Whither newspapers? With Russell Crowe as the champion of the downtrodden reporter, good endings seem possible for an industry often portrayed as morgue-bound. The new thriller, State of Play, in which Crowe stars, is so mesmeric that it may, in the optimist's dream, do for the print media what Florence Nightingale did for nursing. Such an image makeover would, however, be a slog. Give or take estate agents and bankers, few trades are held in lower esteem. Still, if anyone can sell the hack as hero, it is Crowe. A late choice, he was persuaded to take the role by Kevin Macdonald, director of Touching The Void, after Brad Pitt pulled out. While Pitt would have been wrong in the part – too silky and sanitised – Crowe is perfectly cast as Cal McAffrey, the shambling journalist whose investigative methods no longer fit the cash-starved newsroom of the Washington Globe, run by an editor (Helen Mirren) desperate for cheap sensation and fast scoops. Although the film, based on a BBC series broadcast in 2003, features murder and conspiracy on Capitol Hill, Crowe looks British to his stick-on boot soles. On the one hand, his performance is pure nostalgia; a trip down the memory lane of newsrooms inhabited by reporters wearing unfortunate hand-knits and slugging whisky from paper cups. On the other hand, it is a lament for truth, honesty and courage. Even sceptics who believe those qualities are as redundant as a green visor in modern journalism may leave cinemas with tears in their eyes. State of Play is not simply the best suspense movie you will see this year: it is also a death notice. "Passed away quietly… much missed." Such obituaries may not fill the classified advertising columns of many of Britain's regional newspapers for much longer. Macdonald's film coincides with the grimmest time in memory for newspapers. On both sides of the Atlantic, recession is sweeping great names towards oblivion. Here, the Yorkshire Post, the Scotsman and a host of other titles are shuddering as advertising collapses. In Bristol, the Evening Post and its sister paper, the Western Daily Press, are shrivelling and would-be Cal McAffreys being redirected to JobCentre Plus. In the US, the Los Angeles Times is in crisis and the Chicago Tribune in administration. In Seattle, Philadelphia and other major centres, newspapers are struggling to survive. So what, some might ask. Many people are losing their jobs. If papers, including national titles, are killed by the double hit of technological advance and financial crisis, who cares? The brilliance of Crowe's performance is to explain why such an outcome would not simply result in fewer stories about Cheryl Cole. Democracy itself is under threat. Though it follows a long tradition of films featuring journalists (think Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, Lemmon and Matthau in The Front Page, Clark Gable in It Happened One Night), State of Play is not just another chronicle of Hollywood hackery. Even the story of Watergate, played out by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men, lacks a dimension that Crowe supplies. State of Play is a reminder that, for all their tawdry, intrusive, mawkish ways, newspapers still matter. Think back to the days before OK! Magazine became a sentinel of public record and a big scoop meant buying a footballer's wedding. Start with the Charge of the Light Brigade. Contrary to popular myth, its first great narrator was not Alfred Lord Tennyson, who engraved a relatively small military disaster in the public imagination with his lines: "Into the valley of death rode the 600… Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them…" But Crimea was the first media war, and Tennyson's inspiration was William Howard Russell, a Cal McAffrey of his day and the journalist who recorded soldiers "rushing to the arms of sudden death". As Russell wrote: "They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war." The lyricism belonged to Tennyson ("Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die"), but the first draft of history belonged to Russell. Many years on, in 1969, the American journalist Seymour Hersh sat down to type a report for the St Louis Post Despatch. "William J Calley Jr, 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam veteran with the nickname 'Rusty'. The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission." Long after he exposed the My Lai massacre, Hersh produced some of the most telling investigative reporting of the war on terror. While other US journalists stood accused of failing to interrogate George W Bush's attack on Iraq, the British media attacked their politicians with more gusto. Iraq was the initial armchair war, delivered 24/7 to front-room screens by "embedded" television reporters. Even so, the unravelling of political lies, the disclosures that Saddam Hussein had no WMD and the fakery of Tony Blair's dodgy dossier were a tribute to the power of newspapers to excavate the truths that leaders long to bury. Obviously it's easy to romanticise print journalism; a trade that, at its Fleet Street worst, was a gravy train of excess. There is a story, not apocryphal, of a photographer who spent a flight home from India copying any Hindi names he could find in the airline literature to support his fictitious expenses claim. Some time later he received a polite note from the accounts department, which read: "Would you mind explaining why you have claimed £450 for entertaining Mr Sickbag?" With the days of bogus expenses and awesome amounts of alcohol long gone, the charge has altered from leglessness to mindlessness. Even distinguished papers are, supposedly, so awash with celebrity burblings that, were Martin Luther King to deliver his dream speech today, he might find it bumped off the front page by Britney's knickers. But trivia has always co-existed with the long and weary search for truth and justice. Without the dogged focus of Daily Mirror journalist Paul Foot, the Birmingham Six and the men convicted of the murder of newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater might have spent even longer behind bars for crimes they did not commit. If you watch the recently released film The Damned United, remember Richard Stott, the Mirror editor who sought to discredit the alleged dubious dealings of the former England football coach, Don Revie, when no one else dared cross him. Foot and Stott are dead, but the tradition of investigative journalism lives on. Who, if not newspapers, would have cried outrage over the fate of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper vendor assaulted by a riot officer shortly before he collapsed of a fatal heart attack during the G20 protests? Certainly not the police, whose misleading account implied a hope that the whole affair would, like Mr Tomlinson, die quietly. Who, if not newspapers, would continue to pick away at the inventories of patio furniture and soft furnishings for which MPs and ministers are claiming, under rules that would strike any normal citizen as a kleptomaniacs' charter? No journalist has risked life and limb – as Russell Crowe's character did – to expose the truth about the Home Secretary's bathplug. Someone leaked the details, and newspapers piled in. But heroics, though sometimes necessary, are not the staple of good journalism. The importance of newspapers often turns on the painstaking, the mundane and the banal. Local newspapers, dismissed for their "churnalism" by the Guardian journalist Nick Davies in his book, Flat Earth News, are not dull chronicles stuffed with PR handouts and pictures of amusingly shaped vegetables. At their best, they are the heartbeat of democracy, staffed by those ideally placed to sleuth out corruption, blight and heartbreak. The world does not begin and end at Westminster. Babies are not tortured or pensioners left to rot in the marbled atriums of Whitehall. The scandals of modern Britain often take place in council offices, sink estates and courtrooms far from London. Bloggers and the internet may rule the world, but without a vibrant local press citizens will forfeit their only whistleblower and communities will lose a vital bond. Harold Evans, the former Sunday Times editor and guru of journalism, will devote much of his forthcoming memoir, My Paper Chase, to the vital role of newspapers. As he told me last week: "A good independent newspaper is the best watchdog in the public interest – better than Parliament, the law courts and all the vested-interest lobbies, because of its capacity to gather facts others would prefer to suppress and bring them into the public focus." According to Evans, commentators in US regions where newspapers have been closed or starved of resources are already "raising the alarm about the resurgence of corruption and wrongdoing". So hooray for Kevin Macdonald and Russell Crowe. Their film is not simply a taut thriller or a treat for those with ink for blood. It is also a requiem for freedom. As newspapers begin to die unmourned, State of Play sounds the warning on how terrifying unchecked power would be. State of Play opens in cinemas on April 22 ( www.stateofplaymovie.net )Russell Crowe tells it like it should be
Russell Crowe's brilliant turn in the forthcoming newsroom thriller 'State of Play' makes a compelling case for the importance of reporting in exposing lies
Sunday, 12 April 2009
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