We've seen so much of the ugly side of journalism in recent years, it's hard to imagine anyone from any major newspaper going out of their way to investigate and expose corruption or evil schemes. I'd sooner buy that an indie journalist or an autistically commited conspiracy theorist infiltrated LexCorp's headquarters and reported on what they saw on their channel than that a renowned reporter did the very same thing and was allowed to publish an article about it.
The trope still exists, but the heroic reporter always enters into conflict with superiors who don't want to publish their stories. There are actually plenty of decent reporters who do good work out there exposing shit, they're just severely limited by their corporate consolidation overlords.
Online journalism is relatively free.
Overlord my ass.
> relatively free
we've seen time and time again that that's not the case. Only at worker-owned outlets do you actually get more complete journalistic freedom because it isn't intruding on ad models or pissing manager bosses off.
Pretty much. Most "reporters" nowadays just sit on Twitter looking for shit to embed from people whom actually are at the scene of a story, and investigative journalism is completely dead unless you're doing some political hit piece with some predetermined narrative.
>Is the heroic reporter trope a relic of the past?
It's fine.
Lois doesn't write for Bleeding Cool or Kotaku.
I'd agree.
You're totally right. She writes for a NYT or WaPo which has been bought by Lex or another Corporation multiple times in the past. Those bastions of journalism would never hinder their coverage if it compromised the interests of sources or ownership, right?
I think OP and I would trust the Lois trope more if she actually did write for something like a Bleeding Cool or Kotaku. Hell Gawker was literally killed because a Theil was so pissed at their not pulling their punches about him, that he subsided the Hulk Hogan legal fight he had no standing in. Deadspin was literally killed because a corporation thought it could run it better than it was, and shit the bed in their attempt.
>because a Theil was so pissed at their not pulling their punches about him
Outing him as gay while he was in a country that has the death penalty for it is a bit more than pissed because they didn't pull their punches.
>Is the heroic reporter trope a relic of the past?
I'll do you one better: It never existed in the first place. Journalists were always moral vermin.
The idea that they would leave the office is already foreign to people. They sit there spitting out articles as fast as they can and if they want footage or photo's some guy does it. The photos dont arrive on the desk, they arrive in an email.
The modern person "getting to the bottom of it" is a racist internet conspiracy theorist.
This makes me imagine a version of Lois Lane shouting "I HATE THE ANTICHRIST" while destroying LexCorp delivery drones
I'm sure there are plenty of journalists who would like to do fancy investigative reporting since that's how you actually make a name for yourself, but that also requires the news companies to budget for that, and why would they when they can just have freelancers submit listicles and twitter summaries for a pittance?
They still do that. The big corporate news companies especially do that. There's a lot more to the news industry than writing about how vanilla ice cream is racist.
In real life Lois would be on Lex's payroll and be constantly shilling for him
With gritted teeth at least.
In real life, Lois would be a gay man in Brazil who broke the Snowden story
Nah, Daily Planet would be a small indie brand labled as white-supremacists by bigger corporate for reporting on actual news, see Redacted
Or "conspiracy theorists".
For the most part. You can get away with it with the Daily Planet because the whole thing exists in a sort of time warp. But outside of these legacies you're not making any new ones.
A few years back Rucka wrote a unhinged mini where Lois went after Drumpf which is the current state of journalism even now.
To be fair OP, it's an angle that's really only ever worked for Lois Lane and The Daily Planet for almost the entirety of comics history. Lois as a character is crafted in a way that she's the perfect superhero love interest, and the perfect partner to Superman specifically, which is why the vast majority of other reporter characters in comics are all poor limitations of her. Similarly, The Daily Planet works within the context of Metropolis and Superman as it, much like the Man of Steel himself, acts in opposition to the deluge of pro-Luthor propaganda and fake news that permeates the media landscape. Where most of the news stand is dominated by tabloids peddling celebrity gossip and rumours, The Daily Planets stands for truth and justice. The anachronistic nature of its depiction as a news company, in a sense, help in selling that charm since it feels like matches with the company's core character. You compare that to the way Marvel has had difficulty trying to modernise The Daily Bugle and you see how The Planet and Lois are at an advantage in regards to this sort of thing.
>To be fair OP
Oh we don't need to be fair to OP at all, they're acting like a wingnut.
The word you're looking for is "Idealism".
