The worst journalists in the world are not in a newsroom. They are in the fictions on our screens. The trail of their questionable practice has been followed for decades in series and films, regardless of how intense they were. thrillers politicians, forgettable romantic comedies or adaptations of famous real cases that shocked the world. It didn’t matter what genre they were placed in. The same pattern has been repeated tirelessly over and over again: at a given moment in the plot, the reporter would end up exchanging sex for information. As if being a woman and a journalist meant that taking off her clothes for the public good was unavoidable. All of them embracing the cliché of the journalist fox.
Sally Field slept with her source, Paul Newman, in Absence of malice (1981). Katie Holmes did not fall short in the controversial sex scene that was much talked about in Thank you for smoking (2005). In a terrible move for her destiny, Kate Mara did the same with Kevin Spacey in House of Cards (2013). Alcoholic, seductive and liar, Amy Adams was the journalist who most angered the guild in Open wounds (2018). In the epilogue of Gilmore Girlsthe upright Rory would also end up drunk in bed with one of her informants, dressed as Chewbacca. Even Clint Eastwood fell into this trope in Richard Jewell (2019), when journalist Kathy Scruggs (played by Olivia Wilde in the film), the newspaper’s reporter, decided that this was how she should get her exclusive. Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) which reported on the FBI investigation into the high-profile case of a security guard at the Atlanta Olympics who spotted a suspicious backpack that turned out to be an explosive. The newspaper’s statement against the film was of little use: “The reporter for the film AJC “She is reduced to an object that is sold for sex. This is entirely false and malicious, and extremely damaging and defamatory,” the text said. Warner Bros. turned a deaf ear and viewers were left with that impression.
With the aim of correcting this worn-out archetype and other prejudices about female communicators, the show premiered on HBO Max on March 15 The girls on the busCreated jointly by producer Julie Plec (The vampire diaries) and journalist Amy Chozick, the series is a free adaptation of Chasing HillaryChozick’s 2018 memoir about his coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for The New York Times. In order not to depress the audience, the series does not capture the collapse and paradigm shift that was the presidential race that ended worse than the Titanic and with more white twenty-somethings crying their eyes out than at a Taylor Swift concert. In this series, Plec and Chozick have devised an alternative universe, a fable whose plot revolves around the presidential races of several Democratic politicians who do not exist in real life: a veteran whose age raises questions about his suitability for office, a town mayor who outgrows his minimal name recognition and a famous writer who will receive the support of a fictional Hillary Clinton, a senator who lost the previous presidential campaign.
Between absurdity and grandiloquence – tones that do not quite fit, but very common in journalism – and more in tune with the lightness of other journalist series such as The Bold Type that with the self-conscious solemnity of The Newsroom, The girls on the bus It is a light fiction that could have been a fine parody of journalism. Veepbut preferred to dangerously approach the soap opera universe of Shonda Rhimes without the bedroom scenes.
Overcoming viral ridicule
The protagonist is Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), a correspondent for the New York Sentinel (what would be the Times), a thirty-something who must overcome a professional slump after going viral for ridiculous reasons in another Democratic campaign. Sadie has recurring visions in which Hunter S. Thompson appears to her giving her gonzo writing advice, a fact that is hardly credible for a journalist under 40 years old educated in the heat of the fourth wave of feminism. Her editor, Bruce (Griffin Dunne, eternal protagonist of Wow, what a night and nephew of Joan Didion), is inspired by the legend of the Times David Carr, but here he appears as a more paternal figure, far from the halo of a seasoned and sarcastic reporter that we see in the documentary Page One.
Joining Sadie is the always terrific Carla Gugino as Grace, a cynical, social media-challenged Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran who pretends to care about her college-aged daughters when she’s actually using the campus visit to score a scoop (exclusive). Lola (Natasha Benham) is the young woman on the campaign bus, a histrionic character who brings together all the vaguest clichés of TikTok and Generation Z in an irritating and exaggerated way. The fourth wheel is Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore), a racialized and Republican woman, a liberal feminist who believes she will break the glass ceiling with her merits on her own and who works in a Fox News travesty, determined to overcome all the racist obstacles of her network.
Unbeatable clichés
The title of the series plays on that of the classic in American political chronicle, The Boys on the Buswhich the reporter wrote about Rolling Stone Timothy Crouse on the McGovern-Nixon campaign in 1972—hence, perhaps, the ghostly presence of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote the book’s foreword. “We may have started out as competitors, but we ended up as a family,” Sadie warns at the beginning of the series, telling viewers that the four women will uncover a dark plot that will lead to her arrest. The protagonist will fight against sexist double standards regarding female communicators, including that of the journalist who exchanges sex for information. Only that she herself, years ago, had an affair with the man who is now the press secretary of the candidate she must follow (Malcolm Scott) and the sexual tension will increase as the series progresses. Her feminist prayers will not be answered.
It doesn’t just happen in American fiction. In the report The representation of female journalists in Spanish cinema (2012), film critic Lucía Tello analyzed how female journalists were portrayed in 600 films. In addition to confirming the visibility of less than that of her colleagues in the profession – they rarely appeared on screen without the company of a man – she also warned that “many journalists have their informant partner as a partner or ex-partner.” Tello highlighted in her study two characters who “represent with greater force and forcefulness the role of the authentic vamp (the archetype that defines women who use their sexual attractiveness to exploit men)”: Najwa Nimri as Barbara in Oviedo Express (2007), “going so far as to say that she has ‘her heart between her legs’,” and Monica Randall as Esmeralda in Fourteen Stations (1991), “earning the title of ‘Hydra’, in honour of the mythical multi-headed serpent that ended up being killed by Hercules, and which gives us an idea of the concept that her environment has of the journalist”.
With The girls on the busIt seemed like it would never happen again, but the curse on the vision of the journalists is still there, unchanged. Another failed mission in the revenge against the journalist fox.
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