The first season of The Newsroom, HBO’s drama about a
cable news broadcast that decides to take on the Tea Party, came to
a merciful end last week. The show began as a masochistic hourly
ritual of pompous harangues, left-wing agitprop, clichéd love
triangles, and error-riddled “news” presentations. It got even
worse from there.
Much of the finale was spent in a hospital ward after news
anchor and Keith Olbermann mimic Will McEvoy, played by Jeff
Daniels, overdosed on antidepressants. At one point, Will jokes
that his nurse is trying to euthanize him. After nine episodes, I
think many of us were wishing she would.
Fortunately, in a speechifying whirlwind about Don Quixote and
the evils of voter ID (and when have those things not gone
together?), Will manages to rise from his bed. He’s soon back at
work, reporting the news behind his anchor desk.
That’s when we’re treated to this on-air monologue:
“They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call
themselves conservatives. They can even call themselves
Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should
call them what they are: the American Taliban.”
That might sound like a drunken rant at your local College
Democrat club. But then the scene shifts to the newsroom where
Will’s producers are backslapping and hear-hearing each other, as
though the French had finally sailed into Yorktown. This is perhaps
the most striking feature of The Newsroom. Seeping out of
every pore of its characters, embedded in every word of its
dialogue, is the demand that we prostrate ourselves before its
crayon-scrawled, left-wing nonsense and hail its moral courage.
The Newsroom is the brain child of Aaron Sorkin, the
once-wunderkind writer behind The West Wing. He clearly
intends for conservatives like me to be either outraged or
intellectually swayed by his Speaking Truth to Power.
Instead it’s hard not to feel bored…even sorry for Sorkin.
Will’s entire rant feels yellowed and musty. The “American
Taliban”? Really? In addition to being tedious, that was also the
title of a book by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas. At this
point, the savants of liberalism are even borrowing banalities from
each other.
The left once expressed itself through twanging protest songs,
Norman Lear television shows, and artful movies by directors like
Oliver Stone. Now after decades of cultural hegemony, the liberal
imagination is exhausted. The Newsroom is liberal culture
sputtering, flailing, coughing up on the carpet.
There are many ways to sculpt good satire. You can use hyperbole
to show the logical end of an argument. You can populate your world
with stock characters to show trends. Or you can employ a wry
narrator to comment on everything. Sorkin offers a new approach:
having his characters read Huffington Post op-eds to each
other.
Thus we get this Will McEvoy rant from the first episode of
The Newsroom:
[America is] seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science,
49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median
household income, fourth in labor force and fourth in exports. We
lead the world in only three categories — number of incarcerated
citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real,
and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26
countries combined…So when you ask what makes us the greatest
country in the world, I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking
about.
His audience sits rapt with attention, as they usually do when
Will is Refuting Right-Wing Lies. He quotes statistics! My God,
we’ve been buried beneath his intellectual heft! Set aside
Will’s inaccuracies and focus on just his dialogue for a second.
Who the hell talks like that? Hollywood is so hermetically sealed
from opposing viewpoints, Sorkin believes his characters can recite
left-wing blog posts and people will cheer.
This is a major hazard when you control the culture. Because
your views dominate the media and the little urban enclave where
you live, you can breeze through life without ever being
challenged. Opposing viewpoints are shouted down through the
cultural megaphone. AMERICA IS RANKED 178TH IN INFANT
MORTALITY! Well, no, it isn’t. As Kyle Smith noticed,
Sorkin literally read the CIA Factbook upside-down. And unlike
many other first-world countries, the United States counts
neonatal deaths as infant mortalities, artificially driving up
its numbers. But America’s epidemic of dying babies is now gospel
in many quarters, with McEvoy’s quote being carried around the
Internet like a holy tabernacle.
Despite all the shrieking and ringing of bells about the
“Right-Wing Noise Machine” (the savvy now just abbreviate it as
RWNM), it’s the left that’s deafening the culture with its volume.
Take this on-air exchange between Will McEvoy and a straw-man
opponent of the Ground Zero Mosque who veers into worrying about
Sharia Law:
STRAW MAN: All over America, we’re seeing the influence of
creeping Islam. … Women can be stoned to death for committing
adultery.
WILL: No, they can’t. Actual laws are the only ones that are
enforceable, including the one that says you can’t create religious
laws. And the U.S. is in no more danger of coming under the rules
of Sharia Law than it is the rules of Fight Club.
Will goes on to school her about how it’s actually American
Christians who have a history of theocratic violence. He
cites, among other examples, JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, an
ardent admirer of that papal state the Soviet Union.
And there are plenty of examples of Sharia Law being cited in
the United States. There’s the monstrous New Jersey judge who
refused to grant a restraining order to a woman who
had been sexually assaulted by her Muslim husband after he cited
Sharia. There was Exxon Mobil’s dispute with a Saudi company
where the
judge consulted with experts on Islamic law. These are provable
facts. Conservatives may or may not be wrong about “creeping
Islam,” but they’re not leering at monsters under the bed.
But why engage the facts when it’s so much easier to scream
categorical statements? On and on it goes. THERE IS NO VOTER FRAUD!
Except 177 people have been convicted of voting illegally in
Minnesota’s 2008 Senate election alone. SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS A
SECULARIST! Then why was he trying to
build the largest mosque in history and
have an Islamic calligrapher write a Koran in his blood?
THERE’S A SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS ON CLIMATE CHANGE!
Are there any scientists still defending the IPCC report?
The Newsroom provides an airtight world where
characters make these proclamations and pushover conservatives (or
cliché
dissenting Republicans, as South Park once called them) never
retaliate with pesky facts. Liberal culture is stuck in a loop,
needing to reinforce its opinions over and over again.
It’s the same thing that’s happening at MSNBC where Meghan
McCain is considered a reliable tap into the Republican psyche.
Every evening it’s a drumbeat of the same stories while left-wing
contributors smirk and nod vigorously. Conservative guests who
could articulately challenge the conventional wisdom are rarely
allowed on.
The Newsroom is several ideological heart attacks
beyond even MSNBC. Thus does the Tea Party become the American
Taliban (apparently Sorkin did discover Sharia in
America). Cue the inspirational music. Roll the credits. As the
horrified reviews have shown, it’s too much for even most
progressives to digest.
HBO has already renewed The Newsroom for a second
season. Thus Sorkin will once again have a platform to take up his
sword and slice his way through a field of straw men before taking
a deep bow in expectation of our gratitude.
He’ll insist that it’s high entertainment. But really, it all
just feels exhausted.
