I think the issue here is just that not enough happens in journalism. I’ve watched Spencer Ackerman report out some pretty good stories. It involved a certain amount of looking stuff up online, a great deal of waiting for people to return phone calls, some taking notes, some talking. And then you kind of need to do it all over again. Filling out FOIA requests is important, but watching someone do it would be deadly dull. If you think about All The President’s Men they manage to build an awful lot of somewhat frenetic physical action into the process—people are always physically going places to do things. Which makes the film watchable, but I think is not all that reflective of how people really find where the bodies are buried. Back when I had bosses who wanted to try to turn me into a real reporter-type journalist, the slogan was “pick up the damn phone” not “go do something that would look interesting on a large movie screen.”I think this is partially true, but not entirely. Some parts of journalism involve very static scenes: people talking on phones, people sitting in hearings and meetings, people filing requests, people at lunch with sources. But good writing can make all of those things highly engaging to watch. Take this scene of a morning planning meeting at the newspaper where some of the main characters work in the BBC's State of Play. I've sat in a lot of these meetings, which are frequently dull. This one's elevated both by quite tight writing, and Bill Nighy's marvelous snideness:
The same is true of staging. In State of Play, the parliament chamber is made interesting by tracing the passage of written notes up and down the aisles (see this clip, starting around the 20-second mark):
And though I can't find a clip of it, many of the scenes take place in the newspaper office. The aisle in between rows of desks that stretches from the elevator bay to the editor-in-chief's office becomes a dramatic staging ground: John Simm, playing the main character, alternates between moseying down it and walking at a rapid clip, angry cops stalk down it, their trench coats billowing around them like wings, Bill Nighy and the accountant who usurps his office for a critical sequence of the mini-series, treat it like the runway that it is. It's an entirely prosaic office, but simple good staging make the act of passing through that space exciting and disruptive. The miniseries would be exciting even if a majority of it took place in that office, but it doesn't, and I think that's reasonably accurate. None of my reporting's involved murder or high-level commissions on energy use or coporate espionage, and it's true that a lot of it takes place on the phone, but it also involves going to hearings and events and meetings, and I do spend a lot of time talking to sources in places other than offices or event spaces. All those settings can be made dramatic, and everything said in them can be written to be dramatic, or bristly, or funny, or moving. So if journalism movies are mediocre, I don't think it's necessarily the subject matter.