The Girls on the Bus Are Messy, Flawed, and Driven—Just Like the Best Journalists I Know
Ahead of Thursday’s final episode on Max, the show’s creator explains why the portrayals of sanctimonious scribes speaking truth to power don’t fit the times.
When I set out to create The Girls on the Bus, I knew what I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want it to be sanctimonious or high-minded. I didn’t want to portray Great Journalists Speaking Truth to Power.
Too many journalism movies and TV shows adopt this holier-than-thou tone. Please watch the trailer for The Post (“What will happen if we don’t publish? We will lose! The country will lose!”). Or the scene in The Newsroom when they break the news that Osama bin Laden has been killed—you’d think the journalists hunted him down themselves. To be clear, I enjoyed that show as much as the next navel-gazing New York Times journalist. But these portrayals didn’t ring true to my experiences. (Mind you, I’ve never broken a story that took down a president or covered a war zone. I prefer lunch-based reporting.)
The great journalists I learned from were typically on their third martini at the hotel bar, testing the extent of a corporate credit card at Wolfgang’s and trading gossip with sources that would destroy us if it ever ended up in a data breach alongside John Podesta’s tips for making risotto. They’d pop a gummy to get to sleep after a big primary night, hook up with Secret Service agents (“wheels up, rings off” is real), and spend so much time at The Standard in Miami Beach during the Florida primary that management would leave them a complimentary bottle of rosé upon arrival. (Okay, that was me.)
The Girls on the Bus Are Messy, Flawed, and Driven—Just Like the Best Journalists I Know
Ahead of Thursday’s final episode on Max, the show’s creator explains why the portrayals of sanctimonious scribes speaking truth to power don’t fit the times.
When I set out to create The Girls on the Bus, I knew what I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want it to be sanctimonious or high-minded. I didn’t want to portray Great Journalists Speaking Truth to Power.
Too many journalism movies and TV shows adopt this holier-than-thou tone. Please watch the trailer for The Post (“What will happen if we don’t publish? We will lose! The country will lose!”). Or the scene in The Newsroom when they break the news that Osama bin Laden has been killed—you’d think the journalists hunted him down themselves. To be clear, I enjoyed that show as much as the next navel-gazing New York Times journalist. But these portrayals didn’t ring true to my experiences. (Mind you, I’ve never broken a story that took down a president or covered a war zone. I prefer lunch-based reporting.)
The great journalists I learned from were typically on their third martini at the hotel bar, testing the extent of a corporate credit card at Wolfgang’s and trading gossip with sources that would destroy us if it ever ended up in a data breach alongside John Podesta’s tips for making risotto. They’d pop a gummy to get to sleep after a big primary night, hook up with Secret Service agents (“wheels up, rings off” is real), and spend so much time at The Standard in Miami Beach during the Florida primary that management would leave them a complimentary bottle of rosé upon arrival. (Okay, that was me.)
Today, widespread layoffs, shuttered news outlets, and the dismal economics of journalism mean the expense accounts have mostly dried up. Eating a Midtown salad chopped to the point of puree in your cubicle (or alone in your walk-up apartment) while feeding the Web and hoping no one leaks your Slack messages is more like it.
It’s a dark time for my beloved profession. That’s why the Los Angeles Times said that our show would “be fun, if it weren’t so dangerous.” After all, it isn’t portraying doctors or lawyers, wrote critic Mary McNamara, it’s depicting “everyone involved in maintaining a free and informed democracy.” I know these are dire times, but I have to ask—pretentious much? Yes, journalists are vitally important, but it takes more than us to maintain democracy. Voters of Wisconsin, for one. Why do we have to be so self-righteous onscreen? Why can’t journalists be human? Why can’t we be honest? Infallible? Flawed? Extremely stoned in our Hilton Garden Inn, but only after we’ve thoroughly fact-checked and filed a story?
Journalists are a specific breed. Naturally messy, and manic, with dumpster fires of personal lives. Why? Because the job is really, really hard. We’re not coal miners or Marines or public school teachers, but we leave home for weeks at a time, are always on call, and get paid a salary that might have supported a family in 1975. We endure an onslaught of painful online abuse, a readership that pounces on every word, and editors who need us to “feed the live blog” (kill me). We have to interact with the epic sleazes who surround candidates and hardly speak to us—even more so in 2024 than in my years covering the legendarily press-averse Hillary Clinton.
Why do we do it? Because we care about the truth. We care about the role of the fourth estate and its importance in a free and open democracy…and yes, some of us like going viral in the White House press pool and being retweeted by Jake Tapper. No, but really, I deeply believe that we care about the truth. We just don’t have to talk about it all the time—or act above everyone else who doesn’t talk about it all the time.
In a Late Night segment, Seth Meyers spoofed the typical “newspaper movie,” creating a trailer for one focusing on “a brave team of journalists risking it all to break the biggest news story in history” and featuring “men in bad ties,” with reviews calling it a “thrill ride” of “middle-aged white people typing for two hours.”
