Idealism on "The Newsroom:" The Truth Requires Champions, and Acquires Them

By Dan Hagen

When Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” premiered on HBO, I knew I liked it before I ever saw it.

Why? Because several critics immediately sneered at its journalistic “idealism,” as if all we sophisticated observers agree that a virtue is really, of course, a flaw.

“In ‘The Newsroom,’ clever people take turns admiring one another. They sing arias of facts. They aim to remake television news,” wrote Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker. “Their outrage is so inflamed that it amounts to a form of moral eczema — only it makes the viewer itch.”

Clearly something has made the critics itch, yes, but my diagnosis is an allergy to taking a real look at the utter wreckage their greed-driven corporations have made of professional journalism in America.

That’s the show’s explicit theme, that this particular set of ratings whores decides to try to clean themselves up and tell it straight, to do something that wouldn’t turn Edward R. Murrow's stomach. And the show is particularly effective at that job, having hit on the clever device of setting the drama in the recent past so we can perform autopsies on journalistic crises we remember well.

The program is a worthy successor to the much-admired series “Lou Grant,” and the professional idealism of “Newsroom” does, in fact, tally precisely with the idealism of Murrow. Yet these same critics would not dare sneer that Murrow was a starry-eyed fool. At least not out loud. Why is that?

Nussbaum’s criticism was echoed by several others, all with the same sneering note. “The critique of the show's idealism seems ridiculously selective, considering that Sorkin takes great pains to depict even the nominal villains of the show as somewhat sympathetic,” said Paul Loop, a former staffer for the Las Vegas Sun and the Los Angeles Times.

Jane Fonda as Atlantis Cable News owner Leona Lansing

“(Jane) Fonda's character isn't a full-on evildoer like Rupert Murdoch; she's trying to make money with a second-tier news channel and she’s trying to work the political system DESPITE her innate liberalism.

“And I absolutely don’t see stacked-deck debates within the show. Sorkin respects the adversarial process that’s necessary to weed out bias. I also think that the show is depicting what it would be like for a corrupted enterprise — where idealism has been effectively anesthetized — if it wanted to make its way back to just doing its job right, without fear. As idealism goes, that’s not starry-eyed, it’s just practical, competent.”

A question: What is the agenda of the critics who sneer that “Newsroom” is “too idealistic?” Just who is threatened by the notion of professionals who would dedicate themselves to the fair reporting of relevant, significant, verified facts to the public?

By “idealistic,” they seem to mean reporters who actually try to uncover and expose relevant, significant news in the public interest, instead of merely spending their days fluffing Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and shilling for their agenda. These critics don’t appear to be at all troubled by the latter, but always seem nervous to make sure that no one considers the former a viable option.

I think many corporate types regard anyone who actually engages in a profession for idealistic reasons — doctor, lawyer, journalist, architect, engineer, teacher, law enforcement officer — as a “loser.” I think that is the attitude that informs these critics, consciously or unconsciously.

There is much such critics don’t know about the world, in terms of practical realities as well as moral stances. Professionals have to want, passionately, for their work to be done well in order for it to be done really well.

John Gallagher jr as Jim Harper in "The Newsroom"

They won’t do it merely for money. But they will do it for the mission — for a reasonable income, plus an awareness of the public good their profession can accomplish, plus the thrilling, inchoate sense of self-esteem that comes from knowing that you’ve done an honest, important job to the best of your ability.

In other words, they will do it for idealism. I am always amazed people don’t know that. And if they do know that, and choose to ignore it, I am appalled.

You can’t actually have professional journalism without a significant level of idealism. So jettisoning the idealism is jettisoning the journalism.

“I get very pissed off at people who don't recognize that journalists are, by and large, idealistic people,” said Michelle Mueller Teheux, editor at the Daily Times in Pekin. “Hello? Why the hell would we be doing this work if we were not idealistic? We’d be shucking the long hours and low pay and getting in line for our piece of the pie elsewhere.”

Many half-awake members of the American public seem to think that the significant facts they require to live their lives will simply continue to arrive in their newsfeed somehow, without idealistic professional journalists clawing for them. They will not. The quality of truth requires some strain. It does not fall from the heavens like the gentle rain.

Many in this society regard useful, verified facts as insider-trading information, material to be hoarded and used to blindside the suckers at the right moment.

Without some trustworthy source of professional journalism, a society will not, finally, stand, any more than bridges will stand without the honest efforts of professional engineers.

