News To Me

I watched Aaron Sorkin's much-publicized The Newsroom last night.  It's about Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), anchor of a popular news report.  He's a guy who plays it down the middle but breaks down at a public forum, making a speech about why America is not the greatest country in the world.

He takes a vacation and most of his staff quits to work at another show on the same news channel. (Not just due to the controversy, but also because they don't like him and also, oddly, think he's too weak on his show.) The president of the channel, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), brings in an old acquaintance, Mackenzie MacHale (Emily Mortimer), to be executive producer, even though she's got a fiery relationship with McAvoy.

As they're about to go on the air for their first broadcast (is that word still used in the cable era?), the BP oil spill hits (this takes place in 2010) and they decide to dump everything and run with it, pulling it off beautifully.  Will is reenergized and plans to be his old, incisive, no-nonsense self on the air again.

Sorkin is a highly-regarded writer, but the reviews for The Newsroom have not been great.  Perhaps it's because most critics work for the media of which Sorkin's show is quite critical.  Or maybe it's because the show is no good.

We've certainly seen this sort of stuff from Sorkin before.  For instance, this is his third show set behind the scenes at a live broadcast.  And having a main character get fed up and finally speak the truth in public is in The American President, A Few Good Men, Studio 60--I guess it's in about everything Sorkin's ever written.

Sorkin's greatest strength--really the reason he writes--is his banter (though it seemed in shorter supply than usual last night), though, as always, it's a bit odd that every character talks the same way.  But I could enjoy it if it weren't joined to a rather pompous, self-righteous attitude on The Newsroom.  Let's look at the big speech by McAvoy that opens the show.  He's at Northwestern and a 20-year-old female student in the audience asks why is America the greatest country in the world. (It's not impossible a college sophomore would ask such a question, though I think we might have to live several lifetimes before we heard it.) There are three parts to his answer, all telling.

First he addresses a few words to the Democrat and then the Republican sitting on either side.  Next, he cites a bunch of statistics that show America isn't #1.  Finally, he notes some of the ways we were great in the past.

The first part seems to be Sorkin's gesture toward even-handedness, but what McAvoy says to the Democrat--in essence, liberals are right about everything, too bad you're so decent and honest that you lose elections--and to the Republicans--conservatives today are morons who should be ashamed of themselves--demonstrate where the show's heart lies.

Then the stats.  Some are questionable, but all are generally irrelevant to the question at hand. As I've noted before about this sort of argument, it's what dumb people say to sound smart, and what cowardly people say to sound brave.

Finally, the nostalgia.  Later in the show, during the fallout from the controversy, McAvoy asks why no one is paying attention to this part of his answer.  Actually, it's the dumbest part.  It's just tiresome mooning for a past that never was. Or let me put it another way: most of the great things about the past that McAvoy extols (our innovation, our openness) we still have in about the same degree, and most of the bad stuff (divisiveness, small-mindedness) we had plenty of back in the good old days.  We get an echo of this hokum later when Skinner spreads it on about the days of Murrow and Cronkite, exaggerating their wisdom, judgment and power.

But that's what the show wants to be about.  It's a wakeup call to the media about how things should be done.  And The Newsroom's climax is that solution in action. It's meant to be stirring, of course, but the idea that McAvoy could wing a major, breaking story while his new, untested staff get scoop after scoop is fairly ridiculous.  But that's the dramatic side, I suppose, and I guess we're used to heroes overcoming long odds. (Maybe it just seems weird because it's about an actual news story, so we're more sensitive to how far from real life it is). More troublesome is the slant.  Sorkin wants to show us how real news is meant to be reported, without the fluff and getting to the heart of the matter.  But as far as I can see, the actual point is the news must never be reported straight, but always with a message--in this case (and in most cases), that we need bigger government. (Sorkin seems to be one of those people who believes the only reason a Democrat ever loses an election is because he didn't speak slowly enough for the voters to understand.)

The on-air segment is hardly the whole show.  It looks like we're going to get a whole lot of cute banter between talented, hard-working people who care for each other but often have trouble getting along--once again, like everything Sorkin's ever done.  But it appears each episode will feature Sorkin chewing over another old news story to show us how it should have been covered.  This literally is unbearable.  Yesterday's news is boring enough, but being lectured each week by someone who, as far as I can tell, has no special insight is more than I think I can stand.

It's not that Sorkin can't deal entertainingly with politics, as The West Wing showed.  But there the characters were doing things, not reporting on them, and didn't pretend they weren't unabashed partisans (who'd occasionally let the other side speak). And even then the show could sometimes be insufferable.  But on The Newsroom, the characters believe they're charged with delivering the unfiltered truth to the great unwashed, and in-between keep making speeches about how what they do is so important.

By the way, it turns out McAvoy is a Republican.  So I assume in future episodes he'll give a ringing endorsement of Citizens United, do an editorial explaining how abortion on demand demeans a society, and offer learned analysis regarding the contribution of over-regulation to the crash of 2008.  Nah, just kidding.  He's Aaron Sorkin's favorite kind of Republican---a Democrat.