It's what should always be the core value of any mainline Superman story,
Metropolis, the city of Tomorrow.
The Daily Planet, the publication of Integrity.
Superman, the icon of Hope.
Exactly. To say it's unrealistic for the Planet to have any integrity because all media are corporate and political whores that have been paid off and are lazy oppertunitists is like saying Superman in unrealistic because nobody with his power could ever be a good person with how shitty the world is, especially with American views.
Which lots of people believe honestly, but still the point is in Superman's world where he is still a paragon of goodness there's companies there like the Planet which somehow retain their morals and integrity.
The Daily Planet is owned by Wayne Enterprises, who use it as a bludgeon against LexCorp, one of their major corporate rivals.
Yeah but that kind of just drags it into the good vs evil story since Wayne Enterprises is owned and managed by Batman who knows Luthor uses his company for villainy stuff. So any hit pieces against them is fueled deep down not by money but by Batman wanting to stop Luthor from doing things like stealing 40 cakes.
Its a hold over from when comic publishing was closer to newspaper production than pandering to specialty nerds. Lois Lane is basically the hot bitch at work who doesn't realize you (yes, you anon!) are hot shit because you put up a front of humility. Reporter was just a job they could write about because they had some semblance of what they do.
Same deal with JJJ, but instead of having some fallback characterization like Lois being a romantic interest for Supes, he's always the dickbag publisher/editor they have to scramble to keep relevant with career changes because newspapers aren't really a thing any more.
The heroic reporter is kinda like the straight arrow cowboy cop. They're virtuous not in alignment with their profession but in spite of it. Everyone else either doesn't give enough of a shit or is corrupt.
Characters like that usually have to wrestle with their superiors to get a story published to, and they usually get deflected with stuff like
>can't print that story
>it's gonna be unpopular
>how are you going to prove it's not libel
>those guys pay us, you're going to be out of a job if we shit on them
>etc.
which is pretty much on the same level as police chief going
>you're a loose cannon
>property damage
>I've got the mayor up my ass because of you
>you're out of control, give me your badge and your gun
Imagine McBain but as a reporter.
>McBain: But Chief, my report will expose City Hall's corruption.
>Chief: It's too hot, McBain, I'm killing the story.
>*McBain slams the chief's head down on a memo spike on the desk*
>McBain: No, I'm killing you.
"How are you going to prove it isn't libel?" isn't wrestling with your boss, it's a base standard.
>standard
>implying a reporter is at significant risk of being proven that he has intended to write libel
A good faith defense doesn't work if people are questioning you from the outset.
>Jimmy, why is your avatar a girl in a frilly dress?
>Well...it's not a girl...
yes, but they always capitulate at the end. what hes saying is that the system isn't just corrupt or indifferent, its that it actively works to suppress the truth.
those type of shows always return to the status quo at the end, showing that cops and journilists are basically hardworking, honest people who are good at their jobs and care about truth and justice.
You can't really sell that narrative if journalists are sleazy whores and cops are psychotic fascists.
Heroic reporters are heroic because they're not the norm dummy, same as any other heroic character. If all reporters were heroic, or even the average ones, then Lois wouldn't be anything special.
There was one, but you never watched her show.
And I never will.
I mean it's more interesting than the heroic investigative youtube essayist.
>"Not now Clark, my vtube avatar keeps locking up when I open my mouth too wide. I can't post this intergang piece until I fix this"
Why would you ask Cinemaphile? Cinemaphile doesn't know shit.
"Heroic reporter" was always a fantasy. So long as there is money to be made many news outlets have always played fast and loose with the truth to sell as much as they can. People act like fake news is a newly rampant Here's a little trivia of American history: An entire war was once pushed because of fake news back in the 1800's. The Spanish-American War was one largley predicated and pushed via conspiracy theories and fear mongering by outlets like the New York Times.
Any of you guys ever seen god damn Citizen Kane. That's what the whole film was about.
Fake news is just the new name of "yellow journalism" which the rise of news companies was always a worry.
Meanwhile in Europe you have actual investigative journalists risking their lives and being killed in car bombs because they expose global corruption by the elites.
90% of American "heroic fantasy" is just projecting European values onto American heroes while writing normal Americans as the bad guys.
>European "values"
>ruthlessly exploiting the common man
>bowing down to undemocratic elitists
>raping the world of its resources then projecting morality onto them afterward
>destroying cultures everywhere for sake of globohomo and again moralizing it's good
Huh, I guess I CAN see those European values in American literature and real life now...
