"The Newsroom" - The Ideal And The Real

Journalistic Passion: Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom presents television news and current affairs as it should be. But Sorkin, like all artists, draws his inspiration from reality. The fictional Will McAvoy's (above right) exploits follow very real historical precedents, and there are heroes every bit as idealistic in our own newsrooms.

 

THE FIRST SEASON of US screen-writer, Aaron Sorkin’s, The Newsroom has just ended. Like its predecessor, The West Wing, Mr Sorkin’s latest offering shows America as it should be by taking for its subject matter America as it is.

 

The question Mr Sorkin expect his viewers to ask at the end of every show is: “Why can’t real life be like this?”

 

Why, for example, can’t the producers of our nightly current affairs shows provide us with the sort of searing interrogation of newsmakers that the fictional viewers of News Night regularly witness?

 

Why have Television New Zealand and TV3 been unable to find an anchor-man like Will McAvoy, the strongly principled, fearsomely intelligent (yet politically conservative) journalist who heroically refuses to “dumb down” his show for the sake of the ratings?

 

Why, Mr Sorkin wants us to ask, are our own news-rooms not populated with the sort of young journalists who set News Night’s news-room afire with their idealism and an absolute determination to uncover and broadcast “the truth”?

 

And what about the characters Mr Sorkin places further up the hierarchy of his fictional Atlantis Cable News? What about Charlie Skinner, the president of ACN’s news division, or Leona Lansing, the CEO of the network’s parent corporation, Atlantis World Media? Without the backing of these two, neither Will McAvoy’s journalistic integrity, nor the crusading zeal of his “EP” (Executive Producer) McKenzie McHale, would ever make it to air. What about them?

 

It’s a formidable skill Mr Sorkin possesses; this ability to hold up the real against the ideal and make us rue how little the former resembles the latter. Why weren’t the all-too-real Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama more like Mr Sorkin’s fictional President, Jed Bartlett? Why can’t real journalists be as enthralling as News Night’s?

 

Well, as McKenzie McHale tells Will McAvoy in the pilot episode: “We could be”; “We were once”. Mr Sorkin’s hard-drinking, bow-tie wearing Charlie Skinner and the hard-nosed  Leona Lansing closely resemble the two pivotal characters in that greatest of all American news stories - Watergate. Not the two journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the story, but The Washington Post editor, Ben Bradlee, and the Post’s proprietor, Katie Graham. They were the ones who gave Woodward and Bernstein the time, the resources, and (most important of all) the backing, to tell the Watergate story.

 

Real Life Heroes: Carl Bernstein, Katherine Graham and Bob Woodward discuss the Watergate expose in the newsroom of The Washington Post.

 

The sort of journalism Mr Sorkin champions in The Newsroom is possible. It has happened. It’s history.

 

Nor is it fanciful to claim that high principle, fearsome intelligence and conservative politics can be combined in a single news-man. I know they can, because I used to work for just such a person. His name was Warren Berryman and he was the founding editor of the weekly business newspaper, The Independent.

 

Warren loved free-market capitalism and he was the implacable foe of anyone who brought it into disrepute. What’s more, if you had “a good yarn”, Warren didn’t give a damn what your political leanings were. It was the story that mattered.

 

And though he may not always deliver the scintillating dialogue which Mr Sorkin puts into the mouth of Will McAvoy, our own John Campbell regularly presents TV3’s viewers with the sort of fearless advocacy journalism that makes The Newsroom such compelling viewing. Not forgetting Pip Keane, Campbell Live’s McKenzie McHale, or TV3’s very own Charlie Skinner: that indefatigable champion of his network’s news and current affairs; Mark Jennings.

 

It might be stretching a point to call them “young”, but the very real New Zealand investigative journalists, Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, are every bit as committed to uncovering the truth as News Night's idealistic staffers.

 

Elaborating the ideal; revealing its meaning and presence in our daily lives; this has always been the duty of the artist. But we should never forget the crucial role reality plays in shaping the artist’s vision of a better world.

 

Truth is not only stranger than fiction – it’s more inspiring.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 October 2012.

More "West Wing" Than Left-Wing

Magical Thinking: So compelling was Aaron Sorkin's script for the hit TV series The West Wing that it was easy to forget that "President" Jed Bartlett was a right-wing "New Democrat" in the mould of Bill Clinton. Many Labour and Alliance staffers (some of them now MPs) were won over by Sorkin's hard-headed 1999 definitions of feasible politics. Thirteen years after the series first aired, and in spite of the Global Financial Crisis comprehensively discrediting "Clintonomics", they remain more West Wing than left-wing.

