Broadcast News (1987) provided audiences with two impressive accomplishments. The most important being a tight, well-written, finely directed, and superbly acted story. The second accomplishment was casting Holly Hunter in a role that would provide her with the break-out performance she was very deserving of.
Jane Craig (Hunter) is a high-strung yet remarkably talented news director. She works closely with Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a news correspondent whom she respects and trusts because of his knowledge, experience, and integrity. Aaron aspires to advance in his career but is held back because he’s not as visually attractive as less qualified news employees and he lacks a confident demeanor. Enter Tom Grunick (William Hurt), a good-looking former sportscaster who is hired by the DC area network where Jane and Aaron work. Tom has been hired as a prime-time news anchor based on his viewer appeal, not his experience or knowledge.
Tom is everything that Jane fears and despises for the future of the broadcast news industry. As profits become more important than integrity, the network places more value on style than actual substance and it seeks to elevate the inexperienced who poll better with viewers. Tom admits that he often doesn’t understand the topics he’s covering, yet he succeeds because he has Jane and Aaron feeding him information and questions through an earpiece. Eventually, the three learn to co-exist, but their relationships are complicated when Aaron admits that he has romantic feelings for Jane, while simultaneously Jane is beginning to have a relationship with Tom.
The characters are well-defined, and the plot digs deep into that period in young professionals’ lives when they are out to change the world and spend so much time at work that it muddies their personal lives as well, an experience that most viewers can relate to.
This movie came out shortly after the first 24-hour news network (CNN) began airing. Jane’s fear of the future of news seems more real today than when the film was first released. We now have several 24-hour channels that label themselves as news, yet their entire broadcast days are filled with nothing but opinionated commentary and there’s not a single real journalist in sight. In just the last few weeks we’ve learned that one of them (Fox) deliberately fed its viewers information it knew to be false, solely to increase ratings by telling much of its audience what they wanted to hear rather than what was true. This is a much more egregious betrayal of journalistic ethics than the staged tears that Tom serves up in the film when interviewing a victim of rape. A tear that would end his complicated relationship with Jane.
Broadcast News, its creators, and performers are all deserving of the many award nominations they received. It barely seems dated (okay, usage of VHS tapes aside!) and provides an extremely well-crafted and satisfying ending.
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