In Support of Newsroom - Part 1

Yosemite?!
-Will McAvoy


Newsroom premiered last year, Aaron Sorkin's return to television since leaving us with a single season of Studio 60 and spending some time writing movies.  It premiered in the same manner as Studio 60 in the form of a character ranting about the state of things.

It's difficult to avoid all the Newsroom-related hate spun toward Sorkin.  There could be two reasons for this.  One is the media is getting a harsh look at themselves and doesn't like it, and secondly, expectations are impossible to overcome.

Why though?  Newsroom is done in the exact same vein as West Wing.  It takes an important, behind the scenes setting and creates and idealized, fictional version of it.  

Generally, Newsroom catches a lot of flack for being preachy, and of course this is the first work of Sorkin's to be preachy?  Have you seen West Wing?  The show many Newsroom-haters profess to love so much?  It was on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC from 1999-2006.

West Wing was not without flaws.  It could be accused of posessing straw often set up to allow the main characters to succeed.  It also focused two seasons (post-Sorkin) on a completely self-righteous candidate (Santos) who could do no wrong. 

I imagine the same people who criticized Stephen Colbert for his Correspondent's dinner roast, or Jon Stewart and Colbert for their Rally to Restore Sanity, or Season Five of The Wire * (immediately after heaping unadulterated praise on Season Four)  are the same people criticizing Newsroom.  That's because all target the media and it's unlikely the butt of the joke is going to find it very funny.

* Even the title of articles like this one rubbed me the wrong way.  Phrases like "Our show" (which it's not, it's Simon's) lead to the sort of thinking that a personal preference is the same as a "correct" interpretation.  Also, if everyone who claimed to watch The Wire from the start had been watching it from the start it never would've been in constant cancellation danger.  Kind of like how if everyone who claimed to have ancestors on the Mayflower actually had ancestors on that ship, it would've been way over capacity and never made it out of English waters. 

Drama vs. Reality
Q: Newsroom doesn't accurately portray how a newsroom functions.
A: That's not a question.  And, well, yeah...  Life doesn't happen in scenes and people do not speak in dialogue.  You know the pithy comeback you think of hours after a conversation is over?  That is dialogue...how people would talk if they had time to write, re-write and mull over words.  If television dialogue mirrored real life dialogue, no one would watch.

Newsroom is fiction after all, not a documentary.  I did enjoy this backhanded version of the old "it's not realistic" argument, from Dan Rather which is true of most interesting television characters:

"...average newsroom people are seldom as smart or as high-minded as most of the lead characters in this fictional drama"

Additionally, the show takes a lot of guff for including dramatized reactions to real life events.  It is historical fiction.  I do not think historical fiction has to be confined to history from hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Much like West Wing employed Dee Dee Myers and Gene Sperling to add realism, Newsroom's consultant list reads like the panel guest list from HBO colleague Bill Maher's Real Time.

Impossible Expectations
Expectations are so incredibly high for showrunners who have successfully produced much loved movies or television shows.  Look at reactions to David Simon's Treme.  Wait until everyone hates Vince Gilligan's next show.  I think it follows how series finales are criticized so much, especially in cases open to interpretation like Lost or The Sopranos.  The shows are an institution unto themselves and there is no way to please everyone with an end.

That is why the showrunners should continue follow their own creative path of what makes them happy and what they are trying to create.  It may not please everyone.  But being upset at the new product from one of these guys, or at the way they choose to end a series is like being upset at a chef in a four star restaurant because they cooked food the way they like to cook it as opposed to the way you like to cook it, with extra ketchup.  It's possible for a show to both be good and not within someone's personal taste or expectations.

Bias of Objectivity - finally addressed!
With the cable news setting, Sorkin addresses one of the concerns that prevented Studio 60 from succeeding.  It tried to address big issues occasionally but with the backdrop of a sketch comedy show, the stakes were simply not high enough and the characters could not affect change on a meaningful enough level.  That is addressed in Newsroom with the Fourth Estate. 

Back to the show's inherent criticism of the media.  One of the issues it addresses is the bias of objectivity, which the show states is media's false objectivity where they pretend each story has two and only two sides to it, and that each of the two sides should be given equal weight and credence.  Sometimes there are three or four or more reasonable approaches to a story.  And sometimes, one of the arguments is so insane and unreasonable it should be stated as such, and the story should be reported more as facts from the sane side than as a reasoned argument from two sides.  For example:

It’s even more amazing to see [the media] pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party.

Part 2 coming soon