THAT Scene: the problem with The Newsroom's use of real news

The News Night team's coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy doesn't just sap dramatic tension; it exploits real grief in the service of its own message.

Jeff Daniel's Will McAvoy reports on the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on The Newsroom.

THAT Scene is a recurring feature that takes a closer look at a single scene that exemplifies a particular show, theme or moment in time. The scene might be good or bad, but it will always be memorable and worth talking about.

Television Without Pity's recaplet of the (pretty terrible) fourth episode of The Newsroom, "I'll Try To Fix You," hits the nail on the head when it comes to the biggest problem with the series' much-discussed decision to have Will McAvoy and co. cover actual news stories from the recent past: in this case, the shooting of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The results were not only uncomfortable to watch, but also undercut any point the sequence was trying to make about how the news should be covered:

When the other outlets start reporting that Giffords is dead but there hasn't been any official confirmation, Will has to decide if he should join them and risk being wrong or hold off and risk being the last news outlet to report Giffords' death. Of course, we all know that she survived, and Will's decision to wait is the right one, even though Reese is screaming at him to join in and pronounce her dead. Reese is the Bad Guy. Charlie, Will, and his staff and even Don are the Good Guys, so they realize that Giffords is a person and shouldn't just be used for news ratings or as part of a race to report the news first. No, although apparently it's totally cool to use her for an HBO show's sleazy and hypocritical attempt to elicit an emotional response from the viewers, titular Coldplay songs and all.

The entire sequence, which begins with Maggie (Alison Pill) sprinting to tell Will and MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) and ends with Will's refusal to announce Gifford's death vindicated by the news that she isn't actually dead, is a perfect example of the ways in which reporting on real news can be incredibly damaging, both to The Newsroom's dramatic structure and the show's credibility as a moral authority. (And if you think the series isn't aiming for moral authority status, re-watch the episode and count the number of times Will says he's on a "mission to civilize.")

  

The Huffington Post's Eve Simon defends Aaron Sorkin in the most awful way possible

By insulting the intelligence of anyone who criticizes The Newsroom, Simon shows just how shallow her understanding of the show is.

Jeff Daniels stars in Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series.

If you don't like The Newsroom, Eve Simon thinks you're a moron.

In a fairly awful opinion piece that ran yesterday on The Huffington Post, Simon takes any and all critics of Aaron Sorkin's new drama to task for contributing to the dumbing down of American society. Apparently anyone who didn't enjoy the show, who thinks it's flawed or overly preachy or just plain bad, only formed that opinion as a result of the anti-intellectual forces that have insidiously taken over the country and made intelligence into a vice. A NASCAR New World Order, if you will.

After watching the pilot of Aaron Sorkin's new HBO drama The Newsroom, I'm not at all surprised that people have been beating on it like some alien weed they're hell bent on destroying. 

The show is just too smart. Smart as a pejorative*. And that scares the shit out of everyone. 

[...] 

Stupid people hate that he calls them out on their lack of engagement, and smart people are scared to death to admit publically that he's absolutely right. Why? Because that would validate the picture painted of them in the press: Elitist, smug, self-important, superior, condescending, and not Real Americans (FuckYeah!). 

In these days of advanced citizenship*, I'm truly horrified to say that being smart has become the ultimate liability. And instead of doing something about it, we sit back and wonder why the media is taking our national culture to hell on a speedboat*.

Even ignoring the fact that Simon is proving her own straw man counter-argument by coming off as one of those "smug, self-important, condescending" smart people (because why try to subvert the stereotype when you can play into it?), and even eliding her apparent belief that Sorkin is the lone holdout in a television landscape filled with reality shows and procedural crime dramas (this in a year that brought us a subtle exploration of gender roles and power struggles on Game of Thrones, bold creative choices on Community and a brilliantly funny, bitterly pointed political satire in Veep, to name only a few), Simon's rant displays the limitations of her own understanding of Sorkin's drama.