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There is a scene in the new play Vladimirplaying at the Manhattan Theater Club through November 10, in which a Russian journalist named Raya gets into a heated argument with one of her sources, Chovka, a young Chechen woman.

Chovka took part in a terrorist attack on a school that left hundreds dead, including many children, in order to avenge the death of his own family.

Raya is dismayed, but Chovka reminds her that when they first met, Raya promised to show the Russian people the truth. So that it is impossible to look away. “No one looks away now,” she said.

Raya says she went too far, that killing is wrong and that journalism has enough power to change minds, to change history.

“You really think a lot about yourself, don’t you?” » Chovka responds.

Vladimir was written by Erika Sheffer; Raya is based on Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in 2006 in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow. I met Politkovskaya briefly during her visit to New York shortly before her assassination. After her death, I made numerous trips to Moscow to demand justice, as head of CPJ, where I met regularly with Politkovskaya’s colleagues, her editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov and her son Ilya, who inherited the quiet intensity of his mother. Like Raya, she was driven by the unrelenting belief that journalism is important, and even worth dying for, because change only happens when a society is confronted with the truth.

Since seeing the play, I have been thinking about the role of journalists as fictional characters and in real life. Over the years, I have watched countless dramas, documentaries and films in which journalists were the protagonists, and I noticed a pattern. If society, faced with this uncomfortable truth, takes action, there will be a happy ending. But when no one believes the journalist, things take a turn for the worse.

In the first category are classic Watergate films, like All the President’s Men And The post officein which a few determined journalists, backed by a strong-backed media organization, bring down a corrupt president. This is also true for The insiderwhich describes the relationship between tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and 60 minutesand the Oscar winner Highlightabout the Boston Globeexposing child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Among the many tragedies is the Oliver Stone classic El Salvador (1986), in which a freelance photojournalist played by James Woods is overwhelmed by injustice, and A private warreleased in 2018, which chronicles the life and death of correspondent Marie Colvin, who insisted on staying and reporting on the civilian toll in Syria, believing until the end that the world could not turn a blind eye to the carnage.

Onstage, the 2009 Tony-nominated drama Time stopswhich 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 the Columbia Journalism School who co-taught a course on the portrayal of journalists in films, including Hollywood classics and documentaries. There is a tendency, Coronel told me, to idealize the role of the press in films set in the United States and to overestimate the power and influence of journalists.

Many films set outside the United States present a more nuanced understanding. Coronel cites the 2020 documentary as an example A thousand cuts, which chronicles the exploits of Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa and her press agency, Rapperjust as he fought against the then Filipino strongman, Rodrigo Duterte. They reveal corruption and brutality, but Duterte remains firmly in power as the credits roll.

At the end of VladimirRaya, after surviving an assassination attempt and seeing her beloved Russia defeated by cynicism and fear, goes 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 survived an attempted poisoning, “which is great.”

Raya is perplexed. Everyone she meets in the United States is worried about her, but doesn’t seem to care about Russia, or the fact that its leader – a man of no great intelligence, whose “only talent is finding ugliness and to know how to use it” – hijacked the future of his country

This moment, of course, is intended to make us reflect on our own country, and that is precisely what I did. One day, 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? Maybe we’ll find out soon enough.

Joel Simon is the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.