What Broadway Gets Right and Wrong About Journalism

One can hardly blame people for believing journalists have questionable ethics.

The portrayal that is ubiquitous across pop culture isn’t flattering: A striving workaholic who sleeps with a source (“Richard Jewell”). A narcissist willing to put people’s lives on the line to get a story (“Die Hard”). A nosy witch who relies on gossip instead of fact (Rita Skeeter in “Harry Potter”).

Four stage productions I saw this year in New York City have piled on to this less-than-flattering depiction of my profession.

The reporters onstage were in desperate need of a course in journalistic ethics. They were manipulative (“Yellow Face”). They had an agenda (“McNeal”). They didn’t identify themselves as journalists (“Safety Not Guaranteed” a musical based on the film of the same name), and they misrepresented their reporting experience (“Breaking the Story”).

Any one of these characters would be fired, or, at least, one would hope, disciplined for their behavior. For me, watching fictional journalists scheme their way to scoops is akin to what I imagine it must feel like for doctors to watch “Grey’s Anatomy.”

In addition to my role as an editor on The New York Times’s Flexible Editing desk, I also write for the Culture section. (I see more than 250 films, plays and musicals each year.) And I cover journalism itself: I’ve written more than 100 Times Insider articles that explain how reporters do their jobs.

So, let me share how some stage scenarios would most likely unfold in a real newsroom.

The reporter characters who approach their interview subjects with clear agendas in “McNeal” and “Yellow Face” — the former a New York Times Magazine writer aiming to deliver a hit piece on a star writer, the latter a Times reporter angling to weasel his way into a steaming-hot scoop — would find themselves censured by their newsrooms, should their tactics come to light.