 |
| Sam Waterston finally loses his cool in "The Newsroom" |
Hundreds of thousands of words have already been written
about this past Sunday’s penultimate episode of The Newsroom, focusing mainly on Sorkin’s misguided attempt to
address the story of campus rape and its tenuous relationship to media. The plot, which involves Don trying to
dictate to a rape victim how she should be allowed to tell her story, was
paternalistic, utterly lacking in empathy, and grossly tone-deaf. It also had the misfortune of hitting the air
just days after Rolling Stone
publicly disavowed its shocking but familiar article on a brutal gang-rape on the campus of
the University of Virginia. But
not even better timing could have saved this lead weight of a story.
I do not believe that I am properly equipped as a writer to
deal with this particular part of the episode.
I have never in my entire life lived under even the vaguest threat of
sexual assault. I have never been told
to take my keys out before I walk to my car.
I’ve never been taught not to accept a drink I didn’t see prepared. I’ve never carried pepper spray. I’ve never felt even remotely
threatened. I live a privileged life in
that sense and it leaves me utterly incapable of feeling competent in
discussing the many, many problems with how Sorkin deals with the subject. Fortunately, there are a great many writers
who are capable
of writing about this part of “Oh Shenandoah” and I would highly encourage you
to read their fine work.
What I do feel comfortable discussing (and would like to
discuss) is the death of the one storyline I was really enjoying, and for that, we must talk about the death of
Charlie Skinner, who was literally
killed by the conflict between old media and new.
All season long, and really all series long, Sorkin has been
exploring that space between the old vanguard and the new wave of media,
typically falling, obviously, on the side of the established elite. And that’s fine. This is a show, after all, about the heroes
of cable news. We should expect them to
be the best at what they do. But the
last few episodes have been asking a much more interesting question: what if
being the best isn’t good enough? What
if the war has already been lost because the old guard spent so much time
fighting the new guard without ever realizing that they weren’t the real enemy
– the audience was?
It seems to me that the fight between old and new media was
lost the moment people began to curate their own news – as soon as it stopped
being “the news” and became “my news.”
This transformation didn’t start with Facebook and Twitter, though they
certainly accelerated it. You could
argue that it started with Fox News and the politicization of the news. Certainly, they too have been the target of The Newsroom’s wrath, but I think Sorkin
misses the point in attacking politicized news, or internet news agencies, or
Twitter. None of these entities is the problem; they are the symptoms. The disease is our desire to dictate what news we see.
I get most of my news through Twitter today. For local news I follow the education and
political reporters for my local paper.
For national news I follow reporters from the Huffington Post, the Washington
Post, USA Today and other publications. I realize, however, that I am an
outlier. For most people “the news” is
funny cat videos, “life-changing gift-wrap hacks,” and “Scarlett Johansson’s
secret to getting skinny.”* All of these
examples were taken from my Facebook feed this morning. This is the type of “news” that most people
care about these days and it’s clearly the future that The Newsroom most fears.
* Spoiler Alert: it’s
exercise.
What Sorkin fails to realize is that this battle has already
been lost; it was lost the moment the audience was allowed to receive only the news
it wanted. What has marked the best news
organizations, then, in the modern world of “giving the people what they want”
is their ability to marry the new media and the old. I may give CNN crap for clickbait headlines
on its website like “Swastikas on holiday gift wrapping?”* or “Why he’d leave
NFL, $7m to retire.”** But the network
is still the best source for unbiased cable news, even if sometimes that “news”
is 24/7 coverage of a missing plane.*** While Buzzfeed may be known mostly as the
place to go to find out “18 Times Tumblr Summed Up Christmas Perfectly” or to
see the “10 Celebrity Moments that Basically Broke Twitter in 2014,” the site
does have a legitimate news arm that has exposed, among other things, the practice of imprisoning the victims of domestic abuse when their abusers attack their
children. The Huffington
Post, whose Ryan Reilly put out some of the best on-the-ground reporting
during the Ferguson protests still has a page dedicated to sideboob.****
* It’s an accidental
inclusion in a larger pattern.
** Spoiler Alert: It’s
Marshawn Lynch and the article actually contains the line: “The Lynch
retirement rumor is almost pure speculation.”
*** Thank God we’ll
never have to see Sorkin’s take on that fiasco.
**** Yes, the tag is
supposedly a joke, but it’s still there more than two and a half years after
the “joke” was relevant.
What these sites all have in common is their ability to give
the people both what they want and
what they need. Sure, many people will
stick to the quizzes and the .gifs, but they just might learn something along
the way. The fight between traditional
and new media is not a zero-sum game, as Sorkin apparently thinks. That opinion is never more obvious than in
“Oh Shenandoah,” as we fast forward eight weeks from the last episode to see what BJ Ryan’s Lucas
Pruit has done since taking over ACN. The
arguments here are completely insane - the main one being
Pruit's decision to greenlight a celebrity stalker app that Gawker tried and
killed seven years ago (which the show explicitly acknowledges). For comparison’s
sake Sorkin’s last show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was still
airing when Jimmy Kimmel famously berated Gawker editor Emily Gould on CNN, the
exact moment that Sorkin is attempting to recreate.
I get it. It must be
frustrating for a group of people on “a mission to civilize” (and who have
largely been succeeding in their goals) to have to give up control to a bunch
of interlopers, but Sorkin takes it way over the top. Successful news organizations figure out how
to embrace change and negotiate the space between the past and the future. But The
Newsroom sees only an army of Perez Hiltons coming to kill his Edward R.
Murrows. For ACN there is no negotiating
between old media and new because you don’t negotiate with terrorists.
Maybe that’s the unintentional moral of The Newsroom. Maybe the
lesson to be learned from this show is that this is the fate of all those
institutions whose hubris leads them to believe that they can dictate what the
audience will watch. Some will rage
against the dying of the light, willing to burn the institution down before
seeing it fall into enemy hands. Others
will merely retreat to a cold, quiet balcony where they can bitterly mumble
nonsensically to themselves about page-view bonuses. There truly are no winners in The Newsroom’s world, only
those who survive to move on.
Tyler Williams is a
professional librarian and an amateur television critic. You can reach him at TyTalksTV AT gmail DOT
com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
No comments:
Post a Comment