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Al Pacino played him in the movie The Insider, but in truth Lowell Bergman looks nothing like Pacino.

The veteran journalist, a former producer at 60 Minutes and Mike Wallace’s field producer, facilitator and comrade-in-arms on the TV newsmagazine’s ill-fated 1996 story on Big Tobacco and whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, is struck by the irony of his life being turned into fodder for a Big Hollywood Movie.

The disconnect between perception and reality is the underlying theme of much of Bergman’s post-60 Minutes journalism.

And when viewers sit down to a four-part PBS Frontline series on the state of news today, they will see how easily journalism’s mantra of “what you need to know” can become “what you want to hear.”

News Wars: Secrets, Spin and the Future of News debuts tonight (9 p.m.) with a two-part segment called Secrets, Sources & Spin.

It’s about how the mainstream media covered — or failed to cover — the buildup to the war in Iraq, and how the use of anonymous sources, strategic leaks to the press and the adversarial relationship between the Bush administration and the media shaped the news that viewers, and newspaper readers, saw at home.

Bergman and Frontline producers Raney Aronson and David Fanning conducted more than 80 interviews with newspaper columnists, TV news anchors, media analysts and journalism professors.

The program recounts the recent history of American journalism, from the heady idealism of the post-Watergate days to the present-day scandals at The New York Times and other newspapers, from reporters being threatened with jail for refusing to identify their sources and the obstacles posed by media handlers who exchange access for friendly questions to the realities of the changing market economy.

“The economic foundations of the newsgathering organizations that most [reporters] work for are in question, as are your jobs, your salaries, your perks and your future,” Bergman told reporters at last month’s meeting of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, California.

“And that, in turn, has an effect on the ability of organizations who actually do the kind of watchdog reporting that we like to think is the foundation of our business.”

Bergman noted that as the traditional news media’s core audience grows older, the number of viewers and newspaper readers is declining. He cited a recent study by New York University that claims a majority of Americans under the age of 25 now get their news online or from “fake newscasts” like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

In the third program in the series, News War: What’s Happening to the News, Bergman examines the pressure for profits at network news divisions in the face of increased competition from cable TV and the Internet.

The program features an interview with Daily Show head writer David Javerbaum, in which Javerbaum says that when viewers look to The Daily Show as a source of news, “that’s 100-per-cent indicative of other people’s failure and not our success.”

As news executives counter by making traditional news more user-friendly, traditional reporters fret that the future of serious newsgathering is at serious risk, as former Nightline anchor Ted Koppel told Frontline.

“To the extent that we are now judging journalism by the same standards of entertainment,” Koppel says in the program, “that may prove to be one of the greatest tragedies in the history of American journalism.”

Bergman interviewed former Los Angeles Times managing editor Dean Baquet, who was fired after he refused to lay off more reporters than had been cut already in a previous round of layoffs at the embattled newspaper.

“The people who own newspapers are beholden to shareholders,” Baquet told Frontline. “They want for the paper to be highly profitable. And sometimes that view of what a newspaper is supposed to be, and my view, which is that a newspaper is a public trust, come into conflict.”

The program also cites the counter view, that of a major investor in a firm that has part ownership in the Times, that the paper needs to rethink its role by becoming more local and less national.

“There is a role for probably three national newspapers,” investor Charles Brobinskoy tells Frontline, and names The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times. “We don’t think there’s any demand for a fourth.”

The irony, according to Bergman, is that the newspaper business continues to be profitable. “Most newspapers are great businesses producing tremendous amounts of cash,” Bergman said. “The Los Angeles Times produces more than $1 billion a year in revenue at a more than 20 per-cent-profit. That’s twice the Fortune 500 average, at least.

“So, one of the questions that I asked over and over again, of everybody I could get my hands on, was: How can an industry that produces so much cash be in so much trouble?”

The answer, Bergman says, is complicated.

“It appears that at one time newspapers, when they were privately owned — with some private news organizations, it’s hard to tell how much money they make — were making 30-, 40-, 50-per-cent profit. They were huge cash cows. That’s why investors wanted a piece of them. So they went public.

“Now, they’re at the other end of that bargain. The investors don’t see the 30-, 40-per-cent profits they were used to getting every year. And so you have somebody like Warren Buffett saying, last year at his shareholders’ meeting, that newspapers are not only in decline, it’s an industry that may go out of business.”