The Lazy Trope of the Unethical Female Journalist

One of the most compelling characters in the recent Showtime documentary miniseries The Fourth Estate is the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Haberman joined the newspaper in 2015 to help cover Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and since then, she explains, her workload has been all-encompassing. Haberman is rarely seen on camera without a phone in her hand or attached to her ear. “The biggest mistake I made was promising my children that they would get their mother back at the end of the campaign,” she says. In one memorable scene, she takes a break in the middle of recording a podcast to reassure her son that he can’t die in a nightmare.

makes for fascinating television despite the fact that the majority of the series simply captures people in meetings or people making calls or people commuting in 2014 for , the reality of journalists is that they’re “one of the less glamorous species of humanity,” and the most reliable trait of the truly gifted ones is that they’re perpetually on the phone—which is presumably why the entertainment industry has long preferred an alternate depiction of journalists, particularly when it comes to women. On television and in film, the fictional lady reporter tends to look less like Haberman and more like Camille Preaker, portrayed in the HBO miniseries by Amy Adams.