Michael jackson shamone soundboard5/2/2024 ![]() Olbermann had one, Maddow has one, Brian Williams has a couple, Tucker Carlson has a whole goddamn site. ![]() Or as the greatest news anchor of our time would say, a great moment of truthiness. Or maybe our hero is supposed to be more like Dylan Rattigan or Rachel Maddow? Actually, who knows! The way this show blurs the monolithic network anchor with the opinionated cable host is precisely the kind of fake construction that feels like bullshit. It's easy to imagine an Olbermann-like figure doing this (actually, that's all he did), but it's pretty unimaginable for a Brian Williams or a Katie Couric. That eruption from Will McAvoy in the first scene. Let's temporarily ignore the finer ethical and aesthetic points, which are usually finessed as blustery diatribes, and instead focus on what's believable. Despite having nuanced qualitative opinions about the show 3, that's not what we'll be discussing here. What I offer here is not an artistic or moral assessment of The Newsroom. I've seen, and usually participated in, the creation of news around executions in Texas, riots in Seattle, hurricanes in Florida, and psychotic killing sprees in Virginia. I worked in newsrooms for over 10 years, most of the time at websites attached to TV stations or networks. I want to talk about the part that's bullshit. But other times, I'm like, wait, that's fucking bullshit. So what? Part of me wants to say, fuck it, that's our problem, not Sorkin's. It's characters don't act like our colleagues, it's fantasies aren't our realities. So duh, of course we media people hate The Newsroom. Local significance loses to storyline, depth loses to drama. We don't enjoy having our subcultures portrayed because it reduces ideas down to sketches, people down to characters. Or maybe it's dormroom pop psych: We are apprehensive about the shortcuts that art must take. The anxiety in appreciating art about oneself probably involves some deep Lacanian mirror stage shit. 1 It makes you wonder: When does a subculture actually ever like art about itself? 2 The entertainment landscape is littered with examples of subcultures (professions, geographies, lifestyles) disagreeing with how they are portrayed by mainstream art. If we are extremely close to it - if the subject matter is about us - then it is very likely that we find the similarity ugly, a disfigured clone of ourselves. We seem to have some sort of uncanny valley relationship to art. Outside of media circles (amongst the vegans, to continue this overwrought metaphor), the show seems somewhat more widely appreciated. Reviews of the show have been brutal, but asking a media critic to judge this show is like asking a cannibal how his gallbladder tastes. ![]() We're now two episodes into The Newsroom, HBO's newest entry in chatter-inducing Sunday programming.
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