The "Heroes" of the Fourth Estate

Throughout its history, one of the most durable Hollywood movie genres has been that of the heroic journalist working alone, always at great risk to life and limb, to expose some great truth that is being suppressed by the powers that be. Hollywood made dozens of these movies from the late 70’s through the early 90’s and most of them were worth paying to see at the theater.

Other than Westerns, Courtroom Dramas and Cop Thrillers, this was one of Hollywood’s favorite go-to genres. They were so popular in the Biz that we used to have a joke that if you were serious about getting nominated for an Oscar, your best bet was to make a movie about the Holocaust or a Journalist. Many of the movies in that latter category, “All The President’s Men”, “The Insider”, “The Killing Fields” and “Absence of Malice” to name just a few, are among the finest films ever made and were indeed nominated for a slew of Oscars.

As the 2000’s turned into the 2020’s and Hollywood jettisoned one classic genre after another in the pursuit of cost savings and corporate billion dollar blockbuster-making, the heroic Journalist story remained one of the few classic adult drama genres that Hollywood seemed unable to quit. There is no doubt in my mind that this was because, in the character of the heroic journalist bravely speaking truth to power, Hollywood saw themselves… unafraid storytellers courageously pushing forbidden narratives out into a hopelessly troglodytic America that didn’t want to hear them.

There’s just one problem with that… here at the beginning of 2025, journalists occupy a space on the popularity spectrum somewhere between pond scum and crotch rot. As a result of this sad state of affairs which is almost entirely of the News Media’s own making, the genre, like so many others, has begun to die off. The last heroic journalist movie to make any kind of a dent in the culture at all was “Spotlight”, a 20 million dollar movie which won Best Picture and made just under 100 million dollars at the Box office.

That was a decade ago.

All of which brings me to Gene Hackman.

There aren’t many holes in my Gene Hackman viewing history, but ever since he died, I’ve been going through his oeuvre, catching up with the great films I hadn’t seen in a while, as well watching the few that I’d missed, all the time a little sad in the knowledge that there will never be any more.

One of those movies I’d somehow missed was a Roger Spottiswoode film from 1983 called “Under Fire.” Gene Hackman plays a supporting role in the film, it’s really Nick Nolte’s movie, but Hackman is characteristically great, delivering some classic Hackman lines with that well known exasperated tough guy who is about to sock you in the teeth cadence that no one did better. Lines like “get a map and look up Nicaragua, Charlie… you drive to New Orleans and then you turn left.”

“Under Fire” is not a great movie, but it is an interesting one, and Spottiswoode is a good director with a solid and eclectic resume (I happen to love “Shoot to Kill”). The problem is that the movie is never sure what point it wants to make, its political message is horribly muddled and ultimately it comes off as pop culture agitprop.

Nolte and Joanna Cassidy play a photojournalist and a reporter, respectively, who are sent to Managua in 1979 to cover the civil war between President Somoza and the Marxist Sandinistas. The sympathies of the filmmakers are clearly with the Sandinista rebels throughout the story and this bias results in some fascinating contradictions when the movie is watched 40 years on.

Towards the end, as Nolte and Cassidy are on the run from Government soldiers, they seek refuge in the home of a Somoza-friendly French businessman named Jazy, only to discover that he is being held at gunpoint by rebels too young to be at war. Angry at what she and Nolte have been through, as well as Jazy’s complicity in it, Cassidy lashes out at the Frenchman, saying “you chose the wrong side!” to which Jazy replies “in 20 years, we shall know who’s right.”

And history has proven him correct. Nicaragua was a basket case under Somoza, it was a basket case under the Sandinistas, and it is a basket case today. Billions of foreign aid dollars sent to arm one side or the other over the years has not changed one damned thing. It was a complicated war fought on our hemispherical doorstep, a proxy fight in the Cold War paradigm of East versus West… it broke Congress and it nearly brought down a popular US President. And despite all that, here in 2025 Daniel Ortega, the Nosferatu of Central American Marxism, stands accused of the same war crimes of which Somoza was presumed guilty.

In retrospect, Cassidy’s moral certainty in the chaos of 1979 seems naive at best, criminal at worst.

Eventually, the story turns on Nolte’s decision to break his journalistic code of ethics to shoot a fake photo which the Sandinistas hope will convince the world that their assassinated leader is still alive. The concern is that if the world discovers that “Rafael” is dead, the money will stop flowing and there will be tremendous international pressure on the Sandinistas to stand down, under the theory that the war is now unwinable. This is a plot twist which echoes our modern concerns around “fake news”, our 20 wasted years in Afghanistan and our ongoing troubles in The Ukraine.

The film reminds us that no one who has been paying attention could believe that 2022 was the first time American taxpayers heard the words “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” from our government.

In the end, even though Nolte and Cassidy are the nominal heroes of this story, it is Jazy, the doomed Frenchman, who turns out to be right… about almost everything. “I like you people, but you are sentimental shits! You fall in love with the poets; the poets fall in love with the Marxists; the Marxists fall in love with themselves. The country falls in love with the rhetoric, and in the end we are stuck with tyrants.”

Yes. And yet somehow this little truism never makes it into the network news broadcast packages Cassidy files with her New York bureau, nor does it find its way into Notle’s award-winning war photography. But then the real truths never do, do they?

As far as the unbiased morality of American journalists goes, the movie’s gut punch comes as Cassidy staggers into a refugee camp looking for Nolte, who is missing and presumed dead. It is there that she first sees the photographs of Hackman, playing a network news host, being murdered by Somoza’s troops. As she cries over the footage, a Sandinista nurse sidles up to her…

Nurse: You are a journalist?

Cassidy: (nods)

Nurse: You knew him?

Cassidy: (nods)

Nurse: Fifty thousand Nicaraguans have died and now a Yankee. Perhaps now America will be outraged at what has happened here.

Cassidy: Perhaps they will

Nurse: Maybe we should have killed an American journalist fifteen years ago?

Ouch!

In the end, Spottiswoode’s sympathies are so tightly wound up with the Marxists’ struggle, that he can’t even spare a moment of sympathy for his flawed heroes. It seems that no one in this movie much cares for American journalists, not even the director telling their story. In that sense, the Nicaraguans were forty years ahead of the curve.

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