Fandom Friday: My Thoughts on a Few Fictional Journalists

Happy Friday, here are some of my fandom thoughts on a few fictional journalists:

- On Superman & Lois, why isn't Clark Kent working at the local newspaper, the Smallville Gazette with Lois Lane and Chrissy Beppo? Just because the Lane-Kent family moved from Metropolis to Smallville doesn't mean Clark had to give up being a journalist. Aside from being Superman, Clark's a stay at home dad. There's nothing wrong with that but his twin sons are in high school which gives him plenty of time he could use being an investigative reporter.

I wonder if Clark's journalistic interest will return either in the remainder of the first season episodes (there's only two episodes left) or if it will hopefully be shown in the second season. Clark is a really good reporter and I guess I just miss seeing him working on news stories either alone or working together with Lois. It would be disappointing for Clark not to return to it at some point.

- Another journalist that I like is Khadijah James from the show Living Single. Not only was she the Editor and Owner of her own magazine, Flavor, she was an investigative journalist uncovering stories from city council embezzlement to sporting controversy surrounding boxing matches being fixed. She also interviewed various celebrities as well. Although, Khadijah was shown as being the grounded practical character on the show she still had her zany moments and did ridiculous things. However, one thing that was never in question was her journalistic integrity when it came to writing the truth.

- I think one of the worst journalists is Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter, because she prefers to gather as much gossip and dirt as she can. That is instead of searching for facts and the truth which is something that really doesn't seem that important to her. She relies on sensationalism to sell her stories and she doesn't care if someone gets hurt or their reputation ruined because shocking her readers at the expense of others is more important. And during the rare times when she is being truthful, it's difficult to trust her words because of her tendency to spread lies.

- Another reporter I was thinking of was 9-1-1's Taylor Kelly. In the 4th season episode Treasure Hunt, I still can't get over her, a local Los Angeles TV news reporter, wanting to follow up the Treasure Hunt story by wanting to go to the Maldives where the treasure was purportedly taken. I can't believe she actually thought her local news station would send her there. It's not as if she's a leading anchor, no Taylor's a roving reporter working random hours covering random stories. I know she's extremely ambitious but there is no way her news station would ever spend the money to send her, let alone any non-lead anchor to the Maldives to follow up a story that was starting to lose interest.

I'm still not a fan of Taylor and that's because of how she was introduced to the series in the second season. She was shown as being an unscrupulous character who was willing to make a career and a name for herself by exploiting the firefighters she supposedly wanted to cover. When something terrible happened, she took advantage of the situation and at that moment she stopped being a reporter but became someone who was more interested in furthering her career at the expense of others.

So when Taylor was brought back for the fourth season, the writers wanted to pretend as if what she did in the second season didn't happen and that she had changed. That's fine but the writers could have had her acknowledge she did something wrong and apologized to the firefighters. And the perfect time to do that would have been in the Treasure Hunt episode, there was a scene near the end when she was with the team at Athena Grant and Bobby Nash's home having breakfast. The writers could have had her truly apologize for what she had tried to do but instead, the show had her back in their lives as if nothing had happened. The writers chose to do a soft reboot on her character without showing her apologizing for her actions and that's one of the reasons why I'm still not a fan of Taylor despite the show trying to push this shiny new and improved version of the character.