Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom – The HBO series that charts a course through transitional times in the news.

Donald Trump’s surprising success in the early primaries is a result of many factors.  A recent NewYorker article credits the internet with a leading role in what it terms the U.S.’s eighth (or so) crisis or revolution in party politics. Alexander Hamilton, with his Federalist Papers, helped form the first political parties (his life is currently being celebrated with a Broadway Musical).  The internet poses a threat and brings opportunities to various industries – education is the one I am most intimately familiar with, though it has implications for therapy as well.  Whether or not the party system will be revolutionized by it, Journalism and politics are being profoundly affected.  The reluctant son recently brought Aaron Sorkin’s show The Newsroom, a three season series aired (or cabled) on HBO and now available for binge viewing to my attention after I spent time watching and showing him some of The West Wing.  The Newsroom covers much ground, but, especially in its final season, it takes on the issue of internet “journalism” head on – as well as attending to many other things.

Aaron Sorkin, in both The West Wing and The Newsroom, drives me mad.  He presents complex nuanced arguments about issues of the day.  He gives us whip smart players who explain them to us without patronizing us – he expects us to be on our toes and to learn from his fast paced – OK - breakneck dialogue.  He then, especially in The Newsroom, makes fun of a medium that is more interested in gossip and muckraking than in hard news.  And then it feels like he panders to us by creating characters – idealized though they may be – whose tawdriness and pettiness is not only paraded before us – but relied on to maintain our interest.  He stoops to be those he criticizes. 

Sorkin’s pandering is directly played out in the Newsroom, where the central character, news anchor Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, has brought the quality of the news that his mythical Atlantis Cable News delivers to a very low level because he is so concerned about being liked by his audience.  Bring in his ex-girlfriend MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), who used to produce his news when it was better, and magically it becomes better – why?  Because Will is now more intent on winning the love of MacKenzie than his audience.  Oh, but it is more complex than that – MacKenzie treated him badly, so Will spends most of his time outwardly humiliating her while desperately craving her approval.

OK, secretly, as a psychoanalyst, I admire that Sorkin doesn’t pretend that our heroes are better than we are.  He doesn’t pretend that he is above the fray – and the very things he criticizes.  He clarifies that he is human.  We are internally inconsistent critters.  But Oh, I don’t want us to be – part of why my identity as a psychoanalyst – where we acknowledge all of this – is reluctant.

The first two seasons of The Newsroom are framed around the central relationship between McAvoy and MacKenzie that is mirrored in complementary ways by two other office misbegotten loves that triangulate in complicated fashion while the plot is also being driven by very real world and timely events.  The Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Spill and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden are woven into the soap opera events of love, but also the theme of trying to produce quality news when all kinds of forces are aligned against that – an ownership (including Jane Fonda playing a media mogul) that is concerned – along with the anchor – about ratings; an audience that prefers titillation to the meatier work of wading through complicated ideas; and the increasing threat, especially by the third season, of the internet “news” to the production and management of information that the populace of a democracy needs to become an informed electorate.

In the second season, the focus is on an error that the news team makes – misreporting that the U.S. committed a war crime.  This gets at some very important ethical issues regarding reporting, and the role of the legal system in news – but it is also a loose season that almost falls apart as it careens along.  I would like to focus on the third season, which also careens along (and which we had to pay for – the first two seasons were “free” on Netflix, but the third season, at least at this point, required us to pay for a streaming version that we thought was well worth it) but that ends up nicely resolving – not just the issues of the season, but the series as a whole.  It is a good piece of writing, acting, and just plain theater – but I worry about whether it downplays the extent of the threat of new media – while hoping that it is providing a model of how to address that threat.

Throughout history, we have had to band together to produce things of value.  From the Great Pyramids of Giza to the Interstate Highway System this has been the case.  Journalism is another example of this.  An army of printers and editors and newsboys were required to circulate the words of a privileged few who opined about the ideas of the day.  In order to have a diversity of opinions, there needed to be a diversity of organizations, and people got together to make those work.  The internet puts anyone with a laptop at the head of that organization.  A guy like me can bypass learning the ropes of the profession, take my iPhone to a campaign stop – record some footage – blog about it and upload it for all to see.  Of course there is an army of people who have built and maintain the internet itself, but they don’t control access to producing its content.  I don’t have to argue with a producer to get my story on the air – it just goes there.  And, to return to the theme of the second year, if I say something irresponsible, my integrity is momentarily questioned, but that gets buried under the avalanche of new material that appears tomorrow.  Organizations, on the other hand, are held accountable by their viewers and by legal eagle eagles for what they put out there. 

