HBO Drama The Newsroom Broadcasts Important Message

I confess I am enthralled with HBO’s The Newsroom. Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and screenwriter of The Social Network and Moneyball, has cooked up a delicious new drama. The Newsroom is a kind of behind-the-scenes look at the people who make a nightly cable-news program. It is a thinking show that I hope will cause viewers to question the sorry state of modern politics and the gloomier state of news reporting.

Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy in HBO's The Newsroom

Let’s get the obvious complaint out of the way. The Newsroom’s network anchor (played by Jeff Daniels), his new executive producer (Emily Mortimer), the twenty-something’s of the newsroom staff (John Gallagher, Jr., Alison Pill, Thomas Sadoski, Olivia Munn, Dev Patel) and the boss (Sam Waterston) seem to lean to the political left. Incidentally, Jane Fonda is fantastic as the network chief. Yes, Daniels’s character claims to be a Republican who wants his party back from the Tea Party. But, the majority of political shots have been thrown by southpaws so far. Get over it. Nearly every newsroom I have ever visited has tilted left.

If you fixate on the direction from which the storyline emanates, you will entirely miss the point of the show.

A friend who scoffed at what he described as the morally superior, one-dimensional and altogether too well read Newsroom staff is failing to see why the show works. The show is not about the staff. It is about us, the American viewer.

This week, Sorkin’s recipe called for the juxtaposition of the people my friend described as morally superior leftists to an arguably equally morally superior Tea Party couple the Newsroom staff invited to be hammered on air by Daniels’ character. The result was a tasty bit of thought candy. The Newsroom tries to show how we Americans all-too-often fail to see through the theater of the made-for-commercial-television debate.

The show works because Daniels’ anchor preaches from on high about presenting the facts and then batters the show’s guests with his not-subtle-at-all opinions.

This show works not because people on one side of the political spectrum are painted as villains – this week it was the ultra-politically active and wealthy Koch brothers – and the other side morally superior heroes, but because the Newsroom shows in dramatic fashion how America’s politics and its news organizations are broken.

Sorkin’s concoction works because it makes people think. It isn’t written to allow the viewer to get inside the heads of the Newsroom characters and thereby see the world through Sorkin’s rose colored glasses; the characters are created to get inside the viewers’ heads causing us to consider whether we wear the blinders worn by too many Americans to keep from seeing the messy, incestuous state of modern politics and news.

American politics may not be irrevocably broken, but something is seriously amiss. The debate over which policies are best able to move the United States forward take a back seat to a devilish game played by a rich and powerful few singly interested in feathering their own nests. Making matters worse, the news industry has been corrupted by the same moneyed interests controlling the political parties.

The Newsroom is entertaining, but it is more than that. For those viewers able to put down their Republican vs. Democrat score sheets, the Newsroom should make them question the state of our nation. Allowing the degeneration of modern media to continue while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the consolidation of political power by a frighteningly small group of self-serving wealthy individuals is a formula for disaster.

Sorkin’s Newsroom makes for good viewing and even better food for thought.

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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com 
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register online essay.