When the film All The President's Men opened to great acclaim in 1976, the country embraced Hollywood's depiction of reporters as heroes, portrayed by superstars Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, embodying the best of American values. What a difference twenty years makes. When Oliver Stone's Nixon was released a couple of months ago, the role of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in exposing Watergate had been reduced to about thirty seconds of offhand dialogue in a three-hour, seventeen-minute film. Stone said sneeringly in a Newsweek interview that All The President's Men, produced by Redford, had "glamorized" an undeserving press.

Hollywood is less concerned with the accuracy of a characterization than with its fidelity to the mood of the times and its box-office potential. And Stone -- who once celebrated the courageous truth-seeking reporter in Salvador (1986) but more recently portrayed a journalist as the lowest form of life in Natural Born Killers (1994) -- doesn't appear to think much of the reporter-as-hero archetype anymore.

He's not alone. Consider Quiz Show (1994), about the TV game-show scandal of 1958. In reality, newspaper investigators played a big role in uncovering how contestants on the program Twenty-One were secretly given the answers in advance. On screen, there are no newspaper investigators. The case is cracked by a lone Senate aide. It is noteworthy that this film was produced and directed by erstwhile press "glamorizer" Redford.

Or consider Just Cause (1995), based on a novel of the same title by John Katzenbach. In the book, the main character is a journalist who wins a Pulitzer Prize for disclosing evidence that frees a death-row inmate and who then discovers he is guilty and tries to bring him back to justice. But in the movie, the journalist disappears from the plot entirely, replaced by Sean Connery as an idealistic law professor.

All of which demonstrates a striking change in the journalist's place in American pop culture. A cinematic staple in past decades was the journalist as idealist -- gruff and hard-bitten yet unwilling to yield to cynicism, intolerant of bullies and crooks and always ready to fight for the right: think of Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent (1940), whose all-American values help him expose a Nazi plot; Humphrey Bogart in Deadline USA, putting his life at risk as an editor taking on the mob; Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome (1979), defying big business to expose a nuclear nightmare.

Today, with the odd exception (Denzel Washington as an ace reporter in 1993's The Pelican Brief), such characters have faded away, while the journalist as boob or bounder is becoming more marketable. In Bob Roberts (1992), for instance, the TV reporters covering a charlatan Senate candidate are so cretinous that you expect to see drool trickling from their lips; only one obscure reporter for an alternative newspaper catches the candidate's dark side. Hero (1992) portrays witless TV checkbook journalists who try to squeeze ratings out of an airline crash story and end up losing $1 million to a con man who poses as the missing crash scene samaritan.

Other contemporary films cast those in the news business as outright villains. In Newsies (1992), Joseph Pulitzer (Robert Duvall) is shown as a cold, ruthless cad who cuts the income of his impoverished street-urchin newsboys to boost his profits. And he is a nice guy compared to the aspiring TV news star (Nicole Kidman) in 1995's dark comedy To Die For. She is one of the most amoral, calculating film villainesses in recent memory, stopping at nothing, including murder, to catapult herself from cable weather girl to the next Diane Sawyer. Stone's even more disturbing Natural Born Killers features a swaggering TV crime reporter (Robert Downey, Jr.) who pretends to be appalled by acts of violence he actually loves. He ends up gunning down some innocent folk just to experience the "purity" of the act. A mass murderer who takes him hostage tells him: "You're a hate. . . . You're not even a hate, you're a media person. Media is like the weather only it's man-made. . . . You're scum. . . . Killing you and what you represent is a statement. . . ."

The movies have always featured press villains or anti-heroes (some fully realized and three-dimensional, like the narcissistic, truth-twisting publisher in Citizen Kane, 1941). But for every celluloid journalist who embodies the worst in human nature (the corrupt Big Boss publishers in Frank Capra films, the character-assassin Winchellesque columnist in 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, the super-manipulative reporter who delays a rescue of a man who fell down a mine shaft to build suspense and circulation in 1951's The Big Carnival), Hollywood once gave us a half-dozen crusading white hats.

