Writing in The Atlantic this week, Sophie Gilbert discussed the dismal portrayals of female reporters that have come out of Hollywood in the past few years: Sharp Objects’ Camille Preaker, House of Cards’ Zoe Barnes, and Gilmore Girls’ Rory Gilmore, to name a few. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t a trend I was conscious of until reading her article, but now I’m wondering how I missed it for so long.
Maybe it’s because fictional representations of journalists of any gender aren’t often that great – men who are burnt out and reliant on alcohol to get through the day seemingly dominate the industry, if Hollywood is to be believed.
But they’re balanced out by films like All The President’s Men and Spotlight, both of which are based on true events – which is probably why journalists come out of them looking as good as they do. So I wonder: when will women in journalism (who aren’t Rachel McAdams’ Spotlight character) get their Woodward and Bernstein moment?
Firstly, let’s examine what makes these fictional portrayals of female journalists quite so terrible. As Gilbert outlines, Rory Gilmore sleeps with a source, fell asleep during an interview, and turned up to a job interview completely unprepared. These things are fairly unusual given how hard-working teenage Rory was – why would you work so hard in high school and at university only to put in no effort when it actually counts? Also, one piece in The New Yorker is not enough to build a career out of.
The ‘sleeping with a source’ trope comes up again in both House of Cards and Sharp Objects – Zoe Barnes sleeps with Frank Underwood in exchange for stories, and Camille Preaker sleeps with both the detective she’s using as a source and an 18-year-old source whose sister was murdered. Are we meant to believe that women in journalism are incapable of turning off their sex drives for as long as it takes to conduct an interview professionally?
Not to mention Camille’s struggle with alcoholism. Being back in her hometown is bringing up a lot of awful feelings, so she’s falling back into self-destructive habits, I get it – but when the alcoholic journalist stereotype is one of the only ones we’re seeing, it can be difficult for young women to picture themselves in that field.
Compare these negative portrayals to the triumphant portrayals in All The President’s Men, which only contributed further to Woodward and Bernstein becoming household names to a certain generation. It’s a great movie, and a great story of investigative journalism having an impact, but the women are non-existent, and it’s a shame.
Women have been working as journalists for a long time, but very few have reached household name status the way the men who uncovered Watergate have. Part of that is probably because their work led to a President’s resignation – few journalists of any gender have reached that point at all – but one also has to wonder how many women have been given opportunities to work in reporting at that level, and how many have been bullied into retreating.
Perhaps another part of it is that we associate female journalists with journalists who focus on women’s issues and work at magazines, rather than the hard-hitting journalism portrayed in Oscar-winning movies.
“Spotlight” is the only fictionalized* portrayal of a female reporter I haven’t hated.
*but it’s based on a real journalist, @SachaPfeiffer, so barely even counts. https://t.co/4Ashl4YR1N
— Gabrielle Leaf-y ? (@gabbilevy) August 21, 2018
If you’re after stories of women in journalism to inspire you, don’t look to Hollywood; crack open a history book instead (sorry for sounding like a mum). Ida B. Wells and Nellie Bly are two of the biggest names that you should be aware of.
Wells was born into slavery, and after gaining her freedom, documented lynching in the United States in a time when most people thought it was normal and acceptable. Her reporting on lynching is some of the most thorough and most important reporting available from that time period, and it proved that lynching was a racist tool used to control black people, rather than a response to criminal activity.
Nellie Bly is famous for going undercover – specifically, faking mental illness – to gain access to an asylum to document the conditions faced by patients there. She’s considered a pioneer of this sort of investigative, undercover journalism.
Both women were working just before the turn of the 20th century, but we still haven’t seen an Oscar-worthy movie about either of them, despite their lives being chock-full of Oscar-worthy events.
Nora Ephron and Joan Didion are two other heroes worth having. Both of them were writing in the mid to late 20th century, and Nora was even married to the aforementioned Carl Bernstein for four years (Joan was married to novelist John Gregory Dunne for 39 years). While neither of them went undercover in any asylums, both of them write beautifully and honestly; Ephron is probably best known for her romantic comedies, which include Sleepless In Seattle, When Harry Met Sally and You’ve Got Mail, while Didion is best known for Play It As It Lays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, or The Year of Magical Thinking, depending on which generation you’re a part of.
This is without even touching on the amazing women working in journalism right now, because if I did that, we’d be here all week. Suffice it to say, there are countless women doing amazing work in journalism across the globe, and they deserve better than fictional works that portray them as alcoholics, corruptible, sex-driven and straight-up bad at their jobs.
Women in journalism deserve to be memorialised the way Woodward and Bernstein have been – so Hollywood, where’s our damn Nellie Bly biopic?