Journalists are heroes, their watchdog duties inscribed in the founding mythology of liberal democracy. They are also villains, when they fail to perform these duties adequately, or if they disregard or neglect their normative functions as watchdogs and witnesses to become, instead, manipulators of the truth, fabricators of the facts, abusers of the monitoring power which has been bestowed upon them. In this guise journalists are represented in cinema as, at best, lovable rogues; at worst, loathsome reptiles for whom death itself is not too severe a punishment. The chapters in Part III explore examples of each.

At the outset, and as a generalisation, one can say that films in which journalists are represented as heroic tend to be those in which as investigators, watchdogs and witnesses they are seen to challenge power, or to have power challenge them, as they go about their democratically ordained functions of monitoring and surveillance, analysis, critical scrutiny and commentary. These films tend to be critical of power (or more precisely, its abuses), and celebratory of the role of the journalist in facing down that power, be it in the political, economic, or military spheres (or media power, for that matter – as we have seen, journalists such as Lowell Bergman and Ed Murrow have been represented as heroic in their struggle with their own managers and proprietors). Films about journalists as villains, on the other hand, tend to critique the media institutions themselves, and those who work in them, and in particular the popular, ‘tabloid’ media. In a similar fashion to much scholarly critique of journalism, film-makers tend to equate popular with degenerate, damaging, noteworthy.