This is a real sleeper. Unless you see and understand the real meaning of the movie you may miss it or totally miss the point as it appears the one person reviewing did who claimed it was "tasteless". The true sense of journalism and its moral obligation has been lost in a sea of ratings and commercialism. Instead of objective news reporting and commentary in the we are either treated to "happy news" or the Tom Brokaw school of subjective reporting or both. It has reached the point where even so called "journalists" have been censored by station management for reporting things that might be detrimental to a sponsor or the station itself.
While the sub-plot: a high school teacher is photographing his female students nude and having sex with them - is not in the best of taste, it is the coverage of the story and the ratings race that takes place over integrity and morality associated with responsible journalism. It includes a news director whose priority of winning a ratings war is of such utmost importance that he listens in to phone calls, presents the crew with a celebration cake when the sleaze factor of exposing a teenaged girl's confession on camera wins that station the rating's race. It is this sleazy news director that at the end of the movie is finally exposed in a tactical move by Sheen that is worth the price of the entire movie. It is Sheen realizing his moral responsibility over the importance of ratings. By the way, I will not give away the punch line but it really is great.
The bottom line, the one that we all tend to miss is the fact that this mythical station would not have won a ratings war if we, the viewing public, would not have been so sleazy ourselves. This being Feb., 2000, the month of the ratings war, I still have to ponder over the trash factor that emanates from a few of our stations in the name of winning ratings. I need not mention networks or shows in question as we all know who and what they are.
By all means find a place where you can rent this little gem and take a look. View it a couple of times. Perhaps it will wake you up as well as to where quality television and news reporting has gone to.
I did not see any stars shown but it gets five big ones from me.
