HBO's 'The Newsroom' Takes on Koch Brothers; Journalists on
the Defensive (two posts)

* HBO's 'The Newsroom' Takes on Koch Brothers (Chris Garlock,
AFL-CIO Now)
* HBO's "Newsroom" Puts Journalists on Defensive (Randy Shaw,
Beyond Chron)


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HBO's 'The Newsroom' Takes on Koch Brothers

by Chris Garlock

AFL-CIO New
July 29, 2012

http://www.aflcio.org/Blog/Other-News/HBO-s-The-Newsroom-Takes-on-Koch-Brothers

If The Wall Street Journal is complaining about it, "The
Newsroom" must be doing something right for working people.

"For the second week in a row, Charles and David Koch were
strafed by HBO's show `The Newsroom,' the one-hour drama about
a fictional cable TV news show and its volatile anchorman,"
huffed The Wall Street Journal yesterday in "HBO's `Newsroom'
Takes Aim at Koch Brothers."

In recent 'Newsroom' episodes, anchor Will McAvoy (played by
Jeff Daniels) has not only exposed the Koch brothers'
extensive funding of conservative causes and groups, from the
Citizens United court case to Americans for Prosperity - which
has fueled state-level attacks on unions - but has explicitly
said that this massive infusion of money from corporations and
the wealthy is a threat to our democracy.

No wonder The Wall Street Journal felt compelled to come to
the aid of its billionaire pals.

In the latest episode, broadcast last Sunday, the show
directly linked last year's uprising against tyranny in Egypt
with the occupation of the Capitol in Madison, Wis., as
workers rebelled against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's attacks
on their bargaining rights. "I wanted to compare and
contrast...the protests in Cairo and the protests in
Wisconsin," says show creator Aaron Sorkin, who also created
"West Wing" as well as writing the script for 2010's hit movie
"The Social Network."

Sunday's episode also noted that Citizens United would have
failed if Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had recused
himself from the case. Many say Thomas should have recused
himself from the case because of his ties to the Koch
Brothers.

Given the McAvoy character has vowed to "follow the money,"
despite warnings from the spineless president of "The
Newsroom's" fictional cable news network to back off the Koch
brothers -  whose companies are major advertisers -  viewers
of "The Newsroom" can expect to see more critiques on the
influence of big money on our nation's media and political
future.

That'll undoubtedly continue to irritate The Wall Street
Journal and the Koch brothers, who prefer to wield their
influence behind the scenes and not on a major premium cable
TV show. The bad news for them -  and good news for the rest
of us - is that "The Newsroom" has just been picked up for
another season.

HBO's "The Newsroom" airs Sunday nights at 10 p.m. EST.

[Chris Garlock is communications director of the Metropolitan
Washington [D.C.] Council, AFL-CIO, and managing editor of
Union City http://www.dclabor.org/ ]

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HBO's "Newsroom" Puts Journalists on Defensive 

by Randy Shaw 

Beyond Chron
(San FRancisco's Alternative Online Daily)
July 24, 2012

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=10341

If you have not seen Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series "Newsroom,"
you might be inclined to avoid it. New Yorker critic Emily
Nussbaum concluded that the show "treats the audience as
though we were extremely stupid" and "is so naive it's
cynical." The Huffington Post observed "TV critics haven't
unanimously bashed a series like this since ABC's ill-fated
cross-dressing comedy "Work It," and even its own Maureen Ryan
described Newsroom as "getting almost everything wrong" and as
"a dramatically inert, infuriating mess." I've seen all five
episodes of Newsroom, and it is the hostile critics, not
Sorkin, who have gotten almost everything wrong. Newsroom is
not perfect, but it is an oasis in the television desert. It
is far and away the most progressive show on the airwaves,
understandably drawing a backlash from professional
journalists uncomfortable with Sorkin's biting critiques of
their tepid responses to right-wing lies.

Aaron Sorkin's new show, Newsroom, creates a replica of CNN
and replaces bland Anderson Cooper with Will McAvoy, a Keith
Olbermann-like anchor played by Jeff Daniels. The show has the
large cast of intersecting characters typical of Sorkin shows,
and rotates from conflicts over news issues to underlying
romantic subplots among the staff.

Although Newsroom continues to draw 2 million viewers a show,
it has undergone a critical shellacking. This is no surprise;
the Baltimore political establishment hated David Simon's The
Wire, so a show that pulls no punches in attacking the
political cowardice of the mainstream media was not going to
see a large welcome banner.

