It is rare that two movies on journalism release within a span of two years and earn so much praise across the world. Coming in quick succession, Spotlight (2015) and The Post (2017) showcase real stories of travails and triumphs of two US newspapers. Somehow, it’s tough to find similar experiments in Bollywood. But that’s not to say attempts haven’t been made at all.

The depiction of journalism in Hindi cinema has been sometimes fleeting and sometimes the profession has been used merely to draw a character’s professional sketch. Full blown portrayals of the ironies and challenges of news media are yet to inspire the Hindi cinematic imagination.

In Footpath (1953), Dilip Kumar played a journalist-turned-marketeer who returns to journalism to do an exposé on illegal trade. It was one of the first portrayals of a journalist in Hindi cinema. Kumar, as Meghnad Desai describes in his eponymous book, Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India (Roli, 2004), was Nehru’s Hero. He had emerged as the quintessential socialist hero as cinema and Nehruvian policy crossed paths in the 1950s. Although the film is better known for the Talat Mahmood number, Shaam-e-gham ki kasam, aaj ghamgin hain hum, Footpath can also be viewed as one of the earliest takes on the scourge of corruption in public life.

Almost a decade later, it was Dilip Kumar again who took up a journalist’s role as a tabloid editor in Leader (1964). The film was a crime-politics nexus melodrama and Kumar’s on-screen profession was merely a perfunctory footnote.

It wasn’t until two decades later that Hindi cinema got a full-fledged feature on the news industry. Ramesh Sharma’s New Delhi Times (1986) tried to invest moral capital into media, using the profession as an instrument to unravel the layers of power complex where politics and crime are getting inextricably mixed. Shashi Kapoor played the role of Vikas Pandey, the executive editor of New Delhi Times, who while writing an investigative report on a political murder in Ghazipur finds murkier sides to the political conspiracy. In the final two scenes, Kapoor’s character introspects on the role of journalism in seeing through this intricate web of corruption and erosion of democratic values. Along with its portrayal of the challenges of newsgathering, editorial choices and the role of owners in media, New Delhi Times also focused on the interplay within the ecosystem of power politics.

The eighties saw a newspaper exposé based on a first-of-its-kind sting operation in Indian news media, inspiring Jagmohan Mundhra’s Kamla (1985). Indian Express reporter Ashwini Sarin’s exposé on rural flesh trade made its way to Vijay Tendulkar’s play which in turn inspired Mundhra’s film featuring Dipti Naval in the title role.

The 1990s brought the proliferation of satellite television news channels in India. In the character sketches of news media professionals in Hindi film plots, television journalists were new entrants.

By the turn of the century, the competition over TRPs also made their way into film scripts. The Shah Rukh Khan-Juhi Chawla starrer Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000) depicted the cut-throat competition among rival channels. But the movie, in its formulaic pursuit of song-and-dance-romantic-drama routine, frittered away the possibilities of becoming a media film. It concluded with the makers of the film returning to a clichéd plot device—the morality of its protagonists.

Similar moral pomposity led to another set of plot contrivance in Shankar’s Nayak (2001), a remake of Tamil film Mudhalvan, in which Anil Kapoor plays a television journalist-turned-anti-corruption crusader.

The noughties brought in a phase when the changing nature of gender composition in the media workforce led to more women being portrayed as journalists in Hindi movies. While Preity Zinta essayed the role of war reporter Romila Dutta in Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya (2004), Konkona Sen Sharma played newspaper reporter Madhavi Sharma in Madhur Bhandarkar’s  Page 3 (2005).

Last year, Sonakshi Sinha’s eponymous character as a journalist in Noor could also be seen as an addition to mainstream Hindi cinema registering the growing presence of female workforce in Indian newsrooms.

The insidious dumbing down of television news, agenda-setting and issues of editorial idealism for the lure of TRP are issues that surfaced in two movies of different genres on the Hindi screen in 2010.

Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui’s Peepli Live was a satirical take on television media’s response to a distressed farmer who announces that he will kill himself. The same year Ram Gopal Varma’s Rann churned out a melodramatic take on the fight for media ethics waged by the CEO (played by Amitabh Bachchan) of a low TRP news channel which is trying to resist political pressures and unethical practices of a rival channel.

Despite these melodramatic forays into unravelling the fascinating world of India’s vibrant media scene, the truth remains that Bollywood hasn’t yet extended its narrative canvas to cover real stories from Indian newsrooms. Indian journalism has its own share of stories about its struggles and triumphs in supplying the first drafts of history. The Hindi screen must nurture the visual ambition to tell us some of them.