Breaking the News

Note to the reader: The Professor is returning next post, so the All Housewife All the Time Show is coming to an end. I know you'll be devastated. (wink)


Professor J,

After spending all these months reading and discussing Hedges work along comes HBO on Sunday night and makes many of the same points in the monologue that fires The Newsroom's opening salvo. Since I know you've been a little busy and probably missed it, here's the clip:  

 

While browsing around other blogs and articles about this speech I found that those on the left were typically cheering and those on the right were calling it a speech about hating America, calling Sorkin an America hater, capitalism hater, and scoffing at the idea of the news being influenced by corporations, ratings, and shareholders. Seriously? Conservative bloggers use such terms as "Hollywierdos, refer to Jane Fonda (whose character hasn't been introduced yet) as a "commie," and accuse anyone with a different view of being delusional. Perhaps Sorkin  does intend to use the new series as HBO funded left wing propaganda, but to say that NONE of the things said or portrayed are accurate is delusional in its own right.


Just exactly where Sorkin got the statistics used by Daniels in the speech is a matter of some controversy. Where statistics come from and how they are skewed is always important information and a fair comparison can be made more difficult by a lack of a universal standard for some things. I didn't have time to fact check those statistics as of the time of this post so for the sake of argument let's just say they are mostly true. For an example let's use infant mortality which, according to the speech has us coming in at 178. According to the CIA World Factbook we're at 174. Statistics for this vary widely due to the fact that in the U.S. we try to save even the smallest, most premature baby who in many countries would be written off at birth. And whose numbers and rankings are we looking at? The CDC, WHO? UN? They are different.

Accuracy (in a television drama) aside, are conservatives really going to take issue with the idea of the decline of journalistic standards?

Much of the dialogue in the first episode centers around worries about how the corporate owners will react, and the lack of a search for truth in modern journalism. I couldn't help thinking that if Hedges was watching he must have been cheering (though he doesn't seem like the cheering type). 

You can read the Housewife's review of The Newsroom here.

I find it interesting that so many people equate pointing out deficiencies and failures with hate. I didn't think it was hate. I thought it was articulate disappointment. I thought it was mourning the loss of something. If a marriage doesn't work out you can mourn the loss of what was once good about it without despising the institution.The left/right argument he interrupts to give this little tirade is interesting in its uninterestingness. We've heard it all before. We've heard it so much we don't hear it anymore. It has become so much background noise in the national dialogue (the one we aren't having) that we are in such desperate need of. It's the he says/she says of American politics that keeps people from getting to the truth about what is really going on and makes it next to (or maybe really) impossible to see the truth. That is assuming that people care about something other than whose fault the last big screw up was and if it was "our" guy how we can spin it to make the other side look bad. What might really be good for the country rarely seems to be a consideration. 


How do you get people to want the truth? More than they want to be right. More than they want to be popular. More than they want to be comfortable. How do you do that?


Will "I was fighting the good fight."

Charlie: "How's it going so far?"

Will "Progress is slow, but I'm in it for the long haul."

This housewife wants to know--what's not to love about that?