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Fictional representations of journalism rarely get it completely right. Media critics will say that is apt, given the subject matter. Though it’s not just journalism; I’m sure other professions, medicine and the law, to take two examples, are not as constantly exciting as TV series such as Grey’s Anatomy and Boston Legal make them seem. And that’s fair enough because television shows and films and novels are supposed to entertain.

When it comes to film, All The President’s Men (1976) comes close to getting journalism right, but then director Alan J. Pakula and stars Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman did have a fairly decent real story to work with: the Watergate scandal. Michael Frayn’s 1967 novel Towards the End of the Morning is considered an accurate rendering of the Fleet Street of the time, but I get the general impression journalists don’t fare well in fiction.

Certainly this is the view of American journalist and journalism teacher Steve Weinberg, who collects novels in which journalists feature as characters. “Far too often,” he wrote recently, “this is what I take away from journalism novels: as a group we have a lot of sexual intercourse on the job, lack scruples when gathering information and solve murders frequently enough to eliminate the need for homicide detectives. Good fun, I suppose, but disheartening because journalism should come across as something more noble.”

Two recent fictional representations of journalism, Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the Russell Crowe film State of Play, will hardly make Weinberg rethink his theory, though the movie (based on a BBC series) does strive to achieve a degree of nobility for the profession of journalism. Not for the journalist, mind you: Crowe’s scruffy Cal McAffrey is not a noble man.

Both book and film get more right than wrong about journalism. Dyer, who contributes to The Guardian, gets some things very right. The novel opens with his protagonist, freelance journalist Jeffrey Atman, frozen in front of the computer:

The morning’s work had bored the crap out of him. He was supposed to be writing a 1200 word so-called “think piece” (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had reached such a pitch of tedium that he’d spent half an hour staring at the one-line email to the editor who’d commissioned it: “I just can’t do this shit any more. Yrs J.A.”

As the title suggests, Dyer’s novel is in fact two connected novellas. The first is centred on Atman’s junket to cover the Venice Biennale. It’s 2003, the year the city suffered a heatwave, though Dyer borrows from the 2005 and 2007 Biennales, too. The second is set in the Indian religious city of Varanasi, where the first person narrator, whom we assume is Atman, goes to write a quickie travel piece but ends up staying and immersing himself in the local culture.

This piece is not a book review so I’ll be brief on that score: I found the Venice part much more interesting than the Varanasi part and the novel overall patchy and ultimately unsatisfying. And if Dyer’s puns were horses someone would have to call the RSPCA, so hard does he work them. Dyer is an accomplished novelist and essayist, but when you read on the book jacket that he is: “Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain”, you know you need a new word to describe publishing hyperbole, and I suggest “blurberbole”.

In Venice, Atman certainly lives part of the Weinberg theory: he’s on the job while on the job. The sex is hot, fuelled by a river of bellinis and a mountain of cocaine. I haven’t been to the Venice Biennale, so I asked my friend Sebastian Smee, art critic for The Boston Globe, for an opinion. Sebastian said that while he was never personally invited to “orgiastic cocaine-infested parties... there were plenty of them going on”.

Dyer is good, too, on the banality of minor celebrity journalism. Here is Atman recalling an interview he did at an arts festival with a formerly famous “crumbling beauty”:

She didn’t even have a memoir to promote. All she was publicising was the astonishing fact of her continued existence. Pathetic. So what did that make Atman? Infinitely more pathetic, obviously, since his job was to provide cue lines for her greatest anecdotes, a gig for which he received travelling expenses and four complimentary drinks tickets.

And later:

The biggest joke of all – the thing that made him more depressed than anything – was that at a certain level he was considered successful. People envied his getting assignments like this. He bitched and griped but he would have bitched and griped even more if he’d heard that some other hack had got this junket instead.

There are no junkets in State of Play. There is no cocaine either, though there is more booze in the newsroom – a small bottle of whisky – than I’ve seen in a long time. Licence is taken elsewhere: in my experience journalists spend more time writing than dodging trained assassins, not the other way around. Indeed, no-one writes in this film until it’s almost over. And while the clash between the newspaper’s old-school reporter and its rising online star provides a contemporary tension, it’s a bit overdone.

Yet State of Play gets one important thing right. I won’t spoil it for those yet to see the film but in short the central drama is one of those industrial-militarygovernment conspiracies so loved by Hollywood. The only people standing in the way of the conspirators, the only ones capable of exposing truths that powerful people do not want exposed, are journalists. This is true to life, this is what the media can do, especially the print media, and it’s why we need newspapers.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer, Text, RRP $32.95.

Stephen Romei is editor of The Australian Literary Review