Aaron Sorkin’s cable news drama The Newsroom wrapped up it’s third, and final season at the end of last year on HBO.  As pure piece of entertainment it’s fun to watch, especially with a great cast and the pyrotechnic dialog for which Sorkin is a specialist, but as a commentary on the current state of news, it has some serious flaws, that bothered me enough to write them down.  What’s that, you’ve never heard of The Newsroom?  Well, allow me a brief recap: Jeff Daniels plays Will McAvoy, a cable news anchor of the Dan Rather/Tom Brokaw/Peter Jennings vintage on the fictional Atlantis Cable News (ACN) network (a sly dig at Atlanta-based CNN, no doubt).  The series opens in the Q&A portion of a panel discussion on a university campus featuring McAvoy, when a college student asks a particularly naive question: “Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?”.  After a few attempts to avoid answering this directly (clearly he disagrees with the premise of the question), McAvoy decides enough is enough and starts channelling his inner Howard Beale (the fictional TV newscaster from the 1976 film Network who extorted  his audience to open their windows and yell: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not taking it anymore”).  McAvoy’s response is worth reading in detail, it’s pure Sorkin, the kind of thing that we all wish important people would say, but never do.Read More »