In the Daredevil TV series, investigative journalist Ben Urich battles the public fascination with public transportation.
Daredevil is a made-for-Netflix TV show based on a Marvel comic book about a blind lawyer, secretly a costumed crimefighter with supersenses, who takes on gangsters with his bare hands.
But some aspects of the story are unrealistic.
Take the character Ben Urich, played by Vondie Curtis-Hall. On the show as well as in the comic, Urich is an old-school city reporter whose dogged reporting puts him on the trail of Daredevil’s secret identity. Naturally, you can’t have a journalistic hero without obstacles to overcome, so Urich has an editor who doesn’t want him to pursue the story.
And here’s where the story gets improbable: The New York City tabloid editor’s objection is that people don’t read crime stories.
“Another organized crime thing?” says the editor (as transcribed by Romenesko). “It’s not sexy.”
When Urich explains that the Daredevil story may tie in to an earlier scoop of his, the editor has a memorable dismissal: “And you remember what that expose did for circulation? Dick—with a side of who-gives-a-shit.”
The editor’s bottom line on crime: “It doesn’t sell papers, Ben! Not anymore.”
Even in the real world, tabloids are fascinated by stories of costumed crime.
In the real world, of course, crime stories are a tabloid’s bread and butter, because crime is scary and evolution has made sure that fear gets your attention. In Daredevil‘s world—which is the same shared universe that The Avengers and Iron Man (but not Spider-Man or X-Men) are set in—crime is if anything worse than in the real world of 2015, and far more likely to involve people in colorful costumes with freaky powers. So what do people in that world want to read about?
EDITOR: It doesn’t sell papers, Ben! Not anymore. I want you on the subway line piece.
URICH: Rumors bubbling! Will Hell’s Kitchen finally get a subway line? Come on; we tell that every year!
EDITOR: And every year it kills.
Yep, that’s the problem with news today: Good reporters can’t cover sensational crimes like they used to because people just want to read about transportation infrastructure.
Just from a storytelling perspective, it’s not a good tactic to tell the audience they’re watching a kind of story that people typically find boring. And to create resistance for Ulrich to struggle against, you don’t have to invent a Bizarro World media culture where subway speculation outsells gang wars: The Daredevil series’ big bad, Wilson Fisk, is not only a criminal mastermind but a powerful business leader—the kind of figure actual tabloid editors might be discouraged from going after. He’s likely a major advertiser—he could even own the paper.
In the Marvel comic book, Urich works for the Daily Bugle, the same paper that Spider-Man alter ego Peter Parker shoots photos for. But in the Netflix version, Urich works for the Daily Bulletin—because the movie rights to Spider-Man and associated characters belong to Sony, whereas Daredevil is made by Marvel Studios, which like the comic book company of the same name is owned by Disney. So media ownership has behind-the-scenes influence in shaping Daredevil‘s fictional journalism—too bad corporate politics couldn’t get an on-camera role.
Spoiler alert
actually, if you watch the whole series, you find out at the end of the series that the real reason the editor doesn’t allow the reporter to cover the story is the editor has been bought and corrupted by a big corporation, hiding behind multiple corporate shells.
Re. robkall’s comment: I think the original critique still stands, because a corrupt editor would presumably offer a non-laughable rationale for killing a story. As filmed, it’s like a secretly bought-off Playboy editor claiming that nobody reads about sex these days.
Not a realism issue, by the way, but it did get my attention that in Episode 3 Daredevil tortures a prisoner while a likeable ER nurse offers helpful hints on causing pain. The torture works — Daredevil’s infallible truth-sensing ability helps — and a child is saved. No ambiguity that I could scent: just a straight-up, Good (Tough) Guys Do Torture scene. I suppose that subsequent material of the “hero-faces-his-own-demons” type might somehow modify this apparently straightforward sequence, but I find myself not in a mood to invest X hours of life in answering the question. (So, feel free to spoil, anyone . . .) Is this scene going to be revisited and profoundly re-worked, or is this just where torture is now, in our pop-cultural ethics landscape?
When I saw the headline, I assumed this piece would have a slightly different focus. Ben’s character throughout flirts with leaving the paper and taking his exposés to the web and starting a blog. But he’s skeptical, feeling that it will have few readers and little impact. Numerous reviews of the show (sorry, don’t remember specific publications; probably AV Club for one), though quite positive overall, singled out this plot line as unrealistic. As web publications, it seems they took umbrage at the notion of institutional self-censorship and the inadequacy of blogs and online venues as a remedy. Everyone would be scrambling for Ben’s stories they thought, as if the propaganda model were dead. It was striking.