 

THE SAME YEAR New Zealanders elected the Labour-Alliance Government, 1999, NBC launched Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. The fast-moving, fast-talking television drama series soon became compulsory viewing for Labour and Alliance staffers. Sorkin’s intelligent, razor-sharp dialogue revealed a world of politics very different from that portrayed by the cynical members of the Press Gallery. “President” Jed Bartlett’s staffers offered much, much more than the usual smarts and wisecracks. What transformed the day-to-day activities of characters like Josh Lyman, “Ceejay” Cregg, Sam Seaborn and Toby Ziegler into such compelling television was that they were motivated by real and passionately articulated principles. Sorkin had done the seemingly impossible, he had made back-room politics sexy.

 

The model for The West Wing was, of course, the Clinton White House. As the first “Baby Boomer” President, Clinton brought a looser (as it turned out a much looser) and more informal style to the administrative warren which gave Sorkin’s series its name. The fictional Bartlett (played superbly by Martin Sheen) may have hailed from straight-laced New Hampshire (a far cry from Clinton’s sleazy Arkansas) but viewers warmed to the younger characters who were as “cool” as they were competent. Characters who commented on blogs and confronted protesters – not with billy-clubs and tear gas, but with weapons fashioned out of (shock, horror) facts and figures. These were people who could command arguments.

 

But among all the “walk and talk” tracking shots and fast-talking riffs on everything from Middle Eastern politics to stem cell research, it was easy to miss the underlying political identity of the “Bartlett Administration”. This was not a collection of New Deal Democrats (except, maybe, for Toby Ziegler). President Josiah ‘Jed’ Bartlett was a Nobel Laureate in Economics – neoliberal economics. Sorkin’s politics were and are the “liberal” politics of the so-called “New Democrats” and their “moderate” Democratic Leadership Council. In short, Sorkin was channelling the Clintons’ politics: Bill’s and Hillary’s.

 

It’s the politics that gave the world NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) and declared “the era of big government” to be “over”. The politics that put an end to “welfare as we have known it”. Sorkin's Bartlett Administration is a paean to the virtues of Anthony Gidden’s “Third Way” – presented to the world by a master screenwriter whose persuasive powers not even Tony Blair’s master manipulator, Alastair Campbell, could equal. There was a darker side too. On matters of “National Security”, Bartlett’s chief-of-staff, Leo McGarry, was as hard-line as Sorkin could imagine: an avenging American Eagle in a White House briefing-room already bristling with hawks.

 

Such were the role models that Labour’s and Alliance’s young staffers attempted to emulate. And Sorkin’s pithy justifications for everything from fiscal responsibility to free-trade were to leave a deep impression. When the young men and women who filled the offices around Helen Clark and Jim Anderton (Grant Robertson, Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins, John and Josie Pagani) recall the exemplars of “modern social democracy” do they think only of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, or are Jed Bartlett, Josh Lyman and “Ceejay” Gregg also in their minds?

 

That The West Wing was able to present itself as a progressive drama was only because the Right (especially in the USA) had become so utterly bereft of anything even remotely resembling principle. That, and a long economic boom which appeared to confirm everything its neoliberal architects preached and predicted. Helen Clark and her Finance Minister, Dr Michael Cullen, floated on these economic updrafts for nearly nine years: long enough for those who worked on their staffs to become convinced that while the “reforms” of the fourth Labour government may have been poorly sequenced, and much too brutally imposed, they were, in the context of their time, the right thing to do.

 

Today, the grim legacy of the magical political and economic thinking that Aaron Sorkin so brilliantly gave voice to in The West Wing lies all around us. The Third Way we bought from Clinton and Blair, Clark and Cullen turned out to be a pup. The Fed’s credit-fuelled boom turned to bust. The middle class maxed-out its credit cards. The working-class fell off a cliff. Social inequality spreads through the body-politic like a deadly, metastasizing cancer. Only the rich are smiling.

 

Sorkin, himself, has recognised the shift. His new television series, The Newsroom, lays bare the moral and material legacies bequeathed to America by the political-economy of his West Wing characters. Tellingly, the smart, sassy and principled heroes of this, Sorkin’s latest paean to the faltering American dream, are no longer politicians – they’re journalists.

 

Here in New Zealand, however, the young staffers of 1999 have become the middle-aged politicians and senior advisers of 2012. And although their waistlines have widened, the ideological path followed by these ageing West Wing fans remains as straight and narrow as a Jed Bartlett budget. Their understanding of the electorate is still rooted in the expert analyses of poll data and focus groups. (Sorkin’s satire was never sharper than when he made Joey Lucas, Jed Bartlett’s hot-shot pollster, deaf). Worst of all, the economic and social arguments these unreconstructed "utopian realists" continue to hurl against their critics (both Right and Left) all come from the era of dot-com bubbles and sub-prime mortgages.

 

Arguments that sound more West Wing than left-wing.

 

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.