Book Review: Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture by Matthew C. Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman

Abstract

Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Culture. Matthew C. Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 241 pp. $95 hbk. $25 pbk.In the 1939 movie Nancy Drew, Reporter, the exuberant teenage heroine (played by Bonita Granville) ignores an assigned puff piece to investigate a murder. Idealistic and determined, she sneaks a camera into jail, breaks into a house, concocts a fake news story, and wiretaps a hotel room-all in the search for truth and justice. It says right in my textbook on journalism that a newspaper man or woman must stop at nothing to get the news, Nancy tells her editor.This Hollywood blend of journalistic zeal and ethical stumbles illustrates the deeply ambiguous depiction of journalists in popular culture, where dramatic storylines prevail and journalists routinely portrayed as either saints (Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck) or villains (poison-pen columnist Rita Skeeter in the Harry Potter books and movies).Despite such simplified depictions, authors Matthew Ehrlich and Joe Saltzman make a convincing case that fictional journalists both ubiquitous and significant in pop culture-in plays, movies, television, novels, short stories, comic strips, graphic novels, video games, and so on. These images matter, they argue, because they are likely to shape the people's perception of the news media as much if not more than the actual press does. At the societal level, the authors note that popular stories of fictional journalists illustrate our expectations and our apprehensions regarding the press and its relation to democracy.Ehrlich, professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Saltzman, director of the Image of the Journalist in Culture (IJPC) project at the University of Southern California, focus their research largely on 20th-century popular culture in the United States. They catalog a range of journalistic myths perpetuated in popular culture and offer insights into the meanings and consequences of these myths. Importantly, too, they examine stories by female, minority, and gay or lesbian authors for their unique take on issues of difference that many journalists confront.Ehrlich and Saltzman document many cases where pop culture venerates journalism, offering idealized examples of reporters serving the public good, as in All the President's Men. At the other extreme, pop culture trashes journalists as self-serving liars and moral deadbeats. Fabrication, deception, obfuscation, plagiarism, and arrogance all too common, they write. In cases such as Nancy Drew, Reporter, Popular culture implies that whatever the niceties of ethics codes, journalists can resort to whatever means necessary to serve the higher end of promoting the public interest. Not surprisingly, such mixed messages distort the public's view of the press. …