Absence of Malice: Absence of Professionalism

"Absence of Malice" is a very educational movie for aspiring journalists. Whatever you see Sally Field's character doing, DON'T DO IT. "Absence of Malice" is the ultimate "what not to do" of journalism. Sally Field's character, Megan Carter, is a reporter for a newspaper in Miami. Some of her many errors include: obtaining information illegally/immorally, failure to contact a variety of sources, publishing off the record information, drinking on the job, and many more. As a result of these many failures, Megan ends up publishing a story that fasely accuses a man of murder. When she writes a story to vindicate him, she uses an allibi that was given to her off the record. When the source of this allibi sees the story published in the paper, she commits suicide. It was the many errors Megan made that led to these consequences.
Even though she made many mistakes, I noted a very important aspect of journalism that Megan did actually manage to grasp: backgrounding. She spent a lot of time getting the accused murder's background story, which is very important to every story published in journalism. It's just too bad this is the only thing Megan got right throughout the whole movie. Sorry, Sally Field, it doesn't look like journalism is in your future.