Absence of Malice – New Quote I Love

Love the movie Absence of Malice starring Paul Newman and Sally Field. Love this monologue of the Assistant U.S. Attorney General character (played by Wilford Brimley) to newspaper reporter (played by Sally Field),

“You know and I know that we can’t tell you what to print or what not to. We hope you people in the press will act responsibly, but when you don’t, there ain’t a hell lot anybody can do about it. But we can’t have people going around leaking stuff for their own reasons. It ain’t legal. And worse than that, by God, it ain’t right.“

P.S. Right after I finished watching Absence of Malice, I started writing a long post to recommend the film to the HK newspaper Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai Chee Ying (黎智英), the paper’s editorial team and reporters because I consider Apple Daily‘s moral compass as mostly broken. Apple Daily reporters will write almost anything, put almost anything in cartoons (including a a sequences of cartoons depicting a young girl falling to her death), filming almost anything to sell newspapers.

P.P.S. According to Vanity Fair Dec 2004 article “The Gossip Behind the Gossip”,

“Actor Paul Newman, meanwhile, was unofficially banned not just from “Page Six” but from the entire Post after he went on the warpath against the tabloid. At the center of the controversy were a caption and photo published on “Page Six” in 1980. Beneath a candid shot of a miffed-looking Newman on the set of Fort Apache, the Bronx, standing next to a woman with her hand raised to the camera’s lens, the caption read: “Paul Newman stares in astonishment as a ‘Fort Apache’ crew member wards off a group of Hispanic youths protesting the film.” Newman said that, in reality, it was photographers who were being warded off, and in 1983 he told Rolling Stone magazine that his 1981 movie Absence of Malice, a drama about an irresponsible journalist, was a “direct attack on the New York Post.” He went on to say, “I could sue the Post, but it’s awfully hard to sue a garbage can.” Instead of retaliating, the paper did its best to ignore Newman’s existence.“