Holier-Than-Thou: Why Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom Gets it So Very Wrong

Aaron Sorkin thinks he’s better than you.

Then again, he always has. But this time, with HBO’s The Newsroom – the renowned wordsmith’s new pipedream drama about the way journalism should be – his unabashed self-assurance knows no bounds.

Coming off commercially successful triumphs Moneyball and The Social Network, Sorkin has been gifted a new television project, in which he gleefully adds some HBO-approved “fucks” to a regurgitated and preachy script.

In The West Wing – Sorkin’s much-exalted primetime brainchild – the writer conjured an idealist Clinton administration redux wherein the higher-ups made the tough and principled decisions, all the while fighting off their precious personal demons. Full disclosure: The West Wing is one of my favorite television shows, so I can say with complete honesty that I was, and still am, rooting for The Newsroom to be good. It’s not. It may share the same delightful riposte of The West Wing, but Sorkin’s new endeavor frankly has none of the same charm.

Just as The West Wing yearned for a bold yet brainy Democratic presidency in the height of the Bush years, The Newsroom laments for how things should go down in the world of modern journalism. Today’s mainstream media, as Sorkin correctly diagnoses, shows chronic negligence, but thankfully he is here to show us how it’s done!

Lead anchor and asshole everyman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) breaks the BP oil spill story, promptly recognizing its importance while the other networks blindly claw for ratings. During the Egyptian Revolution, the “News Night” staff immediately sees the significance of local citizen journalism. They also pounce on the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and Arizona’s immigration bill before anyone else thinks it’s newsworthy. And it’s not just about newsworthiness. The staff lives to debunk every conservative talking point circa 2010. Basically, The Newsroom is a retelling of 2010 news analysis done by liberal bloggers, but dramatized and packaged into an hour-long mutual masturbation of high-minded characters patting each other on the backs for being so damn sharp.

When it comes to Sorkin’s rolodex of grating characters, the gang’s all there: the Good Man with a lot of potential who should be striving to do better and then bravely does, the absent-minded but Smart Girl who works hard in the face of patronization, the no-nonsense Leggy Woman who can be emphatic in everything but her personal relationships, and the Intrepid Executive who loves his people more than the establishment he helped create.

After about half a season of watching The Newsroom vomit Sorkin’s nauseating worldview through trite, fragile characters reworking the last two years of actual news, I’ve made my peace with the fact that this show is the most disappointing bullet point on Sorkin’s post-West Wing résumé.

At its core, The Newsroom is predicated on a saccharine nostalgia for the good old days when “great men” told the news. Sorkin yearns for the time when broadcasters had guts enough to deliver the facts with equal parts candor and machismo, ratings be damned. Look no further than the opening credit sequence, where we see our cast of struggling heroes intercut with black-and-white replicas of famous newsmen, all set to a score that Sorkin no doubt requested to “sound important.”

When we cut to the show itself, we see that Sorkin’s Will McAvoy is actually more Olbermann than Murrow. In one episode, Will eviscerates a Tea Party leader. In the next, he takes on a vocal opponent of the Ground Zero Mosque and responds by rallying off a laundry list of offenses committed “in the name of Christianity.” Yes, McAvoy can outwit a Tea Partier, but he doesn’t get to the heart of any new information in the process. This is especially problematic when you consider that Sorkin’s main critique of journalism is that reporting has gotten too lazy, and that we can do better. He offers The Newsroom’s staff as a journalistic ideal, but scoops fall effortlessly into their laps and a week’s worth of drudgery is reduced to either comically graceful or dramatically hurried research.

Indeed, fact checking doesn’t make for a sexy primetime script, but The Newsroom’s most poignant moments come seemingly in spite of Sorkin’s histrionics about journalism (the straightforward depiction of the dangers of reporting in a war zone, for instance). In typical Sorkin fashion, the leading man’s many diatribes sound eloquent, but McAvoy is equally as lazy, doubly as preachy, and triply as loud as any other modern pundit that Sorkin attempts to admonish.

