Talk:Absence of Malice

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Paul Newman plays the son of a long dead Mafia boss, (Michael Colin Gallagher), who is a simple liquor warehouse owner. Frustrated in his attempt to solve a murder of a union head, a prosecutor leaks a false story that Newman is a target of the investigation, hoping that he will tell them something for protection. As his live begins to unravel, others are hurt by the story. Sally Field, the reporter, is in the clear under the Absence of Malice rule in slander and libel cases knowing nothing to trade to the prosecutors. The D.A., Feds and the police set her up to write the story that explodes his world. Now he's going to do what ever he has to do get even, Newman must regain control of his life on different ground. Absence of Malice strikes out against the rights and the privileges of the press. The movie suggests that sometimes the press doesn't do their research as well as they should and that they don't worry about who they hurt. The problem is that nothing that Sally Field's reporter does in the film is her fault. Corrupt sources and a justice department run by injustice hardly seem like the fault of the media and yet in the end, the press gets the brunt of the blame, while the flaws with the law are lessen by a Wilford Brimley cameo and a number of red herrings.

A bit simplistic. The point of the story was that the reporters just wrote what was fed them without digging further to develop the same "facts" from another approach (it's called CYA but all too few news media outlets do it). The reporter who replaced Field when the paper got burned turned around and did the same thing--she let her subject write the story. You think the media is blameless but I think it was an unusually perceptive screenplay. Usually the only time the news media gets dinged is for being insensitive to widows and other grieving people. Absence of Malice happens ALL THE TIME. It happened to me, but I didn't have the wherewithal of Paul Newman's character to get even, nor the inclination.