Archive for September, 2012

Things I Like: The Newsroom

Posted on September 2, 2012. Filed under: Things I Like |

Sorry, guys. This one isn’t going to be funny. This looks like a job for INTROSPECTION WOMAN! (Someday, I will make a web comic of the adventures of Inducktion Man and Introspection Woman. And someday I will post the concept art of Inducktion Man in all of his dry-erase marker glory.) Also, there are some video clips below. All of them contain NSFW language, so don’t come crying to me about the four-letter words.

The Newsroom is a little HBO show, created and written by Aaron Sorkin, that you may or may not have heard of. And if you haven’t heard it or seen it, you should. (It is also notable if only for being probably the only show on HBO to not display copious amounts of copulation and naked people. But they do say bad words. A LOT.)

The show has been criticized for being rather left of center on politics, using strawmen to make political arguments, and being overly critical of the media given that the show depicts events from 1-2 years ago with the benefits of hindsight.

And to be sure, these arguments are fair, at least in some instances. Our hero, newsman Will McAvoy, is a card-carrying Republican who doesn’t actually have any political stances that appear to be Republican in nature; the show is very definitely on the side of the striking unions from Wisconsin several months ago; and it is easy to make fun of Geraldo Rivera not having any freaking clue what was going on May 1, 2011. (Of course, it is easy to make fun of Geraldo Rivera anyway. But my point stands.)

But setting aside all that, the basic premise of the show is simple – what if the news was done today like people think it was back in the days when the Fourth Estate wasn’t beholden to the slings and arrows of gigantic corporations and politics?

And what a premise it is. The idea that we should be able to trust the news media, the idea that they should care not about ratings or corporations but integrity and honesty and telling important stories that people need to hear because it is the right thing to do – well, it’s that idealism and nostalgia for a time that never existed that makes me love this show.

I don’t know about you guys, but I haven’t felt proud of my country for a long time. Don’t get me wrong – I have a great deal of pride for some of the people in it – your everyday men and women who do extraordinary things in a day and age where extraordinary things can seem very difficult to find – but I feel that as a country we have lost our way.

I point my fingers at 9/11 as the catalyst for a lot of the things that feel wrong today, but we can’t keep blaming terrorists for all our problems. The foundations for our economic collapse were laid while the Towers were standing. Democrats and Republicans are not more radical because of 9/11; they are more radical because we live in a world where we are inundated with increasingly larger amounts of information, and the politicians believe (perhaps correctly) that no one will pay attention to them if they don’t grab the headlines and appeal to the hardest of hardliners.

I read the blogs of people in the tech industry, and the movie industry, and the comic industry, and underneath all of those blogs is an undercurrent of nihilism. I look around, and for years I have been wondering if the world has always been this dark of a place, or if my corner of the world really was sunshine and roses during my childhood. And I’ve finally decided that no, the light really has been fading. That’s not our imaginations, and that’s not a world viewed with the benefits of maturity. Our world is crappier than it has been during any other point in my life, and this show validates that feeling. And I had no idea how cathartic that validation could be.

Will’s (really the show’s) opening rant hits some very, very good points about our nation’s slouch downward from grace, and gives voice to feelings I’ve had but didn’t know how to express.

I think Will didn’t go far enough, although as of 2010-11, when the series is set, a lot of the erosion of our civil liberties was only starting.

And guys, eroding they are.

Today, the TSA can grope your junk as a matter of course without a warrant, and customs agents can search your electronic devices without your consent and without a warrant. Today, if you are driving within 100 miles of our nation’s borders, your vehicle can be pulled over by your police and searched without a warrant in the name of your national security. Today, your government prosecutes its own members when they carry out their duty to the American people – to serve and protect the Constitution of these United States. Today, your government is illegally confiscating and censoring web domains. Today, your government is trying to extradite a man from New Zealand without giving him access to funds to defend himself while trying to destroy the evidence they used as the basis of this extradition while essentially trying to railroad the guy for reasons that boil down to “because we said so.” Today, your government complains when judges strike down laws allowing them to detain citizens without trial. Today, your government has, can, and will continue to order the deaths – no, the assassinations – of people, including American citizens, without a trial and without oversight. Today, the NSA has admitted that it has been flat out spying on the American people, and in their own words violating the 4th Amendment. Today, your Congress has basically said it doesn’t care. It seems to say that a lot.