No longer. And this points up the antipathy to the news media that has been building for well over a decade, as sensationalism and a profits-above-all philosophy metastasized through our news organs, weakening their standards and enfeebling their public spirit. Hollywood comes to reflect shifts in American culture and its institutions, but slowly. There is a lag between when an institution develops the symptoms of an illness and when the movies respond, by which point the disease is often far advanced. When it comes to journalism, the Robert Downey, Jr., and Nicole Kidman characters are like bad news on a lung biopsy.

As Katzenbach (an ex-Miami Herald journalist who has had two novels made into films) pointed out in an interview, "Because of the explosion of tabloid TV, tabloid journalism, and the mob approach to reporting, the journalist is seen as a ghoul. . . . Hollywood always reflects, sooner or later, the public feelings -- all of those polls showing that newspaper reporters rank down there with dentists and serial killers."

He also points out that Hollywood prefers to paint its characters with lots of white or black and relatively little gray and to sketch them quickly, tapping the preconceptions of the audience. Although he did not write the screenplay for Just Cause, he suspects his novel's main character was transmuted from journalist to scholar on screen because a professor is today far easier than a journalist to establish in quick strokes as a person of integrity.

It's no surprise, then, that the few films that depict journalists as relatively benign generally evoke an earlier period, from the thirties to the fifties, when the journalist was still in good enough standing to be projected as Everyman. It was a time when, in the old films (often scripted by ex-journalists idealizing the gritty authenticity of their pre-Hollywood days) reporters were men of the people in trench coats and rumpled suits, with press cards in their hats, who skewered hypocritical politicians and other pretentious types, chased fires and crime stories and shouted "Stop the presses!"

Three recent films echo such old movies, though not very effectively. In The Paper (1994), Michael Keaton is the city editor of a down-at-heel tabloid who rejects a job at the snooty New York Timesesque Sentinel, chases down a crime story and then takes glee in yelling "Stop the presses!" for the first time in his career. (Alas, Keaton's hard-boiled idealism is a shadow of his cinematic forebears': he helps prevent his managing editor from knowingly printing a false story so the paper can carry on in its sub-mediocrity without additional taint.)

In I Love Trouble (1994), Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts are trench-coated police reporters who fall for each other while competing, no holds barred, on a crime story. Although it is set in the present like The Paper, this film struggles lamely to draw upon such charming rogue press films of yore as His Girl Friday (1940). The underwhelming Public Eye(1992), in which Joe Pesci plays a rumpled, eccentric, intense, super-aggressive free-lance photographer, is set in New York in 1942. He's about as far removed from today's standard college-educated yuppie journalist as you can get.

 Slouching toward extinction along with the hero films have been those that once lampooned the press with the hope -- naively idealistic, it turns out -- that this institution might be rehabilitated. Back in 1971, for instance, when Cronkite was still going strong but trivialization of the network news was becoming a worry, Woody Allen opened his film Bananas with a TV sports reporter -- Howard Cosell, playing Howard Cosell -- going live for the assassination of a Latin American president ("He's . . . DOWN! It's over! It's all over for El Presidente!") Today, of course, reality has caught up and it's almost a clichŽ to point out that news divisions actually do reduce life to a spectator sport, from wars (served up live with special video logos and stirring martial theme music) to natural disasters (recall "Hurricane" Rather's flagpole-clutching Man vs. The Elements bout when a huge storm hit Florida last October) to the celebrity trials that TV has made the new center of national debate.

In Network, which seemed like wild caricature when it opened in 1976, an entertainment programmer seizes control of a nightly news show with lagging ratings. She starts broadcasting sensational footage of actual crimes committed by terrorists and letting ordinary people vent frustrations on the news (in a nightly segment called "Vox Populi") -- shades of today's reality-based crime and prime-time call-in shows. She also showcases aging anchor Howard "Mad as Hell" Beale (Peter Finch) because he has gone crazy and can be counted on to build ratings by saying bizarre things as the "mad prophet of the airwaves." Today there are many such prophets on the real airwaves, not only on talk radio but on the news "discussion" shows of major networks, fulminating and yelling predictions to grab attention.

