Why Are Girl Journalists in Movies So Lame?

In the press rounds for her new movie, Maggie Gyllenhaal has been calling Crazy Heart “a real love story about the way people actually love each other.” Her character, Joan, plays a small-town journalist who falls for a washed-up country star named Bad Blake. She meets him when she is writing a profile of him for her local paper, making Joan the latest in a long series of silver-screen female reporters who can't help but fall for their subjects.

Injecting journalists into movies makes for a convenient plot device. It throws the reporter into a situation he or she wouldn't ordinarily be in and forces interaction between people who have no other reason to speak. It’s often used in romantic comedies, like His Girl Friday [2], to signal that a woman is independent and adventurous and hard to tame. But in the end, of course, she does get tamed, at the expense of her journalistic ethics.

As a young girl, I fancied myself a Harriet the Spy or a Nancy Drew and wore a pen on a makeshift necklace around my neck so I'd have it at the ready in case I needed to chronicle something at the drop of a hat (you know, a canceled recess or a cute substitute teacher sighting). While all my friends were picking their favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I preferred the show's girl reporter, April O'Neil—she was capable, headstrong, and often wore a kicky jumpsuit. I always found it irritating when she would get kidnapped or otherwise find herself in trouble and the Turtles would have to rescue her. At least, though, she didn’t fall in love with one.

Seemingly every leading actress of the 1930s and '40s at one point played a reporter who was romanced by the leading man—it was the basic plot of films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town [3] (1936), Back in Circulation (1937), and Meet John Doe [4] (1941). The girl aces in these stories all rely on their wiles to charm information out of subjects or to subdue demanding editors. And then the stories typically—and tellingly—end when the girls finally land the man, not the scoop.

It was around this time that the derogatory term “sob sisters” was coined to describe women reporters in film and real life, referring to their often emotional and sympathetic coverage of stories involving other women, according to Joe Saltzman, director of the Norman Lear Center's Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Their work supposedly revealed them to be big-hearted but intellectually feeble and all too vulnerable to love.

Through the years, women reporters in film did get smarter and more capable, but not really any more ethical. Kate Hudson's unfortunately named Andie Anderson in 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days [5] is sophisticated and overeducated yet inexplicably falls for the subject of her article despite an assignment that required her to do exactly the opposite.

Then there are superhero story aces like Lois Lane, and Vicki Vale, who fall for Superman and Bruce Wayne, respectively. There's Katie Holmes' Heather Holloway in the satirical Thank You for Smoking [6], who is painfully over-the-top in her overt attempts at seduction. (“I'd love to see where the devil sleeps,” she coos to her interview subject, played by Aaron Eckhart.)

It even befalls the most serious, fully realized characters, like Adriana Cruz (played by Nora Dunn) in the Desert Storm tale Three Kings [7], who, despite possessing supposedly male traits like being shrewd and fearless, still manages to sleep with more than one of the soldiers she's chronicling—but hey, it's the desert!

The worst, though, has to be Sally Field's character Megan Carter in the 1987 film Absence of Malice [8]. Fields plays a reporter who not only allows herself to be taken in by a prosecutor peddling information about a classified investigation to her and prints a spotty story about it, but then falls for the subject of that investigation. She is, unequivocally, a professional disgrace. Despite her transgressions, Roger Ebert praised Field's character in is review of the film for her “woman's spunk” and for being so “likable”—and even goes so far as to suggest that if many of his own female colleagues were presented with a source as hunky as Paul Newman, they wouldn't be able to control themselves, either.

And what of male reporters on the big screen? They're often personal wrecks: sloppy, bitter, self-centered alcoholics; unenviable traits to be sure, but it's very rare that those failings ever cloud their judgment professionally or prevent them from getting the story at the end of the day. The quintessential male reporters portrayed in All the President's Men [9] obtain key information by convincing a female colleague—against her will—to use her relationship with a committee person to obtain a list of election committee workers. All that people remember, however, is that they brought down the president—and were canonized as heroes in the process.

Even on the rare occasion when the male reporter himself allows a personal relationship to overtake his ethical obligations, things work out. Russell Crowe's character in State of Play [10] lets his bromance with Ben Affleck's politician character interfere with an ongoing investigation, but he comes through unscathed—and with the story. The film's two supporting female journalists, Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams, remain marginalized and dependent on Crowe to save the day.

Of course, real female reporters sometimes do cross the line with a source or a superior. The most notable recent example is perhaps Mirthala Salinas, a Telemundo political reporter who had an affair with a then-married Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Salinas was even the anchorwoman who announced on air that Villaraigosa was separating from his wife. When Salinas' and Villaraigosa's relationship ended, he began dating another local broadcast reporter who had also covered his office. But such cases are the exceptions.

Gyllenhaal herself brushed off the suggestion [11] that her character perpetuates the stereotype of the morally bankrupt female reporter. She told the New York Times that her character was “green” professionally, and “a really big fan” of Bad Blake. “This is not a rational choice that she makes, at any level, at any point.” And that's precisely what makes it infuriating.