“Resurrecting the Champ” is a Rod Lurie vehicle that stars Samuel L. Jackson as a onetime heavyweight fighter now homeless and Josh Hartnett as a Denver newspaper reporter who turns the fighter’s tale into a big story. It’s just the latest movie that tries to take a bite out of journalism and winds up looking uninformed.

A column in the LA Times (via Romenesko) goes after the film for needlessly fictionalizing the real story it’s based on. The original Los Angeles Times Magazine piece told about the reporter first discovering the fighter on the streets and then gradually coming to realize his tale wasn’t true. In the film, set in Denver, the story is much different: the writer publishes the story and basks in a wave of accolades. Then he finds out the fighter was lying and wavers about what to do long enough to lose control of the situation.

Filmmakers can do whatever they want with their stories, of course. But there’s something cheap about taking a story about one responsible reporter’s odyssey and turning into an unethical reporter’s Waterloo. Lurie uses all of this to drive a morality tale about sons and fathers and how prevaricating reporters are.

The real problem with switching the story around is that it’s so implausible as to be risible. This isn’t a Jayson Blair- or Stephen Glass-style case, where a fraud was deliberately perpetrated by a writer against a publication. Here, the entire story is driven by something fairly unlikely: An outlandish story like that’s getting into the pages of a reputable publication (a Denver paper’s Sunday magazine) with zero fact-checking. The first thing an editor says is, Where’s his trainer? Where’s his wife? Where’s his friends? “Resurrecting the Champ” leaves all of this out.

Little in the film squares with how daily newspapers work. The film makes it seem like the paper’s magazine is an hoity-toity independent publication. (This one even has a publisher who gets involved in minor editorial decisions.) A key plot point is a paucity of information on the boxer’s life; we’re told that Hartnett’s bedroom-eyed researcher is quite industrious, but for some reason she was unable to go to a library and check out a book, or suggest Hartnett call up an actual boxing authority.

Another important aspect of the plot is that the real boxer’s son is threatening to sue the newspaper; it’s never clear what exactly for, but it seems to be an implication in the story that he had neglected his father. But when Hartnett had called the son, he had uttered an expletive and hung up on him. If the writer had really implied anything bad about the son in the story, he would most likely have been asked by an editor to try to call the son back again. The published story would detail that he tried more than once to get a response, which would have probably limited the paper’s liability.

(Another small but telling thing: The boxer through some contrived reason makes Hartnett promise that he won’t contact his [the boxer’s] estranged wife. In the film, Hartnett is portrayed as a petty liar but unaccountably keeps this agreement, whereas in real life this would be the promise a real reporter would most likely break; or, more likely, the one he would not ever make in the first place.)

And finally, another plot point is driven by the fact that Hartnett doesn’t immediately tell his bosses when he finds out the story wasn’t true. He tells his wife, who works at the paper as well. It is inconceivable that the two wouldn’t have immediately told superiors. Amazingly, Hartnett even continues with a new gig hosting a Showtime sports special. (The blatant product placement allows a Showtime exec to wildly boast about Showtime’s boxing programming.) They would both know that the news would get out sooner rather than later, and keeping quiet would turn a professional mistake into a much bigger ethical one.

These are just the major problems. There are many smaller ones, and it’s also one of those movies with head-scratching screenplay issues on every page. (For example: By the movie’s math, the Jackson character would be close to 80 years old! For example: The film opens with a group of three frat boys who, we are supposed to believe, routinely wander around darkened trash-filled alleys looking for an elderly homeless guy to beat up. I guess they were doing it “for kicks.”)

“Resurrecting the Champ” is just the latest heavy-handed and wholly implausible look at the reporting industry. Some will say this is a zeitgeist issue reflecting society’s alleged distrust of the media. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. What’s really going on here is artless clods making flop movies getting their kicks by trying to get back at a press they resent. They don’t work logically, artistically or commercially. (”Resurrecting the Champ” has made a big $2 million its first week of release and had a per-screen average of $78 on Wednesday.)

Another recent press-bashing film was Woody Allen’s “Scoop.” It was about a young college journalist, played, with a chesty voluptuousness unseen in most newspaper newsrooms, by Scarlett Johansen. The film opens with Johansen going in to interview a film director and sleeping with him. After that entirely gratuitous start, a ghost (don’t ask) gives her a lead, and she and an elderly Allen go on the trail of a rich British guy who might be a murderer.

The semiotics of her character are difficult to parse. Allen’s own relations with the press, in the wake of the Soon-Yi Previn affair, have not been good, so when the young journalist is schtupped by the film guy Allen is presumably getting his own back. On the other hand, over the rest of the film Allen is finally forced by his age (he’s now 71) to not actually be romantically involved with the comely young actress he’s enticed to star in his films, which can be read as a sort of impotence. So Allen is left to pant over her indirectly in two ways, first through his character and then through his camera, particularly in an overlong sequence in an indoor swimming pool in which Johansen, reclining in a resplendent red one-piece, has her impressive, ah, musculature extensively examined.

That’s what I mean about how mixed up it all is… there are at least three “Allens” on the film; the offscreen director, the character he plays, and the director via his camera. The acid portrait of the loose young journalist, however, is then confused even further, when she becomes an intrepid truth seeker, which lurches back into the standard heroic tropes of journalism in the post-Woodward & Bernstein era. But even this gets muddied because the catalyst for her interest is, well, a ghost, which seems to be a shot at Deep Throat. In the end, she fakes out the murderer when he tries to kill her (in yet another leaden bit of plotting) and she’s off to a splendid career in “investigative journalism.”

Boy, I guess I should have included one of those “spoiler alert” warnings.

Again, little in this film reflects journalism in the real world; Allen’s goal, rather, is to belittle the profession in every way possible, from cheap shots against the media in general to smirking at the idea of investigative journalism.

Finally, another recent film that ventured into this territory is “Thank You for Smoking,” in which Aaron Eckhart plays a big-deal lobbyist for the cigarette industry in DC. He meets a Washington Post reporter, who seduces him and then trashes him in an expose. The reporter is portrayed as blandly, even gleefully, corrupt in her seductions. In the end Eckhart gets his revenge and the reporter winds up in the boonies. Here again, heavy-handedness gets in the way of the facts. While I’m sure some reporters do sleep with people they meet while doing a story, it’s extremely unlikely that a reporter at the Post would do what the woman in the film does (deliberately sleep with the primary subject of her story to get the information she needs to hang him), for the simple reason that the person she burned in that fashion would immediately tell her bosses and she’d be fired.

Hollywood gets every industry wrong of course; what set these films apart is that it’s obvious the makers are working out issues they have with the media; the result is some cheap shots—and, in the case of “Resurrecting the Champ,” some even cheaper box office receipts. The film’s most bizarre scene has Teri Hatcher, as a corrupting Showtime exec, trying to lure Hartnett into all sort of clutches. “There’s no journalism anymore and no news,” she coos. “The last thing people want is the truth.” That’s Ron Lurie talking.