owned that title’ • Again – without irony, portrays journalism as a tough heroic profession with a reputation to live up to.

31. Why do journalists make such good comic book heroes? • 1) The comic book, in its very short passages of dialogue and reliance on quickstep action does not allow for the kind of restless self doubt that many fictional journalists have. They therefore have to be easily recognisable as good or easily recognisable as bad. • 2) There is a strong idea in American society (stronger than in the UK) that individual reporters are generally decent, honest people trying to do a difficult job, and if they are thwarted it is because of their editors or proprietors who are too close to power. • 3) In this black and white world then, it is easier to present reporters as good and their editors as bad (or good too, as in Superman).

32. Journalists in US Films

33. A long and fascinated relationship between Hollywood and the reporter • Brian McNair, in his book Journalists in Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) reckons that while around 80 films whose major character is a reporter have been made by British studios, some 2,166 have been made by Hollywood (p.23) • The first Charlie Chaplin short, made in 1914, features Chaplin as rogue Edgar English, who applied for a job as a reporter (from 3 mins 30) • http://www.archive.org/details/CC_1914_02_02_MakingALiving • The latest, the US version of House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, came out in 2013

34. The Glory Days of the Black and White films of the 1940s • His Girl Friday, dir Howard Hawks (1940) • The Philadelphia Story, dir George Cukor (1940) Citizen Kane, dir Orson Welles (1941) Woman of the Year, dir George Stevens (1942) All four films are multi-Oscar winning and award winning and always make it into the top 100 American films. Citizen Kane is held by film buffs to be the best film of all time.

35. His Girl Friday • Based on a 1928 Broadway Play, The Front Page • The film changes the main character’s gender from male to female and adds the sexual frisson between Hildy Johnson and her ex-husband Walter Burns. • Uses the idea of the journalist-as-loveable rogue (Hildy) contrasted with the more aggressive, cynical and hard-nosed editor (Walter) • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEnZ-zu1YXA • You can see the whole film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rdSZUlzIQw&feature=related • (It’s also in the library)

36. Dialogue • The most praised aspect of the film is the wise-cracking dialogue between Hildy and Walter and the other reporters: • Burns: “I swear it on my mother’s grave.” • Hildy (pause; double-take): “Wait a minute, your mother’s alive!” • Burns: “This is the greatest yarn in journalism since Livingstone met Stanley (orders the office) Use the whole front page. Never mind the European war. Take Hitler and stick him on the funny page.” (This is prior to Pearl Harbour) • The real villains of the film are the politicians who want to hang Earl Williams to do their electoral votes good. • The reporters are no angels, however: • Reporter, filing his copy: “Williams was unconscious when they opened the desk…” (He was fully conscious and we saw it)

37. Serious issues • Hildy makes it clear she is a woman struggling to find her place in a man’s world. When she realises her interview with Earl Williams, where she establishes he did not shoot his victim on purpose, is not going to save him, she tears up her copy and leaves the reporters’ room: • “I’m going to have babies and care for them.” • In choosing to return to her paper, the Morning Post, she is acknowledging that she may never have the babies and domesticity she yearns for. She also acknowledges that the pull of the newspaper world is stronger . • When her fiance Bruce realises where her true love lies, he says “I don’t think you love me at all,” she is so busy working on her story that she doesn’t even hear him or notice him leave the room. • “She was represented as a woman working reluctantly, if courageously, in a man’s world, experiencing the tension of ‘achieving journalistic success by denying her womanhood.” (Ghiglione, L , ‘The American Journalist: Fiction versus Fact’ on www.ijpc.org).

38. Man/Woman • Just like Mabel Warren in Stamboul Train, she calls herself a ‘newspaperman’. This happens at the moment of climax when her fiance Bruce gives her an ultimatum. • Hildy is infact paying homage to an earlier film ‘Smart Blonde’ with the quintessential ‘loveable rogue’ Torchy Blane. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z3mwWSmp8g • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuuAsgWlmSE • Jerry Siegel was a big fan of Torchy Blane and based Lois Lane on her.

39. The Philadelphia Story

40. Not set inside a newspaper office, but examines some issues of journalism, particularly celebrity journalism, namely press intrusion into the lives of the rich and famous, and the effects being a journalist has on the psychology of a person who really wants to be a writer – a common theme in US newspaper fiction of the early C20. The journalist Macauley Connors has the role of truth teller to the upper classes who can’t see beyond their own vanity • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1PEW45pOog • Was also a stage play of the same name before being made into a film starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart.

41. The character of Macauley • He’s a kind of puck figure, peeling the scales of people’s eyes and making them see the truth about themselves and about who they really love. • He invades the privileged world of East Coast High Society (where even the butler looks down in him) and sets things right. • Why is this character a journalist working for a trashy celebrity magazine? What is the film trying to say about the relationship between celebrity and journalism?