After Network, the technique of exaggerating dangerous trends in journalism was used sparingly, perhaps because filmmakers were becoming more jaded and realized that press excesses had become so flagrant there was no longer any need to exaggerate. Absence of Malice (1981), for instance, is not a lampoon but a somber account of how an over-ambitious newswoman (Sally Field) is manipulated into falsely reporting that a local businessman is a murder suspect. Journalism's cynical arrogance is encapsulated by her paper's house lawyer: "As a matter of law, the truth of your story is irrelevant. We have no knowledge the story is false, therefore we are absent malice. We've been both reasonable and prudent. . . . We may say whatever we like . . . and he is powerless to do us harm. Democracy is served."

Malice conveys a sense of outrage at the way things can really work in the news business, but by the time we get to Broadcast News (1987), a more complaisant or cynical tone is becoming evident. The film deals with the encroaching shallowness in TV journalism but uses it as a backdrop for romantic interplay between news producer Holly Hunter and William Hurt, the inexperienced reporter-anchor hired for his looks. We are evidently supposed to see Hunter as a symbol of old-line journalistic integrity: she bridles at the show-biz gimmicks and news division budget cuts imposed by management, hates fakery so much that she breaks up with Hurt after learning that he pretended to cry on the air to dramatize an interview with a rape victim. Strangely, however, the plot has her benefiting from staff cuts by the bottom-line boys she detests, becoming a bureau chief and later pole-vaulting to the managing editor slot when pretty boy Hurt is elevated to anchordom. The unintended, subliminal message of her success is hardly idealistic: you can moralize a little but in the end you go along to get along, even if that includes becoming a tool of airheajournalism.

Even more jaded, in their own way, were the seemingly harder-hitting Natural Born Killers and To Die For, whose journalistic characters are so incorrigible that they can be rehabilitated only with a bullet to the head and are accordingly done in.

What we are seeing in recent productions is the demise of a myth that has been a mainstay of American film -- the Truth-Seeking Reporter who will stop at nothing to keep the public informed and who, to quote sociologist Michael Schudson, tells us "what we may have been once, what we might again become . . . ." This myth has given rise to its share of Hollywood hokum, to be sure, but it has also been a beacon in the fog for aspiring journalists and even some veterans of the trade.

In many of the older press films, there comes a point when a journalist-hero gives voice to the myth directly, as when Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee tells his two Watergate reporters: "You guys are probably pretty tired. . . . Go on home, get a nice hot bath, rest up -- fifteen minutes -- then get your asses back in gear. . . . Nothing's riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country."

One of the myth's corniest distillations is in the Jack Webb day-in-the life-of-a-newsroom film Ð30Ð (1959; available on video; best watched with press colleagues while imbibing heavily). In one scene, a harried copy boy played by David Nelson, of Ozzie and Harriet fame, tells a co-worker he's quitting the paper. His friend commiserates, saying: "What is it? A newspaper, that's all. It's not like we joined the priesthood." Overhearing this, the gruff, hard-bitten city editor (William Conrad, later the fat gumshoe in TV's Cannon) tears into them and reveals that he, like so many gruff, hard-bitten cinematic city editors before him, is an idealist at heart: "That's right, Aristotle. . . . Do you know what people use these for? They roll them up and they swat their puppies for wetting on the rug, they spread them on the floor when they're painting the walls, they wrap fish in them . . . BUT [pause as he cups the paper reverently, with two open hands, like a Bible, as stirring background music begins] this also happens to be a couple of more things. It's got print on it that tells stories that hundreds of good men all over the world have broken their backs to get. . . . It gives a lot of information to a lot of people who wouldn't have known about these things if we hadn't taken the trouble to tell them. It's the sum total of the work of a lot of guys who don't quit. . . . It only costs ten cents, that's all. If you read only the comics section and the want ads, it's still the best buy for your money in the world." Needless to say, young David Nelson stays on the job.

Like everything else produced, directed and acted in by Jack Webb, is so bad it's almost good, so square it's almost hip. But for me -- to my mild chagrin -- the city editor's soliloquy had more than just the camp appeal of an old Dragnet episode. It actually evoked a twinge or two of genuine feeling. Webb was a straight arrow's straight arrow, an anti-elitist who was in the business of affirming the best of mainstream America as he saw it. And in 1959 that America included the news business. A kid could see a film about reporters and come away thinking, "I bet it would be really great to be one."

Those were the days.

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