Mad City

The movie Mad City is an exciting and thrilling film staring John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman. John Travolta plays Sam Bailey a recently laid off security guard to a natural history museum. Dustin Hoffman plays the main character of Max Brackett a news reporter who ends up becoming a liaison between Sam and the authorities. In this film the news reporters such as max bracket show disregard for the code of ethics of which reporters are supposed to follow to ensure their actions are moral.

Sam Bailey was a security guard for a natural history museum until the museums funding was reduced and thereby was required to downsize, Sam was one of the employees affected by this. Sam is the father of two children so with out his job he feels that their well being is threatened. Sam decides to go back to the museum to ask the museum curator to hear his plea and consider giving him his job back. After being ignored Sam thought that by bringing a gun to his next meeting with the curator it would ensure his story would be herd. Little did he realize that this one action would send his life into a down ward spiral ending with his inevitable death. Sam is easily influenced by Max once the situation progresses to be much more the Sam had intended. This conflicts with the code of ethics because Max is coaxing Sam to make the story progress and become bigger to further Max’s career. This shows disregard for Sam’s life and the lives of all the people possibly affected by this. This was shown when Sam was making his demands and Max gave him ideas of things to ask for.

Max Brackett is a news reporter who was fired from his previous job in the big leagues for arguing with the station’s anchor during a live broadcast. When Max sees Sam and the predicament he’s put himself in he recognizes a golden opportunity for a big story and a chance to the big leagues he’s been waiting for. Max decides to befriend Sam to put himself in a role of advisory and council. This was a beneficial role for max because with that power he was able to direct the story into any direction he felt good and was able to make the story so big it was a national story and soon became a conversation topic. This was shown in the film when Max convinced Sam to release 2 children one of which was black to help Sam get sympathy from black citizens after shooting Cliff.

The Code of Ethics is