By Ben Falk

Sydney Pollack’s wonderful film, “Absence of Malice,” makes a good, if not slightly depressing, point. At the beginning of the film, The Miami Standard’s lawyer explains to Megan Carter (Sally Field), a reporter at the newspaper, that the subject of her article, Paul Newman’s Michael Gallagher, is unable to do the paper “harm.” “We have no knowledge the story is false, therefore we’re absent malice. We’ve been both reasonable and prudent, therefore we’re not negligent. We can say what we like about him; he can’t do us harm. Democracy is served.” Implicit in this monologue is the question: is this right? The answer, while demonstrated by the events that follow, is stated specifically at the film’s end, when Assistant U.S. Attorney General James Wells (Wilford Brimley) explains,

“You know and I know that we [the law] can’t tell you [the press] what to print or what not to. We hope the press will act responsibly, but when you don’t, there ain’t a lot we can do about it. We can’t have people going around leaking stuff for their own reasons. It ain’t legal. And worse than that, by God, it ain’t right.”

So there’s the answer: it’s not right, but there’s nothing much we can do about it.

The film starts with an investigation. Miami strike force (something like an organized crime task force) leader Eliot Rosen (Bob Balaban) initiates an investigation of Michael Gallagher in order to find out what happened to local labor leader Joey Diaz, who disappeared a few weeks prior. The investigation is not meant to find Diaz, as they have no evidence that Gallagher was involved, but to pressure Gallagher into helping the authorities. All they know is that Gallagher’s father was a mob leader who kept the longshoremen, the union Diaz led, out of Miami for years. In order to put the heat on Gallagher, Rosen leaks news of the investigation to a reporter, Carter, by giving her an opportunity to read an uncompleted file on the investigation. Carter does and without confirming the story, publishes it. This articles, and others, ruin Gallagher’s reputation. They induce the longshoremen who work for Gallagher to strike in support of their lost leader, and lead his best friend to kill herself. Needless to say the articles, which were based on an unconfirmed leak, do some serious damage.

The damage wrought by Carter’s sloppy reporting brings the point of the film into stark relief: when journalists use their immense power – the power to publish pieces of information which the public depend on – irresponsibly, people suffer. This is different than the current “News of the World” scandal unfolding in Britain. There, the paper did something outright illegal, bribing cops and hacking cell-phones, in “Absence of Malice,” everything Carter did was legal, it was just wholly irresponsible.

And that brings up the final and companion point the film hopes to make. That the law does not set out what should be done, only what must be done. Carter followed the law, but she was still wrong. In turn, journalists, a profession with the power to ruin lives, need to take that responsibility seriously and practice their profession with the utmost care and prudence. Only then, contrary to The Standard’s attorney, will the people who make up that democracy be served.