That's why I was saying a new reboot should have Clark working for Leslie/Livewire's show, since the shock jock, or whatever online podcast thing it morphed into, has largely replaced traditional media.
But Cinemaphile called my idea stupid 🙁
Because it is stupid, and you're stupid.
With how irrelevant newspapers and online articles are getting. I'm wondering if DC will ever make Clark Kent a news anchor again like he was pre-crisis.
What reporters are there in comics outside superman to begin with? Lois fell more in line with female coworker in love with the hero and ignores the disguise trope than anything.
There's tons of them, but with Vicki Vale being shoved to the side Lois and Iris West are the only ones who are the main love interests of their respective hero.
That isn't really convincing VV may as well be dead and Iris when she is remembered is more the homemaker type.
I get what the op is going for but it triggers my autism calling it reporter trope when it is more coworker love interest or reporter as a secret identity.
Lol the reporter who exposed the fact that ultrarich are hoarding wealth in the panama papers got fucking murdered and not a single person gave a shit.
Noble sacrifices may matter but who the fuck is going to make such a sacrifice for such an apathetic populace.
The masses have always been apathetic, except when the elite themselves rile up people with something to care about (which benefits the elite).
Then the masses have earned their place.
Pretty much. Even anarchism has a strain of this.
>Yet unlike Andrade, Yarros did not anticipate the extension of the model to the workers of the world. Indeed, his elitism helped explain his confidence in this constitutional scheme. As he put it, he was not interested in rescuing 'half-starved' 'blind slaves' who worshipped 'the power which grinds them in to powder' and stood ready 'to defend it with their last drop of blood.'
>No journalist goes out of their way to expose corruption or evil schemes, just look at these journalists who got murdered for doing exactly that
You're sending mixed messages.
No contradiction.
There was, WAS, a single reporter and they were killed. Of the tens of thousands of peers they had not a single one cared.
The current number of good journalists is 0.
There was also the woman journalist killed for exposing corruption in Malta.
A more accurate statement would be the amount of good living journalists. You don't survive by scratching too deep beneath the surface.
You are bad at inferential reasoning.
If properly adapted modern Lois would be one of those guerilla journo blogger types you saw in the 2010s who would insert themsleves in some third world shithole.
Yes. Because modern journalists are the scum of the earth. Openly supporting the most evil powers the world has ever known while actively suppressing the truth
There's no such thing as a "journalist", the brainwashing propaganda is whipped up at lizard HQ on the moon and then beamed directly to your computer or television screen, those so-called reporters are deepfakes.
Modern Lois is probably an egirl influencer talking about Important Political Issues, either knowingly or unknowingly sponsored by LexCorp.
Journalism was always the profession of liars, propagandists, and opportunists. The archetype of the noble reporter seeking the truth at all costs was an invention of fiction.
Shout out to Lyla and Weekly.
Yes in the sense that reporters/journalists are scum of the earth. No in that Lois should still be proactive instead of stupidly putting herself in harms way.
lois lane would have gotten herself killed a million times over if it wasn't for superman. she has no sense of self-preservation, superman saving her in some cutesy fashion is just enabling her suicidal lemming like tendencies.
the dumb bitch doesn't even carry a gun.
That would make a heroic reporter more interesting tbh, somebody who is trying to tell real stories when the rest of their industry is forced to push agendas
you can't work for an establishment that does that and claim you are somehow different while receiving a paycheck from them. Its hypocritical.
at least not unless you want to tell a grown up story. kids aren't stupid enough to believe you can work for the establishment and still be a hero, they grew up with the corruption and viewed it all first hand, they aren't blind.
what kids really learn from all this shit is that if you want to be safe you have to make moral comprimises and sacrifice your freedom. Which is a shitty moral, but its why they repeat the party line like they were giving a standing ovation to Joseph Stalin; dissent means danger.
If you're a freelance reporter you work for yourself
true
Is Fatpril a report in the new TMNT?
The idea of an institutional journalist being able to topple corporations was always a fantasy. It's only gotten worse since the ultra-rich decided it was easier to destroy people's memories than cover things up. How many people even remember shit like the Senomyx controversy?
there was a time when journalist were able to hold people and institutions accountable, but even then there were some people who were just untouchable.
