Article

Sensationalist Journalism is All the Rage at the Movies

23 Oct 2026

Films about reporters used to be uplifting stories of Davids conquering Goliaths. Not anymore. As pitch-black thriller Primetime arrives on our screens, Alistair Ryder investigates why journalism movies have become so cynical.

The stories that the movies tell us about journalism always seem to reflect contemporary values. Spotlight (2015) and She Said (2022) both dramatise real-life institutional miscarriages of justice that were unearthed during Republican administrations, but released when Democrats held the White House. They offered liberal viewers a chance to imagine, for a brief moment, that the dark days were finally over. Their biggest inspiration, All the President’s Men (1976), set the template for this kind of process-driven newsroom drama, underlining how important it is for reporters to hold the powerful to account.

However, this isn’t a message audiences want to hear anymore. Case in point: The Social Reckoning, a story about a hero reporter that was met with a critical drubbing. Writer-director Aaron Sorkin may have returned to make a sequel to one of the most beloved movies of the century, but it shared none of the cynicism that made David Fincher’s original feel like such a timely tech-bro takedown. Mark Zuckerberg became a secondary character and Jeremy Allen White’s Wall Street Journal reporter uncovering Facebook’s failings was the hero. But his exposé didn’t change the company’s conduct, and the movie’s earnest portrayal of the power of journalism felt out of step with our more sobering reality.

In today’s less enlightened times, the most acclaimed based-on-true-events journalism movies paint a deeply unflattering picture of the press, for whom reporting the facts comes a distant second to winning ratings and readership at any cost. This is a key reason why Primetime (released in the US last month) became an unexpected breakout hit, throwing us into the uncomfortable company of a man more concerned with beating Lost in the ratings than journalistic integrity.

The characterisation of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen – who stages lurid sting operations to unmask paedophiles – is one of the most vivid recent illustrations of this race to the bottom. In the film, which takes place in 2006, he has a massive chip on his shoulder. He may have won an Emmy for a hard-hitting news report on child slavery, but the Hansen we meet (played with blackly comic relish by Robert Pattinson) is unnerved that his current show isn’t taken seriously, even as it triumphs in the ratings. This Hansen has bought into his own hype, and believes that he’s a force for good. Encouragement from an adoring public has made him overlook any ethical concerns with To Catch a Predator’s dubious method of entrapping sexual predators.

Whatever good intentions he might have had have been warped by the celebrity he’s earned through the show. Its large audience has resulted in network pressure for further growth. His attempt to ensnare a Dallas District Attorney is much the same as the tabloid journalist constantly calling him for a comment on a scoop about his extramarital affair. Hansen’s investigative methods may be far more extreme, but both are using the same weak public-interest excuse to justify the salacious stories they’re chasing to attract more eyeballs.

Primetime arrives on screens a little over a year after the sensational documentary Predators, which used the short-lived success of Hansen’s true-crime hit to examine how its queasy methods of obtaining justice can still be felt on social media. Hansen’s stings now exist behind a paywall on his own streaming service, but anybody with YouTube access can watch armchair predator hunters conduct their own operations, which often turn violent or are dramatised so extremely that they can’t be used in police investigations.

In a world where views and subscriber numbers are the ultimate currency, there’s often no intention of involving law enforcement. Manosphere creators like HSTikkyTokky and Ed Matthews have routinely found themselves on the wrong side of the law for livestreaming attacks on people they claim to be child predators with little to no evidence.

Primetime arrives a few months before Danny Boyle’s Ink, a raucous, 1960s-set biopic of investor Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb’s takeover of The Sun, when they refashioned the newspaper to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Boyle and screenwriter James Graham explicitly draw a link between the paper’s lowbrow sensationalism and today’s crop of headline-chasing content creators, suggesting that The Sun’s approach – later adopted by other publications and TV networks in Murdoch’s empire – was responsible for opening a Pandora’s box that normalised the most irresponsible acts of supposed ‘citizen journalism’.

When Muriel McKay, the wife of Murdoch’s deputy, was kidnapped – mistakenly assumed to be the Aussie mogul’s own partner – Lamb bypassed investigators to turn the case into front-page headlines. Like a proto Hansen, Lamb was uninterested in the ethics of chasing the story, with claims that he was seeking justice proving flimsy considering his obsession with beating The Mirror in circulation. As Graham’s screenplay tells it, the growing readership numbers justified his approach, even if it jeopardised a sensitive police investigation.

This method of reporting an open case was so successful that it reshaped the cultural conversation for the worse. Not only does Boyle’s film suggest that the emotive language and lowbrow content of The Sun influenced the national discourse, a later montage featuring tonally similar headlines from The New York Post and other outlets also implies that its tone of voice and take-no-prisoners approach to crime reporting would gradually become normalised the world over.

By the time To Catch a Predator premiered, it could be a breakout hit with very little immediate pushback. Americans had grown accustomed to the sensationalised approach adopted by Murdoch’s tabloid titles and cable-news programmes, therefore the grossly manufactured nature of Hansen’s true-crime case studies made very few people flinch.

Although set decades apart on different sides of the Atlantic, Primetime and Ink are both impactful in how they connect their dark examinations of journalistic history to our modern world of biased political reporting, reckless click-chasing and influencer journalists with seedy motives. A movie like The Social Reckoning might wind up as the last of a dying breed: a noble reporter can’t speak to our moment quite like one with a cynical hidden agenda.