All The President's Men, 1976

The Watergate scandal, which stained and terminated the Nixon presidency, made Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein the '70s' primo nerd-studs — guys who became famous by doing an important job sensationally well. Back then smart college grads — whose counterparts 30 years later would head to Wall Street for the kicks and power — wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. It was only natural that, in the movie version of their best-seller All the President's Men, the Washington Post cub reporters would be played by the top stars of the decade, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
William Goldman's script captured the exhausting leg work and the connect-the-dots inspirations that nailed a Presidential conspiracy; and director Alan J. Pakula created a tone both bustling and ominous. Here was a thriller where the good guys work on phones and typewriters, and the bad guys are trying to kidnap with the Constitution.
Superman, 1978

"Disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great Metropolitan newspaper..." What male journalist hasn't, at some time or other, thought he exactly fit that description? Sure, we're all superheroes hidden in double-breasted jackets, reveling in our interplanetary superiority even as we get dissed by an ignorant editor and dismissed by the star lady reporter. We use phone booths not to contact a source but to change into our red-lettered costume; and instead of taking a taxi to a crime scene, we fly there. Christopher Reeve's solid earnestness in the 1970s-'80s spate of Superman movies was of course inspired by the Shuster-Siegel comic book, but it also suited the new mold of crusading young journalists who'd do anything to save the planet, get the story and bring evildoers to justice.
Truth, justice and the American way: that was the motto for Superman and Woodward-Bernstein.
Welcome to Sarajevo, 1997

What good can a journalist do in a world full of evil? Bring the evil to light, certainly, and expose the malefactors, if not to justice, then to the opprobrium of the public. All right, and then what?
The early-'90s slaughter of Bosnians (most of them Muslims) by Serbs (most of them Christian) was the first fully televised holocaust. Viewers watched, were horrified and flicked the channel to Cheers; European and American leaders watched, were horrified and did next to nothing. In Michael Winterbottom's fiction film with a documentary feel, a British reporter (Stephen Dillane), a veteran eyewitness to many such atrocities, determines to adopt a Bosnian child. It seems one of the two options available to reporters at war: a kind gesture or, more futile but more therapeutic, a scream.
State of Play, 2003

We mean the 6hr. BBC miniseries, not the Russell Crowe-Ben Affleck remake opening today. Both are about the murder of a woman connected to a prominent politician, and a dogged news team's search for the truth while fighting off the police, the government and powerful corporations with lots to hide. But the original — written by Paul Abbott and directed by David Yates — is much more vigorous and comprehensive in showing how journalists get a big story, wheedle details out of sources and fight their natural instincts to defend a friend who's also the subject of an exposé.
Among the added perks in the BBC version: Polly Walker, world's most desirable woman, as the politician's estranged wife, and Bill Nighy, purring sulfur as the paper's harried editor. This twisty mystery is also a hymn to old-fashioned journalism — the kind where the drudgery of digging for a story, not spitballing on a blog, wins acclaim, readers and self-respect.
Zodiac, 2007

Many of the best newspaper dramas — Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, Alan Pakula's The Parallax View — are really detective stories, where the reporter takes the place of a cop to sleuth out the truth. Zodiac is based on a real case, about a serial killer in San Francisco in the late '60s and early '70s. Real cops were on his trail, but so was a Chronicle political cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who went outside his beat, tracked down leads over a dozen years and gradually settled on a plausible suspect.
Director David Fincher is as obsessive as Graysmith; the movie is a mosaic of tiny details, smudged memories and a journalist's intuition. Put together, the pieces form the image of a killer — and a larger portrait of the lone, dogged print reporter as hero. Take note, please, all of you thinking of canceling your subscription to your local paper.