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This book makes frequent reference to George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet, Will Ferrell and a host of other A-list stars who have made films about journalism and journalists a significant part of their portfolio. It reviews the evolution of the journalistic role and identity, and the professional practices of journalism in its various guises. It also covers the cinematic representation of these roles, identities and practices. The representation of journalism and journalists in cinema is evaluated. Journalism is a job for some, but part of the social and cultural fabric of all (or nearly all) our lives. This book also approaches the films as cultural artefacts worthy of analysis in themselves and as accessible points of departure for jumping into debates about the state of news media in the twenty-first century. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is given.

This chapter presents the two interviews with Steven Soderbergh that offer insights into several of the most prominent aspects of his career as a filmmaker. The first interview, Geoff Andrew talking with Soderbergh and George Clooney before a live audience in London in 2003, touches on remakes, allusion, and their collaboration with the aim, in the actor's words, “to push the things we've learned from foreign and independent films ... back into the studio system.” The second interview, conducted by David Sterritt, focuses on Che, probably Soderbergh's most ambitious film to date. After acknowledging Soderbergh's tendency to experiment and defy expectations, Sterritt in his introduction calls Che “a daring project even for him.” What follows in the interview is the director's defense of the politics of class, embedded in all his films, that came to the forefront in Che.

This chapter offers an account of the emerging centrality of celebrities in public culture. Studying celebrity and religion in concert requires parsing the multiple ways these terms have become increasingly interactive, overlapping, and co-constitutive in modern America. This chapter explores how this has transpired by looking at both the forms of news reporting that have succeeded in recent years and the changed way that religion is publicly discussed. Its focus is the national daily newspaper USA Today, which provides an excellent archive for the relationship between religion and celebrity in the news via its own oft-touted (and oft-satirized) synthetic style, including short articles, cheery cartoon graphics, and intentionally “easy to read” copy. This chapter analyzes the way that entertainment news deploys religious idiom to express something inexpressibly potent in its subject and to translate democratic moral agency in an increasingly privatized corporate media structure. First, it offers a short history of the emergence of infotainment reportage and its corollary, celebrification. It then discusses news coverage of religion and celebrity in three separate periods: 1989–1996, 1997–2003, and 2004–2010.