IT'S panto season and aside from Captain Hook and Cruella de Vil I know who the real villains are: the big bad journalists.

Or that's what the TV would have you believe anyway.

As a reporter it's a real guilty pleasure to watch entertaining programmes and films featuring characters who do this job. It must be the same whatever your profession is - my sister, a nurse in Aberdeen, never misses Holby City.

But most writers' portrayals of reporters leave me laughing out loud, despairing or scratching my head.

Let's take The Missing. The fantastic BBC drama, about five-year-old Oliver Hughes who disappeared while on holiday with his parents, finished on Tuesday.

In it we saw the ruthless journalist Malik Suri paying someone for key evidence, threatening the parents of the missing child, while hacking phones and deleting the messages.

The whole point in dramas is to exaggerate but I could almost hear the boos and hissing across the country as we watched Malik throw ethics out the window.

Of course we know these things have happened in real life. We had the Leveson Inquiry into British press ethics which came about because of the phone hacking scandal.

It did nothing for the public's perception of journalists as heartless vultures.

But I've never met a journalist who would dream of behaving in this way, let alone know where to start in getting a hold of someone else's messages.

Similarly, nearly every time a reporter appears on a TV show, they stop at nothing to get a story.

It's no wonder the public hates journalism when they see characters harassing patients in a hospital waiting room in Casualty, or stabbing friends in the back for a scoop in Eastenders' Walford Gazette.

At the other end of the scale you can only laugh.

In the Christmas film The Holiday, Kate Winslet is dismal as a Daily Telegraph feature editor - who apparently is the last employee to file her story - a wedding announcement - before Christmas.

The truth is being a reporter involves a lot more work. We have to fill the paper everyday.

We write about everything from fundraisers to breaking news and there's no dirty work involved.

I'd love to see a balance in the portrayal of journalists on screen.

Are we all the panto baddies? Oh no we're not!