Aaron Sorkin’s fictional fantasy of ‘The Newsroom’ features Real News, but an Unreal Newsroom.
Perhaps the easiest way to put Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series, The Newsroom, into context is to compare it to another one of his masterpieces – The West Wing. Which is to say, that ‘The Newsroom’ comes as close to replicating broadcast journalism as the ‘The West Wing’ does to American politics – which is to say that it doesn’t! Perhaps it doesn’t even come close.
There is a deeper thought process that lies behind the simplest of analogies, even this one, used for the majority, who haven’t endured the workaday monotony of TV news, the usual banal futilities associated with any job (there is a reason why it is called ‘work’ after all).
We’re all guilty of taking the flippancies that we absorb through television and then using them as the only parameter to gauge. ‘The Newsroom’ is no different and is often used to paint this ruse of how a broadcast channel operates.
Given that most of my nascent career span has been in television news, I have often been inundated with facile questions along the lines of, “so how does it work in your channel, just like ‘The Newsroom’ I suppose?” Or better yet, “which character are you in ‘The Newsroom’?” Not who I admire or which character I relate to the most, but instead, my role in my organization is predicated on the notion that it has to mirror the personality of one the characters working in the fictionalized Atlantis Cable News (ACN).
Don’t get me wrong though! Before I delve into dissecting Sorkin’s HBO hit, I do want to preface this by saying that I like so many out there have been a fan of his greatest works. I still remember a cantankerous Jack Nicholson’s bellowing, ‘You can’t handle the truth’, followed up with a stone faced stare that served as a fitting riposte to Tom Cruise’s courtroom interrogation in ‘A Few Good Men’. I would possibly vote for President Josiah Bartlet if he were to run today. Perhaps your 2016 nominee will be who comes closest to him. I thought the Social Network had some social net worth, and I loved Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane, going through an existential crisis as he was in charge of the Oakland A’s. Apart from great scripting, it’s Sorkin’s ability to paint this canvas of idealism that made us initially fall in love with the West Wing.
And idealism is exactly where it starts in ‘The Newsroom’.
The opening scene features Jeff Daniel’s character brazenly going into a sermon on ‘What’s wrong with the America of today’ when accosted with a rather puerile question in front of a large audience. He has a nostalgic yearning for ‘the America’ of yore, which he believed was the bastion of all things fair and right. Self-righteous or brilliant scripting? I would say that part was brilliant scripting, it sets the tone, you like what you have tasted already, you want to watch on, the self-righteousness comes later.
As the show begins to unfurl, there is an interesting concept that gets you hooked. Sorkin’s show juxtaposes a fictionalized network with fictionalized characters covering real world events. The ability to relate to real world events is perhaps what mesmerizes you initially, but this is also where Sorkin loses the ‘plot’.
Sorkin insists on scripting ‘The Newsroom’ through recent world events and presents this through a myopic ‘holier than thou’ prism of how the news media should have covered the following incidents, while showcasing ACN’s reportage as gospel truth. The series is all about how ACN’s news coverage is so far ahead of the pack, that it accentuates the general mainstream media’s shortcomings on quality reportage and unbiased presentation.
Don’t get me wrong, there is much to be desired when it comes to the quality of mainstream media. Be it Roger Ailes’ & Rupert Murdoch’s quest to promote rancid right wing propaganda through Fox News, or MSNBC’s left-leaning slant or just CNN’s inability to be discerning enough between what’s superficial and substantial, mainstream media needs its own ‘Don Quixote’ and how!
But Sorkin doesn’t do justice to this cause! It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ perspicacity to figure out how ACN’s team of journalists are ahead of the curve. The fact that Sorkin scripts all these episodes of past-dated events makes it that much easier to retrospect the follies’ of contemporary journalism.
Looking back, it’s easier for him to pontificate about the travesty of mainstream journalism through his characters on set. Take for instance the Osama Bin Laden assassination episode. Dated on May 1st 2011, ACN staffers, while on a night out, suddenly get a mysterious call from an unknown source saying they can expect an email from Jay Carney, the then-White House Press Secretary, who would inform them of an impending Presidential address on matters of national security.
It was not Jeff Daniel’s character, who had consumed marijuana in something he ate, but rest assured it was Sam Waterston’s character, Charlie Skinner, head of the news division, that perhaps smoked something exotic, since he magically deduced that it was Bin Laden’s assassination from that precious little information.
To put the absurdity into context, this was in the middle of the Arab Spring, where more people had Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi on their minds, than Bin Laden, who had kept out of the limelight for a good half decade or so.
But the aggrandizement took many a turn on the pompous highway of ACN. Three of its staff members who found themselves grounded on a flight, somehow also magically put on their detective deduction skills, and like Archimedes’ epiphany, the Eureka moments just got more prominent!
Why, Jeff Daniels’ character even broke the story on air before President Obama could say ‘Tonight, I report to the American People and to the World….”
In a nutshell, Sorkin’s fictional fantasy version of a ‘Newsroom‘ is a show that boasts of its central characters as the noble do-gooders or the Don Quixote’s, if you will, who are the moral authority on all things relating to justice, journalism and the fairness doctrine.
What’s ironic is that the ACN staff are shown as the only ones who apparently do not exaggerate covering the news, all this while the show most certainly exaggerates the workings of a real life newsroom!
Given that the latest season sees the FBI swoop down on them and conduct a newsroom raid. This, while Dev Patel’s character, ‘Neal Sampath’, a tech aficionado who actually thinks ‘Big Foot’ is real, is capable of bringing this on the network by coming in contact with a whistle blower at the State Department which simultaneously affects National Security at the highest level.
It sure makes it exciting to daydream working in the fictionalized ‘ACN’ newsroom, since here I thought the biggest worry for a lowly staffer in the ‘newsroom’ is trying to ensure that the graphics were spelled correctly and that the video clip plays on air.
But just for a moment, if I were to rationalize the perspective of a fan of ‘The Newsroom’, he would immediately start by saying ‘cinematic liberty’ and then present the case that all TV series need compelling drama to get even the cynic in me to watch it as guilty pleasure. And yes, I do consume it as guilty pleasure!
No doubt, today when news channels, the so-called fourth estate of democracy, resort to yellow journalism and over the top sensationalism to garner TRP ratings, you can’t expect a TV series, whose core DNA is fictional drama, to eschew from exaggeration.
For one thing, television channels struggle to get sufficient viewership while presenting factual news. Try making the workings of a real life newsroom for an HBO series! Enough said there!
So sure, ‘The Newsroom’ is not an accurate portrayal of a cable news station, the same way Suits is not an accurate portrayal of a law firm, and heaven forbid that there is a Frank Underwood lurking the corridors of Congress.
Perhaps on a kernel level, ‘The Newsroom’ is the idealism that all major news outlets should strive towards, where everyone should be the inquisitive interlocutor, trying to act as the agents of change, uphold the integrity of a free press and nonpartisan reportage, and most importantly, present the news without the ratings obsession.
And perhaps for a fleeting 50-odd minutes or so, the Newsroom traverses through the island of impeccable reporting, while making frequent visits to the hinterland of honesty and shows us a world of what journalism should be, can be, and perhaps was!
It’s only then when the credits begin to roll at the end of the episode do you realize, the difference between fact and fiction.
Oh Sorkin! Get off your Unicorn.
