Sure, journalists can be pushy louts, too hurried or self-important to worry who gets in their way. But movies and pop culture tend to fixate on the reporter as loud, conniving or politically sold-out, at the expense of images that are much more subtle and true.
Real newsrooms are quiet: keyboards clicking with the sound of details being nailed down, conversation burbling between reporters and editors about what's fair and, not uncommonly, the journalist speaking quietly into a phone, to console someone who's lost a loved one.
Reporters understand that they live in a rough and tumble business and that they can't always make friends. Still, it can be dispiriting to watch the relentless caricature of media running amok.
That's why it was such a pleasure this week to catch a screening of "Breaking News, Breaking Down," a documentary that shows journalists as they really are, often struggling with catastrophic events, while trying to maintain the humanity of both their subjects and themselves.
Television anchorman Mike Walter created the short film to show how journalists can be overwhelmed by deep immersion into tragedy and how little attention this phenomenon has received.
The military, law enforcement and firefighting are often cited as the professions that require running toward danger. Walter's documentary demonstrates, quite movingly, how journalists must be added to that list.
"Breaking News, Breaking Down" shows how reporters and photographers dive headlong toward disaster, seldom imagining that they can be snared in the psychological trauma.
Walter, now 53, began to learn this lesson Sept. 11, 2001, when, caught in traffic on a crowded highway, he watched a gleaming jet plunge into the Pentagon and disintegrate into a fireball.
In the months that followed, he became fixated on stories about victims and loss -- like the piece about a young mother whose husband died that day in the Pentagon. Walter couldn't help but think that, in a way, he had watched the man die.
The TV man had covered plenty of bloodshed here in the U.S. and overseas in hot spots like Somalia. "I thought, 'I'm tough, I can take this,' " he recalled this week.
But at night he would slip into dark dreams that often ended with a serene outing interrupted as a jet plunged toward some family gathering. During the day, he couldn't pull out of a fog of depression.
