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" Episode 7: &amp;quot;5/1&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s an old saying in journalism: News is what somebody doesn&amp;#039;t want reported; everything else is publicity. As a rule of thumb, it works pretty well. But once in a while, there&amp;#039;s real, incontrovertible news, that which the actual Powers That Be very much want reported \u2014 want it so much that they call up all the networks and tell them to put their newsrooms on high alert. That&amp;#039;s what happened on May 1, 2011, the night President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden.  All season long, Aaron Sorkin has attempted, with mixed results, to make the act of covering big news events seem as vital and gripping as the events themselves. The bin Laden raid might be his biggest challenge yet. To have drama, of course, you need conflict, and there&amp;#039;s not much conflict in telling the story behind a story that everyone wants told.  So Sorkin invents some obstacles. As Obama&amp;#039;s address to the nation gets announced, Don, Elliot and Sloan are stuck on a taxiing plane at LaGuardia. (Thrilling!) Will, meanwhile, is getting airborne in a different sense, having eaten two pot cookies and popped a few Vicodins at a party to celebrate News Night&amp;#039;s anniversary. (Edgy!)  Can Will conquer his munchies and pull it together enough to do a broadcast? Will the gang make it back from the airport in time to help out? Actually, the trifling nature of these concerns somehow makes for a nice change of pace from a show whose sense of self-importance frequently makes Keith Olbermann seem grounded. I&amp;#039;ll take stoner Will over noble Will any day.  In fact, for a while, I thought we were actually going to make it through an entire episode of The Newsroom without a lecture. Alas, in the end, Sorkin couldn&amp;#039;t resist the temptation to fluff his characters&amp;#039; virtue, so there&amp;#039;s a weird bit where Charlie refuses to run with the news without official White House say-so, on account of said running of actual news somehow, maybe, possibly endangering American lives and/or making ACN look bad. It&amp;#039;s a thoroughly logic-free objection: Why would the White House have told the networks to get ready for big news if the raid was still in progress? Since when does waiting for the government&amp;#039;s blessing enhance a news outlet&amp;#039;s credibility? I don&amp;#039;t remember it working that way when The New York Times admitted that it waited until after the 2004 election to report on the NSA&amp;#039;s wiretapping. But Charlie&amp;#039;s scruples serve here more as a clock-burning plot device than as moral instruction, and we&amp;#039;re soon past them.  Speaking of the NSA, at the end of the episode, Charlie gets a phone call from a source inside the agency, the same one who&amp;#039;d tipped him off earlier about the bin Laden news. &amp;quot;News of the World isn&amp;#039;t the only tabloid that learned how to hack a phone,&amp;quot; says the source, implying that TMI, the gossip magazine published by ACN&amp;#039;s parent company, has also been doing it. I&amp;#039;d be curious to know just how they managed it, seeing as the security flaws that allowed NotW&amp;#039;s reporters to hack into voicemail boxes were peculiar to British mobile-phone services. But never mind that for now. It sounds like Aaron Sorkin will have plenty of conflict to work with from here on out. -- Jeff Bercovici is a writer for Forbes living in New York City. He has covered media for more than ten years. THE THE NEWSROOM RECAP: Come Back Right Here Every Week "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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