"Sorkin Thinks We Are Stupid"

What's most illuminating about the critical response is the
repeated perception that Newsroom talks down to viewers and
thinks they are stupid. As the Huff Post's Ryan puts it,
viewers want more "subtle delights," while Newsroom is
"obvious and self-congratulatory," and "manipulative and
shrieky."

What are the critics talking about? Perhaps it was the show
that exposed Rush Limbaugh, the NRA and the Republican Party
for lying about President Obama's record on gun control---and
which had the Newsroom anchor giving Obama a series of "F'
grades for failing to do anything opposed by the NRA (the
grades came from the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence)

Or maybe it was Newsroom's indictment of the media's repeated
turning to Sarah Palin as an authority figure on climate
change. We are all so smart to know that she has no such
authority, so Sorkin's highlighting the continued airtime she
gets to talk about the subject is "condescending."

Newsroom also pulled the curtain back from behind the big-
money interests that created the Tea Party. The Tea Party's
true origins were so "obvious" that the mainstream media
promoted it as a legitimate, non-partisan grassroots movement
for months---no wonder journalists are so defensive about
Sorkin's calling them to account for their lack of honest
reporting.

The list goes on. Critical comments about Sorkin's factually
accurate challenges to mainstream media timidity recall
attacks on feminists for being "shrieky" for demanding equal
pay for equal work and an end to sex discrimination.

Media Fears "The Truth"

What also drives critics like Ryan crazy is Newsroom's
insistence that it delivers "truth" while other news divisions
run from it. Yet this critique of today's news industry as
promoting pundit spin rather than facts is hardly unique, or
even controversial.

For example, Cenk Uygur wrote in May that CNN should "stop
doing `he said, she said' crap that doesn't actually deliver
the news to anyone. Democrats said this and Republicans said
that -- who cares? What is the reality?! Your job is supposed
to be to bring us facts, not what official spokespeople told
you in their press releases and talking points."

I find CNN with Anderson Cooper and other hosts absolutely
unwatchable. The hosts serve as high-paid mediators, not even
attempting to provide viewers with the facts. Considering that
CNN's ratings are the lowest in a decade, with only 400,000
tuning in to Cooper's prime-time show, Sorkin's very thinly-
veiled critique of CNN's unwillingness to offer facts appears
to be widely shared.

Nearly every mainstream news source seeks out false
equivalencies between Democrats and Republicans, or
progressives and conservatives. We see it in coverage of
Citizens United---which is said to equally help labor unions
and corporations---and in preposterously misleading depictions
of Republicans as "fiscal conservatives" despite backing
deficit-busting tax cuts.

Is Sorkin/McAvoy heavy handed in criticizing mainstream media
for not telling the truth about major news events? Yes. Is
Newsroom "arrogant" for acting like it has more integrity than
other news shows? As Muhammad Ali famously said, "it ain't
braggin if you can do it."

Newsroom's Flaws

Newsroom is not without flaws.

Critics are correct in pointing out that Sorkin's view of a
prior "golden age" of television news---Murrow, Huntley &
Brinkley, Cronkite---is false. Murrow went after Joe McCarthy
years after this posed any political risk, and Cronkite's
announcement in 1968 that we had reached a quagmire in Vietnam
neither impacted LBJ's decision not to run (a widely held but
inaccurate myth) nor impacted opposition to the war.

Yet it is true that none of these historic news anchors
allowed themselves to become mere referees in debates among
pundits. All were committed to providing some version of
"news" rather than the dueling opinions that pass for "news"
today.

Criticism of the racial composition of the lead actors in
Newsroom is also on point. Sorkin has favored whites for all
of the leading parts in each of his three series, and the same
is true here. He had a chance to critique the lack of African-
Americans and Latinos on national news shows, but instead
reaffirmed their absence (there are two minor black characters
but no Latinos in sight).

Some of the romantic sub-plots are far-fetched, the pace of
the talk can be too fast (a typical Sorkin device), and not
all the characters ring true. But on his big picture critique
of television news, Sorkin has come closer to getting it right
than anything else has done.

When you consider that the brilliant David Simon was unable to
effectively portray the newspaper business in the fifth season
of The Wire, Sorkin's ability to come close to getting
television news right---and to be entertaining in the
process-- deserves applause.

[Randy Shaw is the author of The Activist's Handbook and
Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for
Justice in the 21st Century.]

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