Wanna see a film where journalists are made to look good? Try Good Night, and Good Luck, or Capote. Wanna see one where they look bad? King Kong, Munich and The Constant Gardener might be more to your liking.

Some excerpts from the NYT story:

PEOPLE may not be keen on consuming the fruits of journalism - ratings, circulation and polling numbers make that plain - but put them in a darkened movie house and the craft suddenly becomes riveting. ... 

Reporters are historically tossed into scripts, as a Greek chorus as articulate and attractive as a flock of cawing seagulls, or as sleazy bystanders who take people down as a matter of general practice. Hollywood renders many professions as cartoons - pity the lawyers, if you can - but part of the reason that the news media are held in such low esteem is that they are cast as such. The editor in "Batman" who is constantly doing anything he can to sell newspapers is not seen as a cartoon by the public; he is seen as a proxy.

Has the public been taught, movie by movie, to loathe and suspect the press? Maybe not, but the movies in which the press is seen as holding business and government to account - how the press likes to think of itself - are far outnumbered by the films in which the news media come off as entirely unaccountable. ...

When Hollywood is really scraping around for a hero, it will sometimes turn to the news media. "The Pelican Brief," "Three Days of the Condor" and "The Insider" all showed journalists as the saviors of last resort. But more often, journalists are the handmaidens to evil: Danny DeVito as a sleazy reporter blackmailing left and right in "L.A. Confidential," Sally Field, a malpracticing scribe who trashes the reputation of the character played by Paul Newman in "Absence of Malice," or the witless careerists of "Broadcast News" or "To Die For." Dustin Hoffman, playing a ambitious reporter in "Mad City" put it rather succinctly, "I don't want to cross the line, I just want to move it a little bit."

When Hollywood has a role requiring greasy self-interest, it knows it can insert a fast-talking guy with a notebook and soup stains on his tie.