<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Season 1, Episode 8: &amp;quot;The Blackout Part I: Tragedy Porn&amp;quot; If you&amp;#039;re right by accident, does it still count as being right? That question occurred to me while watching the latest installment of The Newsroom. Will McAvoy is negotiating the terms of a magazine profile with a reporter, and he thinks he has the leverage to press for favorable ground rules because, he notes, the writer has been without a steady gig since he &amp;quot;took a buyout from Newsweek when it was sold to IAC.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a nice little bit of inside baseball \u2014 except that Newsweek was never sold to IAC. What Barry Diller&amp;#039;s company bought was a 50-percent share in a joint venture. It was only last month \u2014 presumably months after shooting and editing of this episode was completed \u2014 that IAC became the majority partner in that venture, after the family of the late Sidney Harman opted to cap its investment in the money-losing magazine. So while Sorkin&amp;#039;s reference was wrong at the time he wrote it, it ended up being right, or at least right-ish, by the time it aired. Is this nitpicking interesting to anyone but media-industry nerds? Probably not. But it&amp;#039;s at least as interesting as the dynamic at the heart of this episode: Real Journalism vs. Tabloid Fluff. Can you guess which side we&amp;#039;re supposed to root for? Would you like a hint? The laws of cable-news thermodynamics have reasserted themselves, and News Night, by focusing only on big, important stories like &amp;quot;Why would a gay guy work for Rick Santorum?&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Why are Tea Partiers such a bunch of idiots?&amp;quot; is losing viewers. It&amp;#039;s getting the wholesome, fiber-rich crap kicked out of it in the ratings by Nancy Grace, who&amp;#039;s been going wall-to-wall on the Casey Anthony trial. Will agrees to lead with Casey Anthony for a few days \u2014 not because he cares about the ratings, mind you; he&amp;#039;s kicked that addiction \u2014 but because he needs big viewership to bolster his bid to host a debate of the Republican presidential candidates. He has a revolutionary idea that&amp;#039;s going to change the art of debate-moderation for generations to come. I&amp;#039;m thinking it involves stirring speeches. Whatever it is, he&amp;#039;d better tell us fast, because we&amp;#039;re all about to get distracted again by Anthony Weiner, who&amp;#039;s been engaging in a bit of name-appropriate mischief that would make Charles Dickens blush. The Newsroom has strained credulity quite a few times in its short span, but nothing has made me howl &amp;quot;Are you fking kidding me?&amp;quot; quite so loudly as the scene in which a woman who&amp;#039;d been carrying on a Twitter flirtation with the congressman calls the network and one producer after another refuses to talk to her. I was working in a newsroom when Weiner held his press conference, the one that Andrew Breitbart hijacked in a brilliantly nasty piece of gonzo performance art. That is, I was working up until the press conference started. As soon as it did, no one was working. Anywhere in the media industry. Every single journalist in New York City was glued to the spectacle. Why? Because we&amp;#039;re human beings. Was it an important story, according to Sorkin&amp;#039;s constipated criteria? Of course not (though the long-term ramifications of his resignation ended up being significant, electorally speaking). But it was utterly riveting, and maybe even shed some light on not-frivolous subjects like the weird compulsions that drive politicians and the way social media has turned everyone&amp;#039;s lives combustible. This much I know for sure: If you&amp;#039;re the kind of reporter who&amp;#039;d turn down a call from a source who was involved in the Anthony Weiner scandal at its height, I sure as hell wouldn&amp;#039;t want you working in my newsroom. A note to Katrina vanden Heuvel: I&amp;#039;m a little hurt that you think there&amp;#039;s been &amp;quot;precious little attention to what The Newsroom has to say about the media.&amp;quot; Have I been staying up late all these Sunday nights for nothing? The folks at Salon and Vulture and the Los Angeles Review of Books, to name just a deserving few, have also been paying attention to what The Newsroom has to say about the media. We all pretty much think what The Newsroom has to say about the media is wrong. Well, not all of it is wrong. But the parts that are right are the ones that would be crushingly obvious to any semi-media-literate adult. (Don&amp;#039;t report someone&amp;#039;s dead if she&amp;#039;s not, really?) And the parts that are wrong, like Sorkin&amp;#039;s belief that getting rid of advertising would make TV news better, are way, way wrong. I&amp;#039;m curious about a few things, Katrina: Why do you think The Newsroom offers &amp;quot;a stirring example of what a better journalism would look like&amp;quot;? Do you think the biggest problem with journalism is that journalists don&amp;#039;t have enough relatives and former college roommates in jobs that coincidentally make them ideally placed sources for seminal news events? Or that conservatives on TV, when confronted with a barrage of facts, don&amp;#039;t helpfully acknowledge the error of their ways or collapse into abashed silence? If that&amp;#039;s what you believe, then I dig where you&amp;#039;re coming from. Also, why, exactly, do you say that MSNBC&amp;#039;s Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry, your former colleagues at The Nation, are &amp;quot;admirably and exhilaratingly bucking the trend&amp;quot; of corporate media that serves its own interests? Have those two been doing deep dives into the nefarious business practices of Comcast and GE? If so, please point me to them, because I missed them. Otherwise, it looks like you&amp;#039;re just going out of your way to exempt parties with whom you happen to have a relationship from your criticism. Which, given the nature of the criticism itself, would be kind of ironic, no? Speaking of which, why do you say &amp;quot;No disrespect to Jeff Daniels&amp;quot; before praising a scene that he happens not to be in? Are you really that worried about hurting Jeff Daniels&amp;#039;s feelings? That&amp;#039;s just kind of weird. -- Jeff Bercovici is a writer for Forbes living in New York City. He has covered media for more than ten years. Read Previous The Newsroom Recaps &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a15308/the-newsroom-episode-8-11644831/>