And today, the Fourth Estate has failed you. The press’ job is to report the news. The press’ sacred duty has been, and always will be, to inform the citizenry. That is the deal – the payment for those shiny press passes is to inform us. To inform us of historic events, of human tragedies, of human triumphs. To inform us of the abuses of those in power, and the abuse of those without it.

Back before the internet, we had newsmen we trusted, because we had newsmen who stood up to McCarthy, who broke Watergate, who criticized the government and kept them honest.

Today, our hard-hitting journalism comes from ordinary, everyday citizens on blogs and from a comedian on a comedy channel. (SERIOUSLY, CNN, THE DAILY SHOW DOES MORE NUANCED REPORTING THAN YOU DO. THE DAILY SHOW WOULD NOT EXIST IF OUR NEWS AND POLITICS WEREN’T A HILARIOUS, LAUGH-WORTHY FARCE. WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!?)

Murrow stood up to McCarthy. Our news people couldn’t stand up to the cable companies telling them to quash SOPA/PIPA stories. Murrow could have been prosecuted for treason. The worst our news people would face would be job loss.

In The Newsroom, our fearless reporters and anchors and producers decide not to be beholden to anyone – not to viewers, not to their parent corporation – except the capital-T Truth. (And yes, the Aaron Sorkin version of the Capital-T Truth is really just the truth according to Aaron Sorkin. Shut up. I’m on a roll.)

And they screw up enough to make it believable. They lose half their viewership when they refuse to cover the Casey Anthony case, and their parent organization spends quality time trying to blackmail them into caring about the ratings, and they spend quality time blackmailing their parent organization right back.

Don’t get me wrong – the show is certainly not flawlessly made. There are a lot of people who work at the news station, and somehow they all seem to magically have the same political views as Will McAvoy, who coincidentally seems to have the same political views as Aaron Sorkin. There are also some other believable coincidences – in the first episode, which centers around the BP oil spill, the new associate producer just happens to be the former college roommate of a highly placed executive in BP, and a big sister with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering who happens to work at Halliburton. The most junior associate producer just happens to room with a girl who was friends with Casey Anthony in high school. These things just seem to happen a lot.

But even with these convenient plot devices, the show is mostly very well-written, with sharply written dialogue and characters who do seem like real people and do stupid things not because they are firmly gripping the Idiot Ball, but because they are human, and humans do stupid things for stupid reasons without being stupid people.

One of the other reasons I like The Newsroom is because of its lack of antiheroes. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of amazing TV shows featuring complex heroes who operate wholly in the grey on the moral spectrum. But that’s just it – there are so many of those shows out there that it is incredibly refreshing to watch a bunch of well-written good guys go out and try to make a difference in the world because of some stupid idealistic notion that they can make a difference. The good guys are good guys, and they don’t try to make you root for the bad guys. Out of our cast of main characters you do have the odd douchebag, but they are good people. For instance, Don, who is indubitably a douchebag, spends the episode 5/1 getting increasingly irate over being stuck on the tarmac while a major news story is breaking. He spends the episode berating a hapless stewardess and being generally unpleasant to those around him, and towards the end of the episode finally loses it. And then he realizes he is being a douchebag and… and just watch the clip:

I don’t mind telling you. This episode made me cry. And it started with this scene.

The Newsroom is stupidly idealistic and nostalgic for a time and age that college history classes have taught me never existed. And that is why I love it – because for one hour a week, I can pretend that although we have fallen and lost our way, we can be great again. We can be more. Individuals can make a difference, and someday we can again be proud of our country and our government.

That hour is a really, really nice hour.

Also, The Newsroom has Charlie Skinner: