Aaron Sorkin is about to unleash his vision of what conservatives and Republicans are like in a new HBO series called The Newsroom and it ain’t going to be pretty. It seems like more proof that liberal Hollyweirders don’t know anything about conservatives. They are all Pauline Kaels now.
The premise of the series gives us a famous, trusted, objective, unbiased cable network news anchor loses his cool during a campus interview session. He lets loose his inner demons right in front of the students he came to address as well as the ever-present video cameras that send his tirade to viral Internet status. Chaos with his career ensues.
Newsman Will McAvoy, lead character played by Jeff Daniels, is said to be a “registered Republican” in the show, yet nearly all the issues and points he espouses, at least in the series trailer, seem liberal. He’s a global warming believer, he’s hateful of American culture, dismissive of religion, and says that America is not a great country, not to mention that he’s an insufferable, manic, arrogant sort. Yet, again, at least in the trailer, he never blames the left for these failures.
If you are hard pressed to see these as views and actions of a conservative, well you could be excused for your confusion.
Absurd is writer Sorkin’s premise that a long-time news anchor could have navigated the world of TV as a conservative in the first place. Except on real-life Fox News there is no such animal as a conservative news anchor. Never has been. To a man they’ve all been raving liberals.
A second ridiculous premise is in the pre-story of the series. The first episode reveals a news anchor that undermines his hard-earned reputation for objectivity with his supposed conservative outburst at the college Q&A session.
Naturally, the objective news anchor is another mythic beastie Sorkin foists on his audience. When have we ever had an objective news anchor? Again, Fox aside, they’ve all been liberal to their core and have “reported” the news along those biased lines despite their pretense that they are, indeed, unbiased and objective.
According to news reports, Sorkin spent time with MSNBC left-wing extremist Chris Mathews and the constantly fired ego maniac Keith Olbermann to do his “research” for his “registered Republican” news anchor character. What could be more natural to find out about how Republicans and conservatives think and act than to tag along with two of cable’s biggest haters of everything right of center?
One other thing rings hollow in this thing. It has Commie Jane Fonda as the tough-as-nails, capitalist-minded boss. Seriously.
Speaking of capitalism, the advance pub for the series contains the plot point that the characters are dealing with the reality of putting on a news show “in the face of corporate and commercial obstacles…”
What do we make of this but that this series will attempt to claim that evil corporations are forcing news producers to bow to corporate goals in the production of news programming? This is a claim that left-wingers level at TV news all the time, acting as if corporations skew the news in a conservative direction to serve that gosh darn evil, evil capitalism. But we all know that these TV newsers never lean conservative with their on-air product so it’s obvious that corporate masters never meddle with the denizens of those left-wing newsrooms at all.
It’ll be just another plot point that will ring hollow should that be the direction taken.
So, let’s recap; Aaron Sorkin’s conservative is an insufferable blowhard that hates America, hates religion, believes in global warming, has a hair-trigger temper, and is prone to mental breakdowns working in a corporate culture of conservatives forcing put-upon newsroom workers to skew their programs toward serving capitalism at the expense of truth. Well, heck. Aren’t ALL Conservatives like that? Hollyweirders think so, anyway.
HBO ordered 10 one-hour episodes of The Newsroom, the show is slated to start this summer.
Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as Breitbart.com, among many, many others. He has also written for several history magazines, has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.
