TRADITIONALLY, newspaper reporters are the bad guys in dramas, always sleazy and sneaky, unprincipled, ruthless, hard as nails and liars.

In particular, reporters on local newspapers are depicted as behaving as though they are national newspaper reporters, when in fact they couldn’t be more different. Yes, it’s true that many reporters on the nationals have come from locals, but once they make the move, their priorities, loyalties and methods move poles apart.

For example, local newspapers need to have a good working relationship with the readership as well as with local institutions such as councils and police forces, whereas a national newspaper can upset a family or a council or a police force and not care because they probably won’t have to deal with them again.

This misrepresentation has gone on forever. I cannot ever remember watching a drama that accurately portrayed local journalists, from Ken Barlow running the Weatherfield Gazette entirely on his own in Coronation Street to the tea boy on the newspaper in EastEnders who just became a reporter with no training whatsoever.

The national press has fared equally badly. In fact, I cannot ever remember a single decent or even nice reporter on television ever.

So it was with great interest that I watched Press, the new BBC drama set on two national newspapers, one similar to The Guardian and the other resembling The Sun.

Written by Dr Foster writer Mike Bartlett, it was refreshingly closer to reality than I’ve seen before. The newsroom, where most of the journalists sat quietly at their desks churning out copy, is exactly like today’s newsrooms, both national and local, where tightened belts have led to fewer people doing more people’s work.

It is very unlike the newsrooms of years ago, when I heard stories from an ex-boyfriend who went from local newspapers to one notorious national tabloid where the volatile editor would burst out of his office and slap the back of the head of every journalist, male and female, as they sat at their desk until he reached the one he was really angry with. Then he would unleash a torrent of abuse at them, including the foulest of language, and sometimes fire them on the spot. My ex lasted three months there.

Somehow, I can imagine Ben Chaplin, as the editor of The Sun-type tabloid in Press and stole the show with his cold-eyed Machiavellian manoeuvrings that led to the Home Secretary resigning after he got hold of pictures from her murky past, behaving like this.

However close it was to the real thing, Press of course did not show journalism as it really is day to day. Most jobs have boring bits and journalism is no different. You barely even get phones ringing with a hot story these days because everything happens by email or online.

But you cannot have the day-to-day realism of any job in a fictional drama because then it would no longer be a drama. Just like that other BBC hit Bodyguard, where real bodyguards told newspapers “Ah, but the job isn’t really like that”, as well as all those police procedurals, where no doubt real police officers are muttering angrily about how they’d never do that in their job, and the doctors who worry how real medics can compare with their fictional counterparts on Casualty, writers have to dramatise to make the jobs look exciting or manipulate them to suit the plot.

By contrast, you only have to watch one episode of the documentary The New York Times: The Fourth Estate, a behind-the-scenes look at the newspaper during Trump’s first year as president, to be bored silly.

I really hope that as Press progresses, Mike Bartlett also explores the current scourge of fake news.

I want him to explain, in his unique fictional way, the huge difference between trained journalists, who hold a qualification from the National Council for the Training of Journalists having passed exams in the law, how local and national government operate, and how to write a balanced and objective news story as well as shorthand, and online bloggers.

These are mostly people with an opinion but with no background in journalism and so what they write is not backed up with fact and is often a polemic where an objective and balanced argument is absent.

Most people, because they are not au fait with the difference between a trained journalist and a writer cannot and do not appreciate the professionalism of journalists. So this an homage to the honour of real journalists everywhere. We’re not perfect but the vast majority are not the awful hacks dramatists would so love us to be.