Lou Grant Made Me Do It   

John Berthelsen had an enviable career as a journalist, covering Vietnam for Newsweek and working the investigative beat for the Sacramento Bee. But his credentials didn't make much of an impression on his son, Christian Berthelsen, who enrolled at Ramapo College of New Jersey with designs on a business degree.

Then Christian saw "All the President's Men."

"After I saw that movie I thought, 'My god, I have to do this, ' " says the younger Berthelsen, 24, now a federal court reporter for Los Angeles' City News Service. "Journalism was just something my dad did until I saw that movie."

Christian says his dad was a little frustrated that it took the Robert Redford/ Dustin Hoffman version of the Watergate exposé to motivate his son to pursue the life of the journalist. But Hollywood has long had a thing for journalists and journalism--and vice versa.

For a profession that involves mostly scribbling and sitting, journalism gets a lot of play on screen as a glamour career. And budding journalists often can't resist the lure of these images. (Some are absurd, to be sure. See Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte in "I Love Trouble," for example, or any episode of last season's drama-series clunker "New York News.") But every once in a while Hollywood can make the business look pretty appealing.

"Reporters were one of the few professionals that were displayed on television and in the movies where people actually did something," says Michael W. Sasser, editor of the SunPost, a Miami weekly. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, Sasser, 27, found his imagination stoked by one TV-land journalist in particular: Lou Grant.

The eponymously titled CBS series, which ran from 1977 to 1982, no doubt did its part to fill a seat or two in the nation's journalism schools. Ohio State University journalism professor Lee Becker, who conducted a study on the issue, says there is no direct correlation between any pop culture phenomenon in the years between Watergate and the present and increased enrollment in journalism schools. But anecdotal evidence like Sasser's story is compelling.

Although Sasser admits that, by current standards, the "Lou Grant" series is somewhat "hokey," he says it was nevertheless "absolutely significant" during his formative years. The series simply made journalism look exciting, he says.

"It looked like something that was filled with intelligent people who were involved and committed to things going on around them," Sasser says. "And it took people from sort of an everyday, ordinary-type background and exposed them to the unusual."

USA Today senior film critic Mike Clark remembers being intoxicated in the Ohio theaters of his youth by movies like "While the City Sleeps," a curious 1956 drama about reporters who vie for a job on the city desk by hunting down a serial killer. Such films portrayed a reporter's life as being full of perks (i.e., getting paid to watch boxing matches), intrigue (catching the bad guys), and the chance to meet Lauren Bacall (as in 1957's "Designing Woman").

"I can't really say that [movies about the press] necessarily made me want to go into journalism," says Clark, who recently appeared in Turner Classic Movies' month-long look at Hollywood and the press. "But I think they took something that was already in me and reinforced it, because I liked to write and I liked to read newspapers."

The truth is, of course, that life is not a tidy black-and-white drama. Real reporters don't really score headline-grabbing scoops every week. Real reporters are more likely to file redevelopment agency stories destined for inside the local section.

"Anybody who sets their life on a TV show is asking for trouble," says Douglass K. Daniel, who teaches journalism at Kansas State University. But Daniel says that even while the newsrooms of Hollywood were hardly realistic, they did capture the flavor of the profession.

" 'Lou Grant' was journalism as we all wish it would be practiced," says Daniel, whose look at the Emmy-winning series "Lou Grant: The Making of TV's Top Newspaper Drama" was published this year by Syracuse University Press (see Books, April). "And there's nothing wrong with having an ideal to pursue."

But when ideals aren't met, when real newsrooms turn out not to be staffed by the likes of Redford and Hoffman, do reporters, having been dazzled--maybe even a little seduced--by Hollywood's version of journalism, feel cheated?

Sasser, who came to journalism following stints as a private detective and a social worker, says he was disabused long ago of what he calls the "ridiculous, childlike idealism" of Lou Grant's world. "I think there is just a glimmer that remained, [a notion] of being able to make a difference, even if it's not making the difference as defined by those groovy people on 'Lou Grant,' " Sasser says.

And as for Christian Berthelsen, the reporter who says "All the President's Men" made him do it, is real life journalism everything Hollywood made it out to be?

"Well, not yet, but it's early," Berthelsen says. "I'm not at the Washington Post yet, that's for sure. But this is an exciting job. I can't imagine what being an accountant is like."