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There’s a scene in the new play Vladimir, running at the Manhattan Theatre Club through November 10, in which a Russian journalist named Raya gets in a heated argument with one of her sources, Chovka, a young Chechen woman.
Chovka has taken part in a terror attack on a school that left hundreds dead including many children in order to avenge the death of her own family.
Raya is appalled, but Chovka reminds her that during their first meeting Raya promised to show the truth to the Russian people. To make it impossible to look away. “No one is looking away now,” she says.
Raya says she’s gone too far, that killing is wrong, and that journalism has sufficient power to change minds, to change history.
“You really think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Chovka replies.
Vladimir was written by Erika Sheffer; Raya is based on Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in 2006 in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. I met Politkovskaya briefly when she visited New York not long before she was murdered. After her death I made multiple trips to Moscow to push for justice, in my role as head of CPJ, where I met regularly with Politkovskaya’s colleagues, her editor Dmitry Muratov, and her son Ilya, who inherited his mother’s quiet intensity. She, like Raya, was driven by a relentless belief that journalism matters, and is even worth dying for, because change only happens when a society confronts the truth.
Since seeing the play I’ve been thinking about the role of journalists as fictional characters—and in real life. Over the years I’ve watched countless dramas, documentaries, and movies in which journalists are protagonists, and I’ve noticed a motif. If the society confronted with the uncomfortable truth takes action, there’s a happy ending. But when no one believes the journalist, things turn tragic.
In the former category are the classic Watergate movies, like All the President’s Men and The Post, in which a few determined reporters backed by a media organization with a firm spine bring down a corrupt president. That’s also true for The Insider, which portrays the relationship between tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and 60 Minutes, and the Oscar-winning Spotlight, about the Boston Globe’s exposé of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Among the many tragedies are Oliver Stone’s classic Salvador (1986), in which a freelance photojournalist played by James Woods is overwhelmed by injustice, and A Private War, released in 2018, which chronicles the life of death of correspondent Marie Colvin, who insisted on staying and reporting on the civilian toll in Syria, believing to the end that the world could not turn a blind eye to the carnage.
Onstage, the Tony-nominated 2009 drama Time Stands Still, which starred Laura Linney as a wounded war correspondent struggling to make sense of her life and salvage her relationship after returning from Iraq, had a similar feeling.
I spoke with Sheila Coronel, a professor at Columbia Journalism School who has co-taught a course on the portrayal of journalists in film, including Hollywood classics and documentaries. There’s a tendency, Coronel told me, to romanticize the role of the press in films set in the US—and to overstate the power and influence that journalists have.
Many films set outside the US present a more nuanced understanding. Coronel cites as an example the 2020 documentary A Thousand Cuts, which chronicles the exploits of Nobel Prize–winning journalist Maria Ressa and her news organization, Rappler, as it does battle with then Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte. They reveal corruption and brutality, but Duterte remains firmly in power as the credits roll.
At the end of Vladimir, Raya, having survived an assassination attempt and seen her beloved Russia overcome by cynicism and fear, travels to New York on a book tour. An earnest young store clerk, fumbling with her microphone in front of a sparse audience, notes that Raya was arrested and kidnapped and has survived a poisoning attempt, “which is great.”
Raya is nonplussed. Everyone she meets in the US is concerned about her, but doesn’t seem to care about Russia, or that its leader—a man of no great intellect, whose “only talent is finding ugliness and knowing how to use it”—has hijacked the future of her country
This moment, of course, is intended to make us reflect on our own country, which is precisely what I did. Someday, I thought, when this moment in American history is turned into a fictionalized drama, a journalist will likely be a key protagonist. Will it have an uplifting finale, or will it end in tragedy? We may know soon enough.
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