Welcome shades of grey for pop-culture journos

Heroes and Scoundrels — that’s the title of a 2015 book that examines the representation of journalists in popular culture. Looking at movies, television, plays, novels and comics, authors Joe Saltzman and Matthew Ehrlich suggest that the image of journalists often veers between very good and very bad.

Journalists are either impossibly virtuous and noble or shamefully scurrilous and self-serving. They’re either public servants or a public menace.

Recently, however, with the economic pressures on legacy journalism, the decline of local outlets, and the rise of misinformation and disinformation amid a new media universe, we’ve seen the development of a new pop-culture category, a kind of beleaguered, in-between classification that views journos as a little hapless, a bit hopeless and just barely hanging on.

That’s certainly the vibe you get with the new mockumentary comedy series The Paper (currently streaming on StackTV), in which the sweetly peppy, impossibly earnest Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) struggles to turn around a dying newspaper in the American Midwest.

Going back to the 1930s and ’40s, the movies — often scripted by newspapermen-turned-screenwriters — portrayed journalists as chain-smoking, card-playing, bar-haunting, meal-cadging, scandal-chasing wretches.

This disreputable line runs from Kirk Douglas’s disgraced reporter in 1951’s Ace in the Hole, trying to get back to the big-city beat through the pitiless exploitation of a man stuck in a mineshaft, to William Atherton’s vain, intrusive and irresponsible TV reporter in 1988’s Die Hard, who gets resoundingly sucker-punched in the final scene. (The actor would later get jeered on the street by passers-by.)

On the other side, we have the intrepid, untiring Woodward and Bernstein (played by the late Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) in All the President’s Men (1976), their methodically checked and double-checked reporting taking down a crooked presidency. (The film reportedly caused a spike in applications to journalism schools.) And then there’s the team from 2015’s Spotlight, exposing the systematic coverup of sexual abuse in the Catholic church with their tireless, often tedious work. In this Oscar-winning ensemble drama, long, repetitive scenes of phone hangups and slammed doors suggest the time-intensive, cost-intensive, labour-intensive process of original investigative reporting.

And now, with The Paper, a sideways spinoff of the American version of The Office, we get the comically inept crew of no-hopers who work at the (fictional) Toledo Truth-Teller.

Established in 1888 and once housed in a magnificent eight-storey Romanesque-style building packed with reporters, editors and pressmen, the once-historic paper is now jammed into one corner of one floor, basically an unprofitable subsidiary branch of a toilet-paper conglomerate.

Ned is unfazed, and with the help of his one trained journalist (and possible future love interest), Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), and despite the interference of his glamorous, hilarious nemesis, Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore), he is hoping to ditch the AI-generated chum and generic celebrity clickbait the paper was slinging before his arrival and get back to original reporting on local issues.

The gang’s victories are small: at first, just getting out a paper is an achievement, even if some issues are basically sudoku delivery platforms. The defeats are minor and a bit embarrassing: They’re getting tromped by a local teen blogger.

But series creators Greg Daniels (who also worked on The Office and Parks and Recreation) and Michael Koman use these deliberately petty battles to point to something bigger. They get a lot of comedic effect from the vast gap between the Truth-Teller’s lofty founding ideals, as a democratic bulwark against tyranny and corruption, and the low-stakes stories the paper is currently covering in its drastically reduced state.

It’s funny, but amid the bumbling reporting, bad writing and a few ethical oopsies — not to mention the Pam-and-Jim-type romantic intrigue — there’s a serious underlying sense of what hangs in the balance with the success or failure of this little newspaper and its gang of (mostly) likable losers.

As images of journalism have become even more polarized, not just in pop culture but in the public’s view of actual real-life journalists, maybe watching The Paper will help audiences see reporters not as heroes or as scoundrels but as folks who are trying their best in a troubled time.

There’s no Woodward and Bernstein here, no Spotlight investigative team. Neither are there reckless and malicious monsters or purposeful purveyors of “fake news.” There’s just the ever-hopeful idea that maybe you could help make your small corner of the world a bit better by working at a newspaper. “Jiminy crickets,” as Ned would say. Is that such a crazy dream?

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca