I Wish Clint Eastwood Would Do to Himself What Female Movie Journalists Are Always Doing to Their Sources

Can we retire this trope already?

Clint Eastwood arrives at the AFI Fest 2019 - Richard Jewell premiere. Sthanlee B. Mirador/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

There are a lot of things that have really, truly sucked about being desperately addicted to journalism, of all things, while also being female, but if one more movie/TV show/porno/whatever comes out in which a female journalist exchanges sex for information, I’m going to become a demented shut-in who taps out angry letters at 2 a.m. on a typewriter to anyone with an address about how goddamn stupid that storyline is. 

The latest insult comes via a movie titled Richard Jewell, about the man who was wrongly accused of bombing the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. It’s directed by Clint Eastwood, the epitome of a mediocre white man, and written by Billy Ray, who once wrote a pretty good movie about newsroom dynamics and probably should know better than to go in for this nonsense, and starring Olivia Wilde, who definitely should know better. Wilde plays Kathy Scruggs, who was, by all accounts, a hell-on-wheels shoe-leather reporter who does not appear to have any history of, say, sleeping with sources. (She died in 2001 at 42 years old.) Despite Scruggs’ standing as a respected reporter who, to be clear, does not seem to have screwed anyone for a scoop over the course of her career, the fictional version of her in the film follows the shopworn trope. She and an FBI agent have sex, and then she gets the story! Just like Zoe Barnes on House of Cards, a BuzzFeed-esque reporter who was advised by her female editor to do so, because haven’t we all done it? (Reader, we have not.) Even Rory Gilmore eventually failed us, and for that, I will never forgive Amy Sherman-Palladino.  

Where Richard Jewell really rises above all the other shitty examples is that it involves a real journalist who isn’t around to defend herself—Eastwood is punching so far down his fists are in the grave—and it involves Wilde, who grew up surrounded by journalists. Her parents, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, are award-winning investigative reporters. Several of her extended family members are journalists, too. Christopher Hitchens, who was as great a misogynist as he was a writer, babysat her. 

To be clear, I hold Ray and Eastwood primarily responsible for this, not Wilde. If dramatizing Scruggs’ storyline by putting her into bed with a source was the only thing they could think of to propel their story forward, then those dudes suck at their jobs and should find other employment. My frustration with Wilde, whose work I admire, comes from her defense of the film. In an interview with Deadline, Wilde said this:

“But what I resented was this character being boiled down to one inferred scene and I don’t hear anyone complaining about Jon Hamm’s character as being inferred that he also had a relationship with a reporter. It feels unfair that Kathy has been minimized in this way.

“I think that we are still struggling with allowing for female characters who aren’t entirely quote-unquote likable. If there’s anything slightly questionable about a female character, we often use that in relation to condemn that character or to condemn the project for allowing for a woman to be impure in a way. It’s a misunderstanding of feminism to assume that all women have to be sexless. I resent the character being minimized to that point.” 

The issue at hand isn’t likability; it’s the continuation of a trope that is actively harmful to women who already suffer the consequences of this bullshit stereotype while simply trying to do their jobs. More than just laziness, it betrays a rancid assumption that a woman’s professionalism is there to be sacrificed if it means moving the plot along. Scruggs is a complex character all on her own, and any research of her life at all indicates as much. Reducing her to an ambitious tart—using her real name—is an insult to her legacy as a woman who made strides in a male-dominated field. In a tribute published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Scruggs’ colleagues recall a dogged reporter of nearly mythical standards, a journalist who was always on the clock even when she wasn’t, developing sources wherever she went, refusing to leave crimes scenes without a full-to-bursting notebook. No one is claiming that she was sexless, or that she should have been; the problem is simply the portrayal of her as an unethical reporter. The problem is which liberties get to be taken with the presentation of real-life figures, and why, and by whom. The problem is that the first time I can recall personally encountering this stereotype is when I was in high school, and that was not the last time by a long shot. The problem is my female colleagues and my friends who work at other publications all have stories in which we’re hit on by male sources, or random men we encounter who operate on the assumption that the combination of our gender and our profession means we’re ready to fuck to get a story. The problem is that we as female journalists have to fight sexism and harassment while we’re in the field, and then we return to a newsroom where sexism and harassment are rampant, and then when we want to unwind we turn on a movie, Absence of Malice, say, or Never Been Kissed, or Trainwreck, and we watch female journalists mingling the personal and the professional in all the ways we’re constantly clarifying to men that we won’t.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate