A scoopless Scoop: What Netflix gets wrong about the news business in its re-creation of Newsnight’s Prince Andrew coup
There are, however, a lot of films about investigate journalism. Blame Alan J Pakula, who set the ball rolling with All the President’s Men. Much of the template has remained in place nearly 50 years on. Late nights in deserted offices. Rolled-up shirtsleeves and loosened ties . Tips that turn into dead ends. Endless phone calls. Repeated disappointments. Final vindication. In older variants, the presses start to roll in the final scene.
The best films about investigative journalism emphasise the values of hard graft and dogged persistence, and steer away as much as possible from cheap cliffhangers. In the right hands, such as Tom McCarthy’s, in, all that granular procedural detail accumulates its own dramatic tension. Even these films hover perilously close to some of the cliches of the form, but they are both solid, midmarket entertainments of the old school, rooted in the facts of their respective cases .
It adds further insult that Scoop shares its title with the greatest satire ever written about journalism, Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel, described correctly by Christopher Hitchens as “a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps”.