Sorkin's Fictional "Newsroom" Gets It Right, As CNN, Fox And Others Get It Wrong

July 2, 2012

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.com

I turned on CNN to watch live coverage from the Supreme Court just in time to hear an earnest young woman report that “the decision is very legally written.” That was moments after she broke the news that the Affordable Care Act had been struck down.

The woman reporter appeared to be a late 20s, early 30s something, blond and good looking. I don’t know her name. It really doesn’t matter. Women with that profile are ubiquitous on all news channels and anchor many cable and broadcast news shows.

A few days ago an organization that calls itself “Newsbabes” held a fund-raiser for breast cancer in Washington, D.C. The photo that appeared in the newspaper showed 15 or 20 of them mugging the camera. Most appeared to be in their late 20s, early 30s, blond and good looking.

You may have noticed that NBC’s Today Show has a new co-host, Savannah Guthrie. The caption under her photo in today’s paper says she is “from a generation of broadcasters who can be more relaxed on the air.” Savannah Guthrie fits the dominant on-air profile: pleasant to look at, chatty, upbeat, light on experience.

Much is made these days about the disconnect between what’s really happening and what people think is happening.

Like the health care law.

The June edition of the respected Columbia Journalism Review cites a number of reasons for public misunderstanding of the Affordable Care Act, not the least of which is the “poor job” the press has done in covering the story. Here’s an excerpt from author Trudy Lieberman’s CJR article:

“The Republican strategy to demagogue the Affordable Care Act has certainly taken its toll on clarity. As the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism showed in a study released this week, the enemies of the Act are winning the communications war. And they seem to have the help of the media.”

Explaining what’s in the Affordable Care Act requires context. Some background knowledge of health care, insurance, law, federal-state relations, the social conditions prompting the health debate and other relevant issues also would be helpful.

Absent that knowledge, it requires very little background and context if you are satisfied with reporting only the he-said, she-saids of bumper sticker debate such as “destroying doctor-patient relations,” “government takeover of health care,” “death panels,” and the like.

Politics, not content, unfortunately dominates coverage of the health insurance debate.

Don’t agree with me on media coverage of health care? Okay, let’s move on to another mega-issue of our time: climate change.

According to the Denver Post, fires burning in Colorado are in an area where mountain pine beetles have killed 70% of the trees. Those rotting trees are perfect kindling for lightning strikes or careless campers.

It takes sustained 40 degree below zero temperatures to kill the mountain pine beetle and that seldom happens any more in the West. What’s happening are more beetles, drought, less mountain rainfall, melting glaciers and other changes in the ecosystem.

You would think that with all the evidence of climate change, in the West and elsewhere, the media at least would cover as fact what the mountain pine beetle knows. But that requires background, context, and reporters and editors and news organizations who don’t report black and white issues in politically safe shades of gray.

Which brings me to the new Alan Sorkin TV series, “Newsroom.” Many mainstream TV reviewers have dug their claws deep into Sorkin’s early episodes. Critiques of the show use words like “naïve,” “sanctimonious” and “preachy.” “Newsroom” imagines a TV news operation that values news and honesty over timidity and fluff. Small wonder than many real news rooms feel offended or embarrassed by it.

Alan Sorkin’s TV producer character McKenzie McHale makes this plea to fictional anchor Will McAvoy during the premier episode of “Newsroom":

“There is nothing that’s more important in democracy than a well-informed electorate. When there is no information or, much worse, wrong information, it can lead to calamitous decisions that clobber any attempts at vigorous debate. That’s why I produce the news.”

The New York Times’ critic of the show haughtily dismissed that speech as the stuff of a “high school commencement address.”

Maybe if more real life Will McAvoys had heeded the fictional McKenzie McHale’s message they wouldn’t have gone on air telling the world that the Affordable Care Act was dead.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)