His Girl Friday

Sometimes I forget how much I love old movies. Occasionally, I'll randomly watch one and fall in love all over again with the thickly developed plots, the witty humor, and the deep personality of each characters. Modern movies often lack one or even all three of these elements, which is why I found His Girl Friday to be so refreshing, funny, and enlightening for my understanding of journalism.

Being a young female journalist, I found myself focused on Hildy's character throughout the movie. Hildy is a young, talented, female journalist surrounded by obnoxious, overanxious, rude, middle-aged men. But the one thing they all have in common is that they will do anything--quite literally anything--to get their story.

In the film, many ethical principles of journalism were blatantly violated. There is one scene where the male reporters know that they are being unethical when they read aloud Hildy's unfinished story from her typewriter. It's ironic that they exercise some conscience about this because that it's probably the lightest ethical issue that they violate. The whole plot of the story is based on how reporters made up lies about a man who is later imprisoned and set to be hung. It becomes obvious that the reporters are driven and don't give any second thought to making up facts to create an interesting story.

The reporters also don't try to remain independent or neutral in anything they write--and this includes Hildy. Each of them completely immerse themselves in the situations they are reporting on. This makes their writing biased, not based on fact, and probably false.

Another way the reporters in the movie violate ethical principles is that they don't really seek to minimize harm for those they are reporting on. They don't treat Earl Williams or his girlfriend with any respect, sensitivity, care, or even basic decency. They promote his name as a criminal and don't even give any second thought to how they might be portraying him. They don't try to tell his story, but rather they push their own biased take on his situation.

All in all, I found the film to be very entertaining, humorous, and interesting. While you can't really take away any good journalistic values from the movie, you can come away from it with a good laugh and a renewed excitement to be part of the media.