In the third season of The Newsroom, a new owner, a Silicon Valley new money billionaire, wants to change the news.  He wants us all to become reporters – with hundreds of channels of information available, and with almost infinite viewing and reporting capacity.  The misreporting of suspects – people who were physically harmed – by the internet media in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings were told as a cautionary tale as the corporate hostile takeover threatened the fractious balance – but one that was based on mutual respect – between ownership and the news department.  This disintegrated with the new ownership and my fear in watching things unfold was that the center could not hold and a great institution – one that is essential to the functioning of the democracy – would be undermined. 

I suppose this spoiler alert is too late – but a particular solution is offered.  I am less interested in doing any more spoiling than I am in acknowledging some of the elements of the solution.  One is that luck and timing have a lot to do with it.  Things that are not, in fact, central to media issues play a determining role in the solution.  I think this is often the way of the world.  How many great ideas have failed to materialize because economic conditions have changed?  How many great leaders have emerged because of circumstances?  So this solution is unsettling, because the underlying thesis is that a thoughtful approach to learning a craft – and practicing it despite all the forces that are arrayed against it – is central to living a civilized life.  That craft might be journalism but it might be acting.

I am struck as I think about this about the functioning of the internet with YouTube videos that the reluctant stepdaughter watches.  There are YouTube “stars” that take pictures of themselves engaging in life.  They are, I think, shaped by the audience response – which things that I put out there get retweeted most?  And they are learning a craft – directly from the consumer of what they offer – not from a director or other actors.  They are getting feedback the same way that a comic does in endless performances of his or her routine – the same way that the Beatles did when they were playing small clubs and bars before recording a single hit.  And this is a particular kind of training – Paul McCartney still can’t read music – and he hires people to “put in more notes” in his compositions; would he have been able to more fully realize his musical vision if he had been classically trained?  It is hard to imagine that his musical career could have been more successful…

I am reminded of another example which I think I have given before of game players on the internet taking on the persona of analysts and having offices with couches.  Other game players come to the office and begin to talk about the difficulties they are having in the game – but the difficulties sound like difficulties they are having in life.  And the people playing the analyst begin to become concerned that they are out of their depth.

Some of the characters on The Newsroom appear to be quite young.  They are taking jobs in an industry that is terribly important to the functioning of the nation.  They are, at moments, thrust into roles that are new to them – they try them out – a reporter gets laryngitis and a young producer has to go in front of a camera.  They give it a shot.  And they get feedback on it – not just from the masses, but from other professionals.  Indeed, the central character, Will McAvoy, becomes an anchor by accident.  A prosecutor by training, and a reporter by aptitude, he sits in for an absent anchor on September 11^th and has the authenticity to carry the day.  Sorkin’s portrayal of McAvoy and the rest of the characters as people – deeply flawed, but also deeply committed people, articulates the frail nature of what we try to accomplish – taking our limited nascent selves out there into the world to learn from it and to offer something back.  We do what we can with our native talents and with the instruction we receive.

This series, and the political arena that is emerging in this election, seem to be asking whether careful planning and corporate work – the building of pyramids – which seems to necessarily enslave us some of the time so that we can all have a measure of freedom – whether the compromises that must be made to achieve the huge structures that we build for the common good – are worth it.  Can and should they be torn down in favor of simpler, more direct approaches to solving problems.  Approaches that do not involve nuance and caution, but bold articulation of powerful forces – are these superior?  Or do they simply lead to a cacophony of individual voices, all straining to be heard – and to a worse suppression of all of us as we must figure out how to move forward and so choose a leader who ends up answering not to us but to him or herself?  Can the individual voice supplant the collective?  Can we, individually, hear all of the channels and integrate them?  Should we rely on others to filter them, knowing that important voices will be lost?

I find it chilling to watch interviews or footage of the powerful figures in our history describe their thinking.  Especially with the luxury of 50 or 60 or more years of hindsight, I am struck by how narrow minded they were – by how parochial their thinking was.  And these are people whose motives and actions I admire.  Yet I cringe.  We will necessarily cringe at our actions when we look at them from further down the road.  Part of that is because we will have a broader view, one that can be enhanced by the ability of so many to articulate what is on their mind.  The Newsroom ties up one of many strings that seem too numerous to pull together in its final episode by proposing that the new media can and should emulate what was good and useful about the old media.  The new media can and should look for approval to those who have made the news before – to hold themselves to the standards of those, flawed though they may have been, who set the standard.  I like this solution and hope that we can achieve some measure of it, but fear that the very freedom that allows us to strike out in our new directions will make it hard for us to figure out how to work together in this new world where we all feel that each of us is the leader – each of us does or can know how to move the ball forward.  Of course, I probably would have felt the same way were I to have watched the 1968 Democratic Convention as an old guy rather than as a child who interpreted the actions of other young people - putting flowers into the barrels of rifles - as inspired activity.

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