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" Episode 4: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll Try to Fix You&amp;quot; We&amp;#039;re about halfway through this episode of The Newsroom when we realize Aaron Sorkin is using a literary device on us, and none too gently. It&amp;#039;s foreshadowing, and Sorkin is really leaning into it. Whatever he&amp;#039;s foreshadowing, it&amp;#039;s something to do with guns. A little earlier, our hero, Will McAvoy, went after Second Amendment alarmists on his show. Sorkin forced us to watch the whole three-minute segment. Then there was a bit with a potential love interest whom Will spurned upon discovering that she carried a gun in her purse (though not without displaying an uber-manly talent for handling a pistol). In keeping with the Law of Three, we know there must be a Chekhovian third-act gun still to go off. But where? Of course: It&amp;#039;s Gabby Giffords. We&amp;#039;re now up to January 2011 in the Newsroomverse, the month when Rep. Giffords was critically wounded during a shooting spree in Tucson. Naturally, there must be a lesson here. Sorkin, that pedant, would cram a teachable moment into a commercial break if The Newsroom had any. But it&amp;#039;s not the obvious, after-school-special moral about guns being bad news. Nor, mercifully, is Sorkin here to exhume that beaten-to-death horse about the need for restraint in our national discourse. Sorkin isn&amp;#039;t interested in the story of Gabby Giffords, per se, much less in the six people who died that day, who don&amp;#039;t rate a mention here. He has a meta-journalism point to make. Giffords, you&amp;#039;ll recall, was briefly, erroneously reported dead by a host of networks, including CNN, Fox News, and even NPR. Naturally, Will and his team avoid making the same mistake, despite overwhelming pressure. That&amp;#039;s how The Newsroom works. It&amp;#039;s like Quantum Leap for the news business, with Will as Sam, Mack as Al, and Sorkin himself as Ziggy, beaming back intel from the future to help put right what once went wrong. (This parallel actually works on multiple levels: Man of La Mancha is a running motif in both shows.) In other words, all the gun stuff was foreshadowing violence not real but metaphorical \u2014 something about the dangers of jumping the gun, or shooting first and asking questions later, or going ready, shoot, aim. Something like that. I&amp;#039;m a professional media hall monitor, and I&amp;#039;ve done my share of finger-wagging and then some over relatively minor journalism infractions. But the &amp;quot;X reported Y and then had to correct it&amp;quot; genre has never really excited me. I&amp;#039;m not saying accuracy isn&amp;#039;t important. Giffords&amp;#039;s husband apparently spent twenty minutes mistakenly thinking his wife had died, and that should never, ever happen. It goes without saying. But if it goes without saying, how much point is there in saying it? Factual accuracy in breaking news is an area in which incentives are actually pretty well-aligned. No one wants to be wrong. It&amp;#039;s not like, say, political bias, a failing on which a reporter who&amp;#039;s cynical or clueless enough can build a career. Excepting certain odd professional backwaters, like celebrity gossip (which gets a pretty thorough working-over of its own in this episode), there&amp;#039;s just no percentage gain in being obviously, demonstrably wrong. Do it often enough, and you&amp;#039;ll get fired and/or become a laughingstock. And it&amp;#039;s something that happens to everyone, idealized fictional paragons notwithstanding. If you work in breaking news long enough, you&amp;#039;re bound to have one or two stories you wish you could have back. (I have more than two, I know.) Sometimes teasing out what went wrong requires a certain amount of distance and reflection, but more often total understanding comes in an instantaneous rush of remorse. Have you ever had your bike stolen? I did, last summer. I left it in the garage of an apartment building, unlocked, behind a locked iron gate. A thief smashed the mailman&amp;#039;s strongbox and took his key. Afterward, the landlord helpfully observed that I really should have locked up my bike. Watching Sorkin lecture working journalists for getting a heat-of-the-moment call wrong feels a little like that. Rehashing a mistake from which there&amp;#039;s nothing left to be learned isn&amp;#039;t just rude. It&amp;#039;s boring. -- 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>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/reviews/a14889/the-newsroom-episode-4-10700232/>