Still, what I find most irksome about The Newsroom, even more than its wrongheaded wistfulness for journalism’s bygone era, is its blatant sexism.  Sorkin tells us that Emily Mortimer’s Mackenzie Hale, “News Night’s” Executive Producer and McAvoy’s ex-girlfriend, is a war-tested veteran journalist. She has spent time reporting from Islamabad and “has two Peabodies and the scar on her stomach” to prove it, but Sorkin gives us an incompetent and maladjusted woman who is frustratingly weak.

In one instance, she mistakenly mass-emails the entire office. Oh, how silly! In a later episode, Will ridicules her for having to clandestinely count out numbers on her fingers. Girls can be so dumb sometimes! This is an award-winning journalist, according to Sorkin, but she is scatterbrained, unprofessional, neurotic, and only looks good when she helps Will’s character look good.

When things get explained in The Newsroom, men do the explaining. I don’t think this is necessarily purposeful, but Sorkin’s propensity to have the men daddy the “girls” is more pervasive in The Newsroom than in his other work. Then again, it wasn’t until he left The West Wing that C.J. Cregg, the spirited female press secretary, became President Bartlet’s chief of staff. Is there any chance Sorkin would have promoted her if he had he stayed on the show? It has made me wonder if this kind of insipid masculine conceit has always existed in Sorkin’s head, or if it has just come with old age and his increasing distaste for young people, the Internet, and probably the Kardashians.

Illustration by Maddie Wells

Certainly all of Sorkin’s characters make mistakes, but his male characters’ mistakes are grandiose and weighty. Will struggles to be a Great Man in an era where it’s so easy to cave into network demands and the beguilement of ratings. Sorkin’s female characters, on the other hand, operate within realm of frivolity. Maggie, despite growing up in the digital age, somehow thinks LOL means “lots of love.” It’s cute, but this is the crux of Sorkin’s chest-thumping male narcissism. He can’t even dignify his female characters with proper mistakes. No, Maggie must confuse the State of Georgia for the Republic of Georgia while real journalists like Will toil with the big, important questions of the day.

The most dynamic female character, Sloan (a fantastic Olivia Munn), faces a great quandary in the sixth episode regarding a source she spoke to off the record about the Fukushima reactor, but she eschews Mackenzie’s advice (because, as an Executive Producer on a major network, Mack wouldn’t be good at this whole news thing) in favor of Will’s fathering. Despite her brilliance on the financial crisis, we’re told that Sloan only gets airtime because “if I’m going to get people to listen to an economics lesson I need someone who doesn’t look like George Bernard Shaw.”

When staging this argument to friends and fellow West Wing fanatics – most of who have embraced The Newsroom – I am met with something along the lines of how “a TV show is, first and foremost, meant to entertain.” I personally don’t find it very entertaining. That said, I think The Newsroom’s conceptual shortcomings distract from Sorkin’s most apparent strength, which is, and always has been, his vibrant dialogue.

But I am as sick of his jazzy back-and-forths as I am of his whole sanctimonious shtick. “I need something to help me sleep.” “Why?” “I can’t sleep.” It sounds like a bad Abbot and Costello routine. The brief moments of amusement are crushed by other plainly self-congratulatory riders that I just can’t get over: Will, the liberal firebrand, is a registered Republican and former Bush 41 speechwriter; “Gary’s a smart black guy who is not afraid to criticize Obama”; the network is somehow in jeopardy because Will humiliates a Tea Party congressman. It’s enough to make your eyes roll, and it’s why people dislike Sorkin’s brand of intellectual, liberal egotism.

For all the criticism, The Newsroom actually boasts a pretty solid viewership. The show’s blowback is likely just noisier because journalism, the trade Sorkin tries to disembowel, can respond in a more visible way than, say, emergency room doctors could respond to ER. When you write about journalists, they write back, but I can’t help but feel like The Newsroom is nothing more than a great opportunity lost by a moldy screenwriter.

1 Comment

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Bryanreply
7 September 2012 at 6:32 PM

Wow, this is all spot on, and written with a degree of wit worthy of Sorkin’s own dialogue. Every time somebody says I should watch this show, I just go watch more “West Wing” instead.

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