42. Citizen Kane

43. Kane facts • Welles was a young man – 25 when the film opened; his early experience had been in the theatre, and Citizen Kane is a very theatrical production. • Didn’t do particularly well financially when released • Is based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, America’s Northcliffe • Is described by French director Francois Truffaut as ‘probably the [film] that has started the largest number of filmmakers on their careers’

44. Mankiewicz • Script written by Herman J Mankiewicz, ‘the Central Park West Voltaire’. Mankiewicz, a former friend and dinner party guest of Hearst was hounded ruthlessly by the Hearst press following the release of Kane. • Mankiewicz, a former Berlin correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, reporter for New York World and dramatic critic of the New Yorker, and New York Times and was familiar with the world of journalism during the 1920s • ‘And so Hearst, the yellow-press lord who had trained Mankiewicz’s generation of reporters to betray anyone for a story, became at last the victim of his own style of journalism.’ (Kael, ibid) • His great love was theatre and had written in the 1920s a few plays for Broadway but like a journalist-writer, was seduced by money offered in Hollywood and sold himself to the studios for $400 a week.

45. Why is Kane great? • ‘’It isn’t a work of special depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a shallow masterpiece…there are articles on Citizen Kane that call it a tragedy in fugal form and articles that explain that the hero of Citizen Kane is time – time being a sort of proper hero for a modern picture…but this is to miss why it is a peculiarly American triumph, that it manages to create something aesthetically exciting and durable out of the playfulness of American muckraking satire.’ • Raising Kane by Pauline Kael, 1971

46. Kane’s wider themes • It’s about a man who wants to be God, or at least get to be as close to God as man can – and we all know what happens to that kind of man – from the Greek tale of Daedalus and Icarus. Icarus wanted to fly like a God… • There is a deliberate biblical reference to Kane’s constructing for himself a mythical castle: ‘Two of each, the biggest private zoo since Noah.’ • It’s about a man who had everything, and lost it all; who started out with papers that “spoke for millions” but ended up retreating into his personal private shell. • It’s about the dark side of the American dream • It’s all about the world of newspapers when they were at their most powerful. Kane’s political disaster: Chronicle: ‘Candidate Kane caught in love nest with singer’. Inquirer: ‘Kane Defeat: Fraud at Polls.’ • When his best friend Leland leaves him he says: ‘You talk about the people as though you own them, as if they belong to you.’

47. The role and portrayal of press and journalists in Citizen Kane • Opening scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r0b_XeRkG4 • (Shooting script handout) • Newspapers are of course a great metaphor for the perils of vain gloriousness – hugely important one day, forgotten the next – so the portrayal of the life of a newspaper tycoon is a rich seam for both satire and for tragedy • Kane is after all the story of how a brilliantly gifted man who seems to have everything, can lose it all • Mankiewicz had been impressed by the success of the Broadway play The Front Page, later turned into the film His Girl Friday with tough guy editor Walter Burns based on the famous Hearst editor Walter Howey of the New York Mirror. He had a glass eye and it was said of him ‘you could tell which was the glass eye because it was the warmer one.’ • Young Kane is wildly rich, but emotionally neglected; we learn that he started “as a reporter” but these early years are blurred. Why does he want to run a paper? He says: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper” – but it’s more than that – he wants to use the Inquirer as a WEAPON of REVENGE against his Guardian – and also as a way of destroying his own fortune – it costs him $1 million a year just to keep going. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhb3U2cONs

48. Context: Portrayal of the press in 30s and 40s America • The most successful of the thirties movies often featured newspaper settings, or reporters, especially the ‘screwball’ comedies which made the most use of the new invention of ‘talkie’ movie – fast talking, wise cracking reporters distinguished their films from the previous silent tearjerkers. • 1930s: Five Star Final and Scandal Sheet and the first film version of The Front Page. Lee Tracy as the gossip columnist in Blessed Event and as the press agent in Bombshell, Clark Gable as the reporter in It Happened One Night; Spencer Tracey as the editor in Libeled Lady; Stuart Erwin as the correspondent in Viva Villa!; Jean Harlow stealing the affections of a newspaperman from a girl reporter in Platinum Blonde; the Torchy Blane films • In the US, film has been one of the main sources of the representation of journalism and attracted some of its finest writers and directors. Why do you think?

49. Randolph Hearst • ‘He lives on the largest house on the beach – and I mean the beach from San Diego to the Canadian Border’ • Real-life multi millionaire tycoon • Owned his first newspaper as a young man in 1887 • Like Northcliffe, got into newspapers at the moment when millions of people were becoming literate • At his peak owned 30 newspapers and 15 magazines • Built himself a gothic beach house castle, San Simeon and looted the world’s archaeology to fill it with treasures • Was a demanding and hands on editor/proprietor who changed pages at a whim

50. Why so many films (and good films, as opposed to American novels) about journalism? • Highly functional – generates narratives and events • The journalist is the licensed exposer of things that other people like to keep hidden away • In the US the role of the reporter as the challenge to state corruption and tyranny is enshrined in the Constitution • As a person, the journalist can still be sleazy and distasteful which makes him or her an interesting character, while at the same time, doing a good job, with the support of the public • If the journalist is about the expose something or someone there is someone trying to prevent it, which creates the drama • Many Hollywood scriptwriters had cut their writing teeth in newspapers and were familiar with the world. Many of the 30s portrayals evoke this feeling of nostalgia by the writers for their younger former selves, who, though they were hard nosed reporters, were still young, idealistic and thought they were going places • Many of the films have this interesting ambivalence about journalism: it may be a mucky job but the reporters are dreamers who want to make the world a better place (seen through the eyes of men who eventually sold out to Hollywood, even more corrupt than the world of newspapers)