Critic Without Clout
"Good evening."
A long overdue ode to one of my favorite TV shows ever made.
MAY 07, 2023
I lie to everyone who asks me why I studied journalism at Cal State Long Beach and why I chose to stay on the editorial team at the Daily 49er. I say it was because of Anthony Bourdain. Sometimes I say it was because I was lonely after quitting CSULB’s track team (which is pretty true). But if I’m being honest, the only reason was The Newsroom.
In 2013 I drove up and back from SoCal to Oakland a few times. A close friend lived here at the time and he let me stay at his apartment, which was right above the 19th St. BART stop and walking distance to Lake Merritt. Pretty tight. On the nights we decided not to crawl around Downtown Oakland looking for good pizza or a bar with Oasis in the jukebox, we sat on his brown, lumpy leather couch and watched episode after episode of The Newsroom. He was grading papers for his job as a teaching assistant and I was reading Kitchen Confidential, half arguing with each other about the current state of journalism (and what he made for dinner that night) and half immersed in Aaron Sorkin’s broadcast news epic about the realities of working in media post-9/11 and post-2008.
The Newsroom has Sorkin dripping all over it: amazingly cast (Sam Waterston, Olivia Munn, David Harbour, Jane Fonda, Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, Dev Patel, Alison Pill, etc.), long, theatrical monologues that always end in a metaphor or two, expert pacing, and lots and lots of tear-inducing close-ups.
Tonight I finished The Newsroom in its entirety for the sixth time. Writing that the show “still holds up” seems lazy. They get everything right: the bad and the good parts of broadcast news; broadcast news has a choice to entertain or inform the audience or both, either for the common good or for the most amount of clicks newsroom digital teams can possibly get after a story breaks.
That tension is so delicious to me.
This dilemma becomes the overarching plight of the close-knit Atlantis Cable News team, and it gets juicy. Every season is undeniably gripping and its not because of the score by Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall, 1917). Maybe people die? Maybe people go to jail? Maybe people get married?
But The Newsroom is not perfect. Sorkin is clearly a fan of the elite. And habitually protects this particular tax bracket in everything he makes. The Fourth Estate exists as a response to the establishments who control the arena, and to The Newsroom’s credit the show does take moments to touch on that control i.e. political, corporate, and economic entities influencing showrunners about what stays on and off the air.
Socioeconomically-speaking, this show shows a lopsided experience of the news: cozy yet sad rich people working in a high-end newsroom in a glass skyrise overlooking the stories that their status enables them to be far away from vs. the marginalized communities the news effects and keeps effecting well after the News Night with Will McAvoy director Herb calls “and we’re out.”
Make no mistake: this show is mostly about an egotistical, scorned newsman trying to be Edward R. Murrow who cares too much about what the audience and his executive producer (and ex who cheated on him) thinks about him. He is constantly being protected by the systems he likes to judge on-air. But I still love Will McAvoy, and I still love this show.
I think Sorkin’s biggest triumph is making The Newsroom really about how fundamentally important scrappiness is to being a good journalist. Being scrappy means being open-minded, resourceful, and trustworthy.
Being scrappy is the underrated golden rule of effective journalism.
It’s being right without making the audience feel bad about being wrong or uniformed. It’s routinely shouting at one another about ethical choices and newsworthiness, as so much of the characters in The Newsroom do effectively well. It’s running through city hall to be the first reporter to look at unsealed legal documents (Spotlight, 2015). It’s making the right calls to the right people (All The President’s Men, 1976). It’s being Meryl Streep (The Post,2017).
One could say being a good journalist is about knowing how to make the right decisions. Every main character in The Newsroom is given the chance to do just that, either hand-fed or when they’re placed in front of a fork in the road. That’s the real reason why I wanted to be a journalist: to get good at deciphering what is right and wrong, true and false. Thankfully for The Newsroom, which gets the ugly truth right (and as Charlie Skinner puts it), “We just decided to.”
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Lively, imperfect film reviews by a proudly solo moviegoer.