Try Again

7.5.24

Journalists get portrayed in movies all the time; some films get it right, some don't. 

"The Last Letter From Your Lover," a 2021 film, gets it partly right for me, although you may never meet a journalist exactly like the character Ellie Haworth plays in the film.

If you spend a lot of time around young journalists, you notice certain characteristics. Young reporters typically don't know yet what attracts them to particular types of stories yet, and that's just as it should be.

Some come out of such a specific background that they almost embody it -- a place, a race, a culture, a gender, a religion, an emotional or intellectual environment. But that doesn't mean that they should do stories that only conform with that background.

Anyone who goes into journalism and develops to any significant degree knows that while his or her background matters a great deal, it is hardly the end of the story. It's more like the beginning. We need to do stories despite our backgrounds as much as because of them.

I remember conversations I had with my late friend Raul Ramirez, a long-time executive at KQED, the NPR/PBS affiliate in San Francisco, while he was dying of cancer. He wanted to establish a fund that would support diversity in journalism at San Francisco State University in his final days, and he did.

I promised him I would help supervise the journalists that got internships via that fund as long as I could, and I have done that.

What Raul meant about diversity was in no way confined to representations of only certain ethnic or racial groups, sexual orientations, political perspectives or any of the other categories that divide us one from another.

In the movies and in popular imagination, reporters rarely appear as nuanced as the people Raul wanted to help break into our business. In film, we often are portrayed as heroes ("All the President's Men"), irritants ("Maid in Manhattan"), or naive idealists ("Almost Famous").

And there are many others: "The Post," "True Story," "Official Secrets," etc.

What I like about the part played by Felicity Jones in "Last Letter..." is she is just an everyday person who makes mistakes, questions the stupid rules she encounters, and never gives up on her investigation. When at one point in the film she reaches an apparent dead-end in the trail, an older man and former reporter himself says bluntly: "Well, you're a journalist. Try again."

She takes his advice and makes the breakthrough that allows the film to reach its resolution.

In the process, she finds out a lot about herself and also about something she didn't know she was searching for -- how to love and be loved.

That's about as perfect a conclusion as a journalist (or anyone) can hope to achieve.

(I first published this one when the film was released in 2021.)

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