NYT Movie Section editor, just about done with Caryn James' latest piece

I know you are probably sick of hearing about it, but if the folks at the Times movie section think that films about journalistic transgressions are important enough to write about twice in one week, then dammit, you had better get with the program.

After all, David Carr's Capote-orgy-preview-as-tired-media-crit from July 13 ran six full days ago. And God knows Times readers were marching on 43rd Street for today's follow-up by Caryn James, which surveys the long, sad path to disgrace down which screen journalists have wandered since the heyday of All the President's Men. Sure, the writers touch on many of the same points, allowing an uncomfortable amount of inefficiency I have not seen since, well, June 19. But what is more important is that you know where the Times stands in relation its own festering self-consciousness.

The public's thirst for media navel-gazing can only be slaked for so long, however, especially with content as nutrient-poor as the Times'. Just in case there was any question that one hand might not know what the other is doing:

CARR, 6/13/05: It is easy to forget in the current context of journalists willing to go to jail to protect sources that much of the profession involves less noble imperatives.

JAMES, 6/19/05: Movies haven't had time to catch up with today's most volatile journalistic issue: several reporters have testified before a grand jury and Judith Miller of The New York Times has gone to jail for refusing to reveal her source, a result of a special prosecutor's investigation into the leaking of a C.I.A. operative's name.

CARR, 6/13/05: Most journalists arrive at their profession with (a desire for validation) - why take the gamble of making mistakes in public if not for the reward of recognition? But the profession requires cooperation: The subject must be enrolled in the enterprise, even though it is rarely in his or her express interest.

JAMES, 6/19/05: When the cameraman nudges the grieving parents - the first thing we see a journalist do in the film - it's a shorthand way of situating us in the world of tabloid television. The moral question the film goes on to raise is whether the reporter and his crew can rise above their tawdry impulses.

CARR, 6/13/05: The public has a well-established mistrust for the press. It is the people who endure journalism, in all of its blunt and wily manifestations, who hold it in the lowest esteem. They have learned, often painfully, that a fraud is embedded not so much in the telling, but in the finding out.

JAMES, 6/19/05: A Gallup poll released last month showed that public confidence in journalism had reached a new low, with television news and newspapers receiving the same dismal number. Only 28 percent of those polled said they had a great deal of confidence in those media. The more that confidence plummets, the more likely movies are to portray reporters unfavorably; and, in a snowball effect, the more unsavory reporters appear on screen, the more that image takes hold.

CARR, 6/13/05: (Both Capote films) depict a talented but toxic storyteller, not a fabulist like Stephen Glass or a fabulist/plagiarist like Jayson Blair, but a writer who came up with a nonfiction novel that set the standard, for good or ill, for what came after it. It could easily be argued that there would be no Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, or Bob Woodward's fly-on-the-wall series of contemporary historical books, without In Cold Blood.

JAMES, 6/19/05: It isn't hard to spot what's behind this erosion of the journalist's image. When Watergate broke, tabloid television wasn't a force and 24-hour cable news (all shouting all the time!) hadn't been invented. As the news media expanded, standards became as varied as the outlets, and the public's respect for the media steadily declined. The damage has been done by everything from gossipy Internet sites where anything passes for news to the Jayson Blair fiasco at The New York Times and CBS's apology for its Dan Rather report on President Bush's National Guard service.

Waaaaaaaiiiiiit a second, Caryn. "The damage has been done by … gossipy Internet sites where anything passes for news"? You mean as opposed to unaccountable, elitist, out-of-touch old newspapers with bad editing?

At any rate, sweetie, if it were not for sites like The Reeler trimming your readers' attention spans, how could you and Davey Carr ever get away with cannibalizing each other?

RELATED LINKS:
Truman Capote: Putting the 'I' Back in 'Mendacious Whore', July 13
The Opening Shot, June 7