It isn't hard to spot what's behind this erosion of the journalist's image. When Watergate broke, tabloid television wasn't a force and 24-hour cable news (all shouting all the time!) hadn't been invented. As the news media expanded, standards became as varied as the outlets, and the public's respect for the media steadily declined. The damage has been done by everything from gossipy Internet sites where anything passes for news to the Jayson Blair fiasco at The New York Times and CBS's apology for its Dan Rather report on President Bush's National Guard service.

A Gallup poll released last month showed that public confidence in journalism had reached a new low, with television news and newspapers receiving the same dismal number. Only 28 percent of those polled said they had a great deal of confidence in those media.

The more that confidence plummets, the more likely movies are to portray reporters unfavorably; and, in a snowball effect, the more unsavory reporters appear on screen, the more that image takes hold. Today it is pervasive. In the Russell Crowe boxing movie "Cinderella Man," reporters at a news conference make the hero's wife (Renée Zellweger) cry by suggesting her husband may be killed in the ring. The episode is revealing because it's such a throwaway scene in a big commercial movie, playing off the easy assumption that reporters are the bad guys.

"Crónicas" is a prime example of how current films gesture at that shared image. (Now in New York and Los Angeles, the film opens in other cities Friday and through the next month.) When the cameraman nudges the grieving parents -- the first thing we see a journalist do in the film -- it's a shorthand way of situating us in the world of tabloid television. The moral question the film goes on to raise is whether the reporter and his crew can rise above their tawdry impulses.

The film is no treatise on journalism, though. It's a sleek cat-and-mouse game that begins by placing viewers one step ahead of the journalists. The film opens with a man suspiciously bathing and washing his clothes in a river, the same man who soon after accidentally hits a boy with his truck and is attacked by the crowd that witnessed it. The film plants the idea that he may be the serial child killer even before the journalists begin to suspect.