The mirror that is Hollywood, reflecting back the image of our culture, has a new vision of the media and it isn't a pretty. No place is the transformation of media to monster so complete as in Tomorrow Never Dies , the current James Bond flick. Here the arch villain, Elliot Carver, kills his wife and plots a war between China and Britain, just so his media empire can flaunt the scoop of the century, and give him paramount access to every television screen on Earth. Bond is, of course, among the most infamous Brits around, so think Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell at the next level. Today's movie goers are no longer intimidated by South American dictators or Russian generals.
Recent surveys reveal that the public is scared silly by the media.
So the producer decided to model the arch villain after a media mogul because he knew that the audience would really root for Bond to destroy him. While there's a long history of the media as protagonist in films, Citizen Kane is perhaps the most memorable. But over the last two decades, journalists and television itself has increasingly taken its lumps. Most recently, Danny DiVito plays a corrupt editor of a sleazy Hollywood celeb rag in LA Confidential , and Dustin Hoffman a self-promoting newscaster in Mad City . Hollywood is simply keeping pace with the public's growing suspicion of the press.