We wanted our show to adopt a very different “tone”—as they say in Hollywood. Our writers room featured posters for The Paper, the 1994 Ron Howard comedy about a New York City tabloid. (We even named our fictional paper of record, The New York Sentinel, after that movie’s Times stand-in.) We worshipped at the altars of Broadcast News, James Brooks’s masterpiece starring Holly Hunter; Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s homage to his Rolling Stone gig; and Mike Nichols’s Working Girl. My journalistic hero is Nora Ephron, who was a reporter before writing When Harry Met Sally… and other classics. NPR critic Eric Deggans said our show “unfolds like a mind meld between The Paper and Primary Colors.” Exactly.
There are those who say that in such chaotic and terrifying times, when democracy is threatened and the free press is under assault, we need serious portrayals of journalists. Time suggested that All the President’s Men, Network, and the final season of The Wire are among the “straightforward dramas” that we need. So I have to wonder: By “serious,” do those people mean…male? The Los Angeles Times also longed for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “sifting through every request the White House made of the Library of Congress for an entire year.” Well, that sounds like riveting TV.
CNN’s Brian Lowry wrote that “the profession could use an image boost, in the way All the President’s Men highlighted reporting’s noblest ideals in the 1970s.” I miss a young Robert Redford too, but who’s going to tell Brian that that movie is nearly 50 years old? Woodward and Bernstein are busy writing Donald Trump books or being talking heads on CNN. Maybe instead of romanticizing an era of journalism that’s older than The Golden Girls, what we need is an honest accounting of how the profession has failed the public, too often coming off as arrogant and elitist.
After all, it’s a different era. Print is dead. Wordle is king. No one smokes in newsrooms…except our fictional editor, played by Griffin Dunne, who, as the son of Dominick Dunne and the nephew of Joan Didion, does know a thing or two about journalism. The internet has made us all a nation of enraged fact-checkers, and women hold senior newsroom positions. Wild, right?
And here’s the rub: This holier-than-thou, unbiased thing? It’s not working. Hunter S. Thompson called “objective journalism” a “pompous contradiction in terms.” And whether or not he was tripping on LSD when he said it, he was right. That doesn’t mean we can’t be tough and fair and scrutinize everyone equally, but to pretend that we have no emotions is, I think, being dishonest—and readers clearly feel that. We’re trying so hard to be great, objective newsmen whose only allegiance is to the truth…and yet no one believes us. You’re probably reading this not believing a word of it. Only 32% of people say they have “a great deal” or even “a fair amount” of confidence that what we report is accurate. That is basically the Upper West Side.
So why not take a different approach? Why not be honest? Why not admit that we genuinely try to get it right, but sometimes we fall short? That, like everyone, we bring our personal experiences and biases to a story? Why not show “the grimy ethics of what these kinds of journalists sometimes have to do,” as Washington Post critic Lili Loofbourow put it? It’s always bothered me that we can scrutinize everyone else, but we’re supposed to be righteous and perfect. The truth is that we try our best, but sometimes we chase each other down a rabbit hole (coughs “Russiagate”) and fixate on the wrong things (this is when Twitter yells, “BUT HER EMAILS!”). And yes, we have inappropriate hookups (um, half the DC press corps)?
Sometimes we take the bait. Sometimes we write it just for the likes. Sometimes we inadvertently help get a despot elected, because he returns our calls and makes for good copy. Hey, it happens. Journalists and fictional characters are complicated. We contain multitudes. In other words, we’re human.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where we want to see those nuances. Depending on where you get your news, everyone is either good (Biden! Trump!) or bad (Trump! Biden!). But that’s not how life works…and that’s not how TV works. We loved Tony Soprano not because he was so special, but because he was so ordinary—at times a sociopathic mob boss, and at others a put-upon suburban dad.
So please don’t let the tequila shots and vintage Isabel Marant coats fool you: The journalists on The Girls on the Bus are every bit as committed as Woodward and Bernstein. (And as hot as Redford.) But the truth is, by the time the girls took over the campaign bus, they couldn’t be like the boys on the bus. They had to be better. They had to file 15 times a day and worry about layoffs and get trolled by Elon Musk.
ThGirls on the Bus is inspired by my memoir, Chasing Hillary, about covering Clinton, but I didn’t want to recreate my exact experiences onscreen. Where’s the fictional fun in that? I wanted to create the conversations I wished I’d had with the candidate, the stories I wished I’d written, the things that went unsaid. I wanted to explore fallibility.
In the final episode, the protagonist, Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), has an honest, private conversation with the female candidate, Felicity Walker (Hettienne Park). It’s a cathartic scene and one that could’ve never happened with the walls around Clinton, but it’s one that played out in my mind for years. What would journalism look like if we were all a little more honest? It’s unspoken, but the scene asks the central question of our series—and, I think, of our election cycle: If we covered politics differently, would we have different politics?
The four female journalists in our show end up working together to break a big story that could save democracy (you always need “stakes,” to use another Hollywood term). And I get that it’s easy to be snarky and call this “girl power” or “girl boss-y,” but that’s the sexism talking. Because just as The Boys on the Bus, about the 1972 campaign, was a repudiation of pack journalism, our show questions the feeding frenzy of contemporary campaign reporting. We question whether authenticity is more important than objectivity. We admit that we screw up. That what we’ve been doing isn’t working, but that it’s not too late. We end on the cliff-hanger of imagining another way.
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