HBO and Aaron Sorkin’s new series The Newsroom is all too explicitly about truth, justice and the posited nadir of the American way. News is just the excuse. My guess is its tendency to pontificate on these subjects will do it little good with audiences. Like most televised dramas, it will rise or fall on whether audiences care about its characters. But this is not what I was asked to write about.
I was asked to write about The Newsroom’s representation of newsrooms, news, and the news industry. Here, I am afraid, the news is not good. What’s notably absent from The Newsroom’s newsroom is news; you know, the daily events that exemplify life in our times. Once an episode, News with a capital N is invoked, in the actual brand-name of a “real” mega-news story, but this is mere exploitation.
The Newsroom is not about news but how news is presented. This focus allows Sorkin, through his anchorman character Will McAvoy, to sermonize not on the news but on its Meaning, an example of what his Executive Producer Mackenzie McHale so tellingly puts it, “Telling the Truth to Stupid.” Beware those who choose to pontificate to the “stupid.”
Real newsrooms are filled with news, stories that lead the show, make it into the show, never make it into any show but are of interest to somebody in the newsroom. This is what gives newsrooms their energy. Both these stories and that energy are unrepresented here. Only The Big Stories are worth The Newsroom’s notice. Everything else is contemptible “human interest.” Those stupid humans, who cares what’s news to them?
Also missing is all the news work done outside the newsroom. This is called reporting. And reporting rarely involves (spoiler alert) fielding calls from your sister and college roommate who happen to be “inside sources” on the biggest story in the world. Reporting means going outside the newsroom, with open eyes and no agenda, to see what’s actually happening where the story intersects with life. No one does that in The Newsroom.
Ironically, this is where The Newsroom tells the truth. Today’s television news is almost wholly made inside the newsroom. What’s “out there” is just used to fill in the blanks in someone’s preconception of the story, and is gathered as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Thus it is especially cynical that in The Newsroom both the Executive Producer and the President of the News Division are presented as ex-reporters (who covered Afghanistan and Vietnam, no less). To this one can only say, “Hahahaha.” Executives in the news industry do not reflect the values of grunts from the field.
Today’s news industry, like so many industries, devalues its raw materials in favor of their processing. Thus, reforming it depends on much more than what Newsroom proposes: if its workers “have the will.” This is the stuff of fairy tales, and The Newsroom, for all its “real stories” and “big issues,” is as real about news as Jack and the Beanstalk.
One step beyond what Mr. Marash defines as today's news culture takes you back to the ying and yang of the digital revolution. The generations of broadcast reporters and crews burdened under the tonnage of analog devices benefitted from the miniaturization of our tools. Ironically the scribes are now burdened with the equipment only those of us in broadcast had to carry. Plusses and minuses in that revolution. The newsroom that Mr. Marash and I harken to was also a simpler universe of three networks owned by their broadcast founders without competition from cable, the Internet, mobile telephony and the fiber and satellite ubiquity that hold them all together. We had the luxury of time to report (though we bitched mightily even then). We had the downtime when the last flights left with our film to think, and yes to drink. Stories matured and had gestations. Our conversations whether in the home newsroom or on the road tended to be consumed by the stories, With the exception of radio pressures that were constant even then and the wires that never ended, we privileged few at the networks and single deadline newspapers had a life we only now realize was privileged. Today the "what's next" culture leaves little or no time for thought; just doing. The end of the process is a meal and a hotel room. . Once the bitching about idiot editors at home ends, the only energy left is to compare food and hotel rooms. That's all that is remembered of where we are or were. The story? Oh that? Don't recall.
#1 Posted by peter m herford, CJR on Mon 25 Jun 2012 at 09:32 PM
The Newsroom will perhaps inspire, perhaps put some spine into what largely passes for "news" these days.Perhaps it will help to frame a more civil debate. Viva!
#2 Posted by Dr. Linnea Johnson, CJR on Tue 26 Jun 2012 at 02:20 AM
Upon viewing the eagerly awaited premier episode of The Newsroom, I had a Peggy Lee moment, "Is That All There Is?". I'm far too long out of the newsroom to comment knowledgeably about the contemporary portrayal of such, but I'm too much of a Sorkin fan to succumb to the idea that lofty pontification about the parlous state of the union that was entirely appropriate in The West Wing can possibly ring true in a TV studio. Furthermore, those West Wing denizens were all grownups, a state of being that woefully eludes the characters of The Newsroom. As Dave Marash says, "Like most televised dramas, it will rise or fall on whether audiences care about its characters", and these are not characters that I could ever bring myself to care about.
Having said all that, "like bees to honey drawn", I will probably continue to watch it regularly, in spite of myself..
#3 Posted by Art Kane, CJR on Tue 26 Jun 2012 at 09:50 AM