A car-and-motorcycle chase in the windy streets of Paris. Dueling helicopter pilots in a narrow mountain pass. A rooftop footrace that led to Tom Cruise’s broken ankle in real life. When it comes to stunts, Mission: Impossible—Fallout delivers. But, for all the Fitbit-melting set pieces that Cruise endures in the film, it’s a bit of stunt casting that strangely may pack more risk—and it comes care of Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s avuncular, desk-bound standard bearer.
The news anchor plays himself in the well-reviewed action sequel, in a scene in which a terrorist wants his anarchist group’s manifesto read on the cable network’s airwaves. Blitzer’s scene, which—spoiler alert—relies on the spy series’s use of fakery for the force of good—comes at a particularly thorny time for the news media. Journalists are under intense pressure from a White House crying “fake news” about unflattering coverage and a public increasingly unsure of which news sources to trust.
Blitzer’s appearance is just the latest in the newsman’s long acting career—he has also played himself on House of Cards, in the 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall, and the original Murphy Brown series back in 1996. And he is far from the first broadcast journalist to deliver a winking cameo. Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien appeared in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Rachel Maddow, George Stephanopoulos, and many other news anchors have showed up on House of Cards; and even that exemplar of traditional news ethics, Walter Cronkite, popped up in a 1974 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, delighting the starstruck employees of the fictional Minneapolis newsroom.
In an era when Russian bots are populating social-media feeds with fake stories, Blitzer showing up in the sixth installment of our most reliable espionage franchise is hardly the gravest danger to our public trust in media. But 2018 is a long way from Cronkite’s era in terms of Americans and their feelings toward journalists. According to a 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey, today, 66 percent of Americans say most news media do not do a good job of separating fact from opinion, compared to 42 percent who held this view in 1984. And less than half of Americans now say they can think of a single news source that reports the news objectively.
“The idea that you’re going to take a role in a movie and effectively be reading something that’s obviously fake is a blurring of the lines that I think is even more dangerous at a time when the very effort of journalism is being attacked as fake,” said Deborah Potter, a former network correspondent at CNN and CBS, and founder of the journalism nonprofit NewsLab.
Mission: Impossible—Fallout, which looks set to earn more than $50 million at the domestic box office this weekend, arrives in a week when one of Blitzer’s own colleagues is at the center of another conflagration between President Trump and the journalists who cover him. On Wednesday, the White House barred CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins from attending a presidential event in the Rose Garden for asking “inappropriate” questions during Trump’s meeting with European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. The move inspired the sharp-elbowed White House press corps, including Fox News, to stand in solidarity with Collins.
“Reporters playing reporters is nothing new, but what’s unique right now is the climate we’re in, in 2018—this brutal, antagonist relationship between the president and journalists, and our relationship with the public, which is fragile at this point,” said Duy Linh Tu, professor at the Columbia Journalism School. “We’ve lost credibility in a lot of ways. Do we want to do anything that further compromises that? Does appearing in a blockbuster film help, or does it hurt? It could humanize Wolf Blitzer for someone who doesn’t watch him, because they watch Fox News or because they don’t watch news at all. Or maybe someone would like that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. But in today’s environment I think that’s really rolling the dice.”
Blitzer and CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Blitzer did tout the film appearance on his Twitter feed, saying, “Thanks @simonpegg and @HenryCavillNews for welcoming me to the “Impossible Mission Force.” #MissionImpossible Fallout is amazing.”