But to say they had no effect at all isn't really true.
The Watergate scandal was a set-up and Snowden is a plant.
and your mother is a Martian and your uncle is a communist. tell me another one.
stem cell research produced miracles and should have never been banned.
There's a difference between stem cells and buying organs from abortion clinics to mix into pepsi
oh give me a fucking break, don't believe everything you read.
stem cells might be my values, but they probably shouldn't be supes, ya know?
Related: Woodward and Bernstein are fake as fuck; they never gave a damn about Democrats who did much worse things than Nixon. They were always just trying to "get" and enemy in revenge for him thrashing The Party in the 1968 election.
whatever zoomer.
The problem with superman is that he represents a false potrayal of american values. Even at our best, we have become a shitty country filled with shitty people, with a shitty government that does shitty things.
Just once I'd like to see superman admit this, to drop the facade and admit that 'she ain't what she used to be', to feel a callback to older moral values and stricter moral codes.
How can superman look at fucking walmart and people living under bridges and porn on demand and still feel like this country is on the right track? Some is defintely off kilter about america, and every time you see Supes give one of his patented bullshit speeches about "America the Beautiful" people just want to puke with how sachrine it is.
Where is the old supes? The supes who fought in world war 2, the supes who took on the kkk, the manly man who fought injustice his own way?
Do people forget that superman is still, in essence, a vigilante? The government only tolerates him because he is literally invincible. He'll he even has to hide his identity, remember?
Hes not some state sponsored anti-terrorist unit, he was an iconoclast individual, who had his own values, old supes would have never tolerated the institutionalized corruption he is depicted as defending on a daily basis.
The problem is that comics in the 60's and 70's were part of the counterculture, now they are part of the establishment. Nobody is going to rock the boat and have a popular superhero say something politically incorrect because that is not how you make movies and sell comics.
Comic book artists, writers and producers are in it for all the wrong reasons, they want to be famous, they want to make money.
yeah yeah, i know, i'm full of it
and of course, with supes, lois lane just keeps his fucking balls in her purse. she leads him on at every opportunity and hes too chickenshit to make a move, he might as well be a god damn cuckold. As exciting as that may be for some people, its not a healthy message for immature, impressionable people who read comics.
Society is ambivalent towards journalism right now. On the one hand, they will agree that politicians and private interest groups WILL try and stifle news that expose their dirty laundry, but on the other hand people also agree that journalists are the first ones to sell themselves to those politicians and rich people and that media companies deal them with audiences and users' data.
All in all, it comes down to who opposes what at amy time. If the liberals hate X journalistn or news channel, the conservatives will support it; if conservatives say that the media are evil, liberals will be the first to call skeptics nazis.
Print is dead and most journalists and reporters are just nepo babies and social climbers blogging about how to make your cat look on fleek for christmas
No one admires reporters or news outlets anymore.
In an age of boundless information (and misinformation) that can be accessed at the touch of a button, news outlets have been double penetrated by the big black cocks of digital media and information overload. They just couldn't keep up in the way for viewership, and so they increasingly debased themselves with clickbait, tabloid journalism, blogshit, paywalls and other cheap tactics to try and hold on to their money by sacrificing their integrity.
Meanwhile, radical not-for-profit news sites and sources that give you more unfiltered and unbiased reports on incidents that would otherwise be swept under the rug started to pop up, highlighting the insincerity of some of the institutions that people previously placed their trust in.
That's to say nothing of the nepotism and corruption at the heart of news media being made even more obvious by the 24/7 news cycle and the increased public exposure of its staff thanks to online presence.
Gone are the days of intrepid reporters beating the streets to deliver the truth to a capitve audience. Now all traditional journalism stands for is an aging patriarch watching his children and grandchildren slowly forget he was more than a drooling vegetable once upon a time
>Now all traditional journalism stands for is an aging patriarch watching his children and grandchildren slowly forget he was more than a drooling vegetable once upon a time
nice speech. but who are you referring to? or is that just a metaphor?
just a metaphor
Lets be honest. To be a good reporter you have to know a lot about economics and politics. And no comic writer these days even bother to do research. Lois is written superficially as a hot news reporter whos good at her job and that's it.
If there was a stand alone comic with her, it'll be written by writers who think reporting is like an action movie. Actual reporting takes fucking forever and something might not even get uncovered for years.