Hollywood reporter

TO GET AHEAD in journalism these days, it's better to be a clever stylist and to suck up to your boss than to settle for printing the truth.

At least that's one of the lessons of "Shattered Glass," the poisonous little film that deserved to be on a few Top 10 lists for 2003. It's the true story of Stephen Glass, the 25-year-old writer for The New Republic who in 1998 disgraced himself and the editors who published him when he was found to have been writing fiction and passing it off as colorful fact.

In the movie Glass is as wily as any corporate ladder-climber in advancing himself within a hierarchy where unconventional wisdom sells at a premium. He writes offbeat stories that are much too good to be true (a new church devoted to the worship of George H.W. Bush, a 15-year-old hacker who becomes the subject of a bidding war for an electronics film) and his peers and superiors believe them because he has their trust as a member of the club.

A scandal about an obscure writer at a magazine with fewer than 100,000 subscribers may seem an unlikely plot for a Hollywood movie. In fact, though, "Shattered Glass" is part of an old and uniquely American tradition. Movies about the media have been a staple of the American entertainment diet since the 1930s. Stories of reporters, press barons, news photographers, war correspondents, gossip columnists, anchormen and weatherwomen make up a sizeable -- and distinguished -- Hollywood genre.

Try to name outstanding French, English, Italian, German, Japanese, or Russian movies about the Fourth Estate. There aren't many. Volker Schlondorff's 1981 movie "Circle of Deceit," starring Bruno Ganz as a journalist in civil-war Lebanon, qualifies. More recently, there's "City of God," Katia Lund and Fernando Mereilles's 2002 criminal melodrama about two boys in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, one of whom becomes a gang leader, the other a journalist who exposes his crimes. Even Hitchcock's one contribution, the 1940 thriller "Foreign Correspondent," stars an American actor, Joel McCrea, as an American foreign correspondent.

Hollywood, by contrast, has given us "The Front Page," "His Girl Friday," "Citizen Kane," "Deadline USA," "The Big Carnival," "Sweet Smell of Success," "A Face in the Crowd," "All the President's Men," "Salvador," "Broadcast News," "Network," "Under Fire," "To Die For," and "The Insider" -- to name only some of the best. (This year, it also gave us "Veronica Guerin," one of the worst.)

One reason for the discrepancy may be the First Amendment. Journalists may rank with lawyers and politicians in the index of odious professions, but nowhere else are the rights of the press so central to a nation's vaunted idea of itself. The freedom to publish damning news about government and business is stitched into the Constitution, on a par with freedom of religion. Citizens are supposed to be outraged and the courts spring into action when the press is abused. Innumerable Hollywood plots, from "Three Days of the Condor" to "The Pelican Brief," have celebrated newspapers as the country's last defense against tyranny.

As individuals, however, journalists have more routinely been portrayed as law-benders and scandal-mongers. They came of age on film at about the same time as the private eye, that other troublemaker with his own patter, tribal etiquette, and fluid, attractively dangerous sense of morality. As lowlifes who claim the right to poke their noses into anyone's business, reporters have earned the contempt of Americans up and down the social scale. Clark Kent can hide his identity as Superman by working at a job that does not arouse suspicion or envy from his neighbors.

Talking pictures introduced the snappy dialogue and unconventional lives of reporters and editors to a wide audience; they were all but invisible in the silent era. In his book "Romantic Comedy in Hollywood" film historian James Harvey claims that "The Front Page" (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone and based on the hit play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, "did more to define the tone and style, the look and the sounds of Hollywood comedy than any other work of its time."

The bubbly cynicism of the editor played by Adolphe Menjou ("I was in love once," he muses to a reporter who wants to marry, "with my third wife") was bracing at the time, even if his type has since wormed its way into too many television sitcoms. The outrageous lies that Menjou claims to have knowingly published -- fake confessions from murderers, fake disasters, fake diaries -- would shame Stephen Glass and Clifford Irving. But we're on their side because the world of Chicago that they swim in is so much more corrupt, and humorless besides. Many of Hollywood's most sharp-witted screenwriters -- from Hecht to Billy Wilder to Samuel Fuller (see sidebar) -- began their writing careers as newspapermen.

In other so-called newspaper comedies -- such as "Libeled Lady," from 1936, with Myrna Loy as the richest woman in the world who is suing a tabloid for libel and William Powell as the suave reporter assigned to seduce her and sabotage the lawsuit -- the news business was portrayed as heartless and cutthroat, populated by loners and misfits. But at the same time reporters on screen seemed to be having more fun than may have been legally allowed during the Depression. The lives of sports and fashion stars in movies were drab by comparison. When Howard Hawks reshot "The Front Page" as "His Girl Friday" in 1940, he made romantic history in Hollywood by showing editor Cary Grant and reporter Rosalind Russell as a couple who were as in love with their work as with each other.

As well as being a crusader for good government, a journalist could by the 1940s and `50s be a psychopath ("Sweet Smell of Success," with Burt Lancaster as a thinly disguised Walter Winchell) or a despot ("Citizen Kane"). Indeed, the career of Charles Foster Kane, a young reformer who succumbs to the lure of power as he ages, becomes proof of Ben Franklin's adage that freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses.

The British press can be far ruder toward its own government than in supposedly fearless America, as witness its treatment of Tony Blair since the Iraq invasion. Given the many English novels that depict journalists with scorn, from George Gissing's "New Grub Street" to Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop," it's surprising the British film industry has not supplied its share of memorably awful characters. But the British public seems to accept that the press is grossly imperfect, and no big deal. Fleet Street doesn't wring its hands with the same angst and self-importance as in the United States, where media-on-media columns and shows are everywhere. Even The New York Times now has its own internal press critic.

Television journalists in Hollywood's eyes seem neither to be having as good a time nor to be as interesting as their ink-stained counterparts in the newspaper comedies of the `30s. "Network" and "Broadcast News" presented anchormen as either insane or vain, overpaid buffoons. "The Insider," based on a screenplay by former "60 Minutes" producer Lowell Bergman, showed beleaguered CBS News caving in to pressure from the corporate managers who wanted to merge with a tobacco company. Even in an old-fashioned newspaper drama like Ron Howard's "The Paper" (1994), the crushing power of money -- in this case the unwillingness of the publisher, played by Glenn Close, to spend it -- looms larger than ever. When financial pressure from your own boss trumps the pressure from corrupt officials, it becomes hard to depict journalists as useful, much less as heroes.

"Shattered Glass" allows you to believe again that the truth of what appears in print really matters. The diligence with which the magazine's staff goes about rechecking the facts of every Glass story, even though few were of national import, is thrilling -- and bizarre. Like the lengthy examination of Jayson Blair's paper trail at The New York Times, such soul-searching seems to be as critical for journalism's faith in itself as for the judging eyes of the outside world.

How the movie will play abroad is hard to imagine, for Glass suffers what may be a uniquely American downfall. But by showing how his violation of trust with readers mirrored his betrayal of those who backed him, he emerges as especially unpleasant, friendless, and sad, but -- like all pathological liars -- strangely compelling. Only in American journalism, it seems, are writers so literal and readers so naive that both believe words of fact should always correspond with the Truth. And as far as fragile illusions go, "Shattered Glass" suggests, that's not a bad one to cling to.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic and documentary filmmaker in New York. His most recent film is "Billy Collins: On the Road with the Poet Laureate."