Yes, a reporter so nakedly ambitious and attention-seeking that she practically has “I WILL TWEET EVERYTHING YOU SAY” illuminated in neon over her head is called the unspeakable curse by her executive editor. Having been ordered by his proprietor to do anything to retain the paper’s hot young talent Zoe Barnes, he has a contemptuous meeting with her, and calls her a cunt. Photograph: Nathaniel E Bell Photograph: Nathaniel E. Like many retired journalists, Tom is writing a book carrying a bag of beer. This is the single best decision anyone makes in the entire run of House of Cards: Tom is a decent contender for the worst journalist ever. In season one, Tom Hammerschmidt is fired as the editor of the Washington Herald. Still not sure why you decided you were safe there, given you knew very nearly as much as Zoe did, but your mom’s house seems nice, I guess. So why not report Russo was dead in the passenger seat? Why not report that Frank Underwood’s chief of staff drove off with a prostitute connected to Russo? Why not report Russo visited Kopeniak before he lied about the secretary of state?Īnd, getting to the nub of the issue, why not report that you were anonymously sent explicit pictures of Zoe Barnes about 10 minutes after she “accidentally” died? That might just have got even House of Cards terminally incurious police interested. And you work for a site which we’re told on at least four occasions gives you the ability to publish what you want, when you want. People might believe your off-record sources. Janine, you seem to have forgot you have credibility as a reporter. They might not have nailed the entire plot, but Watergate – a trivial story by comparison – was told piece by piece in two years. By the end of season one Janine, Zoe and Lucas had got some pretty damn good leads on what was going on with Underwood and Russo. Unfortunately, it seemed to be accompanied by some terrible off-camera accident which entirely removed her ability to sense a story. And given that her editor was a moron, fair play to her for switching to Politico-Buzzfeed-Slugline. As chief White House correspondent for the Washington Herald, she might’ve been a bit bitchy about defending her turf, and slow to respond to a challenger, but otherwise things seemed pretty OK. I suggest some good media law training and a computer textbook or two. Prognosis: Lucas, you’ve got a few years to work things out. A final tip: there’s not much point using state-of-the-art anonymisation technology if five minutes later you’re going to record yourself on camera vowing to break the law. That’s not the world’s most subtle way of doing this. And instead of doing it quietly, you told them you thought the vice-president of the United States was a murderer. No, no, you ruled out these things and decided to go onto the “deep web” and ask an anonymous chat forum for help. Like, much easier.ĭid you think to perhaps look at her phone bills? Or, given she had an iPhone, just retrieve the backup from her laptop, which she wasn’t carrying when she died? Or call the phone company (or get her parents to) and just ask for her logs? If you’re trying to get hold of your dead girlfriend’s phone records – yep, that last bit was kinda spoilery – there are easier ways than hacking the entire master server of her phone company. We all understand you’re having a tough time of it lately, but you do appear to have entirely taken your leave of all sanity. By the end of season one, you were looking pretty good.īut oh man, it has gone downhill. You’ve even, as you tell us once every five minutes, done some Serious Reporting on corruption in the DC police force. Photograph: Nathaniel E Bell/Netflix Photograph: Nathaniel E. You did so well at actually seeming like a pretty decent deputy editor, in that unlike Tom Hammerschmidt (we’ll come to him later) you didn’t decry blogs every five minutes, or call your star staff terrible things. Hey, we’ve all had a story land on the rails from time to time. We do this so that they might improve, should they decide to stop being fictional. Here’s the charge sheet against the House of Cards reporting series in turn. The problem is, likeable as some of them may be, they’re all awful at their jobs. House of Cards has no fewer than four journalists as fairly major characters. So it’s no surprise we pop up everywhere from the Bourne series to soap operas to House of Cards. Reporters are a gift to a writer in a hurry: they have a ready excuse to stick their nose into whatever’s going on, to upset or threaten protagonists, or to dig up some old secret from the past. But the relevant one for now is that we enjoy seeing ourselves portrayed in TV and films far more than we should.
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