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.
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| 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?
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.
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| 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?”
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| 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.
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 21st
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.
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.”
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| Sam Waterston as Charlie Skinner with Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy in "The Newsroom." |