While continually butchering editorial budgets to goose profits, the corporate news media has provided us with such “innovations” as running major newspapers without professional photographers, and “quote approval.” That’s the practice of letting powerful sources alter the facts in a story to their own liking. My friend Jim Jenkins summed it up:  ‘Let me see if I have this straight. He said/she said reporting is now considered too mean-spirited and liberally biased. The reporter's job is to report what they say they said, until they say they said something else?”

Thumbs up from Dan Rather

The corporate news media is also shot through with false balance.

Loop described the phenomenon as afflicting Politico, CNN, the news networks, the Sunday shows, the punditocracy in general and all major corporate-owned news sources.

“When you assert that ‘both sides’ are equally to blame, and they are obviously NOT equally to blame after a simple objective analysis, you are essentially covering for the side that deserves all the blame,” Loop said. “In Politico’s case, it's beyond obvious by now that putting lipstick on the conservative pig is an essential part of its mission.”

Robert Parry wrote, “When I was working at PBS ‘Frontline’ in the early 1990s, senior producers would sometimes order up pre-ordained right-wing programs – such as a show denouncing Cuba’s Fidel Castro – to counter Republican attacks on the documentary series for programs the right didn’t like, such as Bill Moyers’s analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. In essence, the idea was to inject right-wing bias into some programming as ‘balance’ to other serious journalism, which presented facts that Republicans found objectionable. That way, the producers could point to the right-wing show to prove their ‘objectivity’ and, with luck, deter GOP assaults on PBS funding.

“Similarly, in the 1980s, New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal vowed to steer the newspaper back to ‘the center’ – by which he meant to the right – to counter criticism that the Times’ role in publishing the Vietnam War’s Pentagon Papers and Seymour Hersh’s reporting on CIA abuses amounted to ‘liberal bias.’

“So, CNN’s behavior fits into a larger pattern which has frequently denied the American people the relevant facts and the clear analysis that are needed in a democratic society – because to do otherwise would invite devastating right-wing attacks on the journalists.”

The first and most important principle of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical code is, “Seek Truth and Report It.”  That cannot be reconciled with letting factual lies go unchallenged, no matter how often corporate media apologists twist themselves into professional pretzels in an attempt to justify it.

And that’s something else “The Newsroom” gets. The job of informing the public should be accurate, factual and fair, but it can never be neutral. Why? Because it will always involve fighting powerful interests who want to see to it that the public is misinformed.

Real journalism can threaten the bottom line, which is the Holy of Holies for corporate America. That’s why corporate America dislikes and distrusts journalism, and much prefers corporate PR with its smooth, polished, useful lies and dissembling half-truths.

Reading Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein's “On Rumors” reminded me that the job of whatever’s left of professional journalism in the digital age is not merely to inform members of the public about factual, relevant, interesting information they don’t know, but also to “de-inform” them about the things they THINK they know, but don't.

Ignorance is aggressive in the 21^st century, so it must be opposed aggressively.

“Sorkin also gets it right in that the onscreen antagonists are subject to systemic American pressures: shareholders, i.e. Wall Street,” Loop said. “The LA Times remains a pretty great newspaper in most respects, but it has been hollowed out by an antiquated business model as well as being degraded over the years because of corporate greed.

“Wall Street picked a General Mills executive to run the paper in 1995, and even though Times-Mirror was still making great gobs of pre-internet money back then, he immediately set about hacking away at it (he shut down a not-so-profitable New York Newsday, never having read a word of it, killed the Suburban section that I worked for and laid off a couple of hundred people) to placate the Wall Street bankers who gave him the job and fatten the stock holdings of the largely reprehensible Chandler family.

“The fact that the newspaper STILL produced top-notch journalism generally and won Pulitzers is entirely due to what these critics are apparently sneering at: idealism. Meeting the ideal of the journalistic mission, which is to let the public in on what is being done to them and in their name,” Loop said.

Is the show unrealistic? Over my decades in this profession, I have known a number of reporters as heroic as those on “Lou Grant” and “The Newsroom.” And reporters are murdered around the world for trying to report the truth with depressing regularity, if inspiring tenacity.

But the betray-your-neighbor ethical culture of contemporary America, exemplified by “reality” shows like “Survivor,” does not nurture even modest heroics. The idea of standing up for the truth is understandably laughable to men and women who have been beaten into submission and/or corrupted.

“Anchors having an opinion isn’t a new phenomenon,” says “Newsroom’s” Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston), in one of the show’s many Chayefsky-like moments. “Murrow had one and that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite had one and that was the end of Vietnam. You know what, kiddo? In the old days, of about 10 minutes ago, we did the news well. You know how? We just decided to.”

Sam Waterston as Charlie Skinner with Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy in "The Newsroom."