Commentary

What Would Aaron Do?

I am a big Aaron Sorkin fan. And before you rain on my parade, I say that fully understanding that he epitomizes the liberal intellectual elitist, sanctimonious cabal that has helped cleave American culture in two. I get that. And I don’t care.

I get that his message is from the left side of the ideological divide. I get that he is preaching to the choir. And I get that I am part of the choir. Still, given the times, I felt that a little Sorkin sermon was just what I needed. So I started rewatching Sorkin’s HBO series “The Newsroom.”

If you aren’t part of this particular choir, let me bring you up to speed. The Newsroom in this case is at the fictional cable network ACN. One of the primary characters is lead anchor Will McEvoy (played by Jeff Daniels), who has built his audience by being noncontroversial and affable — the Jay Leno of journalism. 

This brings us to the entrance of the second main character: Mackenzie McHale, played by Emily Mortimer. Exhausted from years as an embedded journalist covering multiple conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, she comes on board as McEvoy’s new executive producer (and also happens to be his ex-girlfriend). 

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In typical Sorkin fashion, she goads everyone to do better. She wants to reimagine the news by “reclaiming journalism as an honorable profession,” with “civility, respect, and a return to what's important; the death of bitchiness; the death of gossip and voyeurism; speaking truth to stupid.”

I made it to episode 3 before becoming profoundly sad and world-weary. Sorkin’s sermon from 2012—– just eight years ago —  did not age well. It certainly didn’t foreshadow what was to come. 

Instead of trying to be better, the news business — especially cable news — has gone in exactly the opposite direction, heading straight for Aaron Sorkin’s worst-case scenario. This scenario formed part of a Will McEvoy speech in that third episode: “I'm a leader in an industry that miscalled election results, hyped up terror scares, ginned up controversy, and failed to report on tectonic shifts in our country — from the collapse of the financial system to the truths about how strong we are to the dangers we actually face.”

That pretty much sums up where we are. But even Sorkin couldn’t anticipate what horrors social media would throw into the mix. The reality is actually worse than his worst-case scenario. 

Sorkin’s appeal for me was that he always showed what “better” could be. That was certainly true in his breakthrough political hit “The West Wing.” 

He brought the same message to the jaded world of journalism in “The Newsroom. He was saying, “Yes, we are flawed people working in a flawed system set in a flawed nation. But it can be better….Our future is in our hands. And whatever that future may be, we will be held accountable for it when it happens.”

This message is not new. It was the blood and bones of Abraham Lincoln’s annual address to Congress on December 1, 1862, just one month before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law. Lincoln was preparing the nation for the choice of a path which may have been unprecedented and unimaginably difficult, but would ultimately be proven to be the more moral one: “It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion.”

“The Newsroom” was Sorkin’s last involvement with a continuing TV series. He was working on his directorial movie debut, “Molly’s World,” when Trump got elected. 

Since then, he has adapted Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” for Broadway, with “The Newsroom’”s Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch. 

Sorkin being Sorkin, he ran into a legal dispute with Lee’s estate when he updated the source material to be a little more open about the racial tension that underlies the story. Aaron Sorkin is not one to let sleeping dogmas lie. 

Aaron Sorkin also wrote a letter to his daughter and wife on the day after the 2016 election, a letter than perhaps says it all. 

It began, “Well the world changed late last night in a way I couldn’t protect us from.”

He was saying that as a husband and father. But I think it was a message for us all — a message of frustration and sadness. He closed the letter by saying “I will not hand [my daughter] a country shaped by hateful and stupid men. Your tears last night woke me up, and I’ll never go to sleep on you again.”

Yes, Sorkin was preaching when he was scripting “The Newsroom.” But he was right. We should do better. 

In that spirit, I’ll continue to dissect the Reuters study on the current state of journalism I mentioned last week. And I’ll do this because I think we have to hold our information sources to “doing better.” We have to do a better job of supporting those journalists that are doing better. We have to be willing to reject the “dogmas of the quiet past.” 

One of those dogmas is news supported by advertising. The two are mutually incompatible. Ad-supported journalism is a popularity contest, with the end product a huge audience custom sliced, diced and delivered to advertisers — instead of a well-informed populace.

We have to do better than that.

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