The Parallax View is a 1974 film starring Warren Beatty as Joe Frady, a hard-living, truth-seeking reporter who discovers a whopper of a conspiracy and strives to unravel it (while it may seem like fiction, such reporters did exist in another era).

Here's one encounter between Frady and his editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn):

Frady: Somebody's systematically knocking off witnesses and you don't care!

Rintels: Sure I care. I care about my kids' future, this newspaper, my golf handicap. I've even been known to care about you, you ungrateful bastard!

Here, drink your coffee. Here. Take it! (shit).

Joe, what evidence have we got? A girl who died of pills and booze. The sheriff you say tried to kill you -- and the poor bastard drowns.

Frady: And I got a bank book here with $107,000 in it. The sheriff. The police are after me!

Rintels: Then why is there no APB on you? I checked as you called in. They're not interested. They all say it was an accident.

Frady: They don't wanna answer questions.

Rintels: You're damned right they don't. Sheriff L.D. Wicker and two of his deputies were indicted three months ago on a utilities scandal up there. It was in every paper in the Northwest.
                  
He knew you were a reporter, but it wasn't any national conspiracy he was covering up. You were in a whole different ball game and you didn't even know it!

You remember four years ago, you were sure you caught the senator's bagman and it turned out to be his nephew's bookie? Joe: You go on like this, and you're gonna make a real horse's ass of yourself.

Frady: He didn't know I was a reporter.

Rintels: How do you know they didn't know?

Frady: Because I didn't tell him. And I didn't give him my name.

Rintels: Did you register at a hotel?

Frady: Yeah, under a phoney name.

Rintels: Boy, you amaze me. You go expecting these things to happen and they do.

Frady: Just advance me two week's salary.

Rintels: (warily) For what?

Frady: I gotta find Austin Tucker. If anybody knows about this, he does.

Rintels: I won't advance you a dime! I don't care if your self-serving ambition gets you a paperback sale and the Pulitzer prize! I'm not gonna have anything more to do with it!

(Pause, then wearily) Joe ...

Frady: (matter-of-factly) I can't help it.

Rintels: (sighs) I know.

You may wish to also check out my post on the montage sequence in The Parallax View.