MiniCap: The Newsroom

Hello again, Gasmii, and welcome back for another week of Stream of Consciousness with Aaron Sorkin…I’m sorry, The Newsroom. And admit it. Even with my super crappy photoshopping skills you thought twice about whether or not that was actually the title of this episode. Because it makes as much sense as anything else on this show.

You know the hoary old writing bromide about “Show, don’t tell?” Yeah, Sorkin is unfamiliar because he always defaults to telling and telling and then telling again in case you missed it the first two very subtle times he had one of his proxies yell at you. Oh, there was a lot of purposeful walking and shouting and speechifying and intense staring at each other. But no one did anything but yap and yap and yap some more about what they did and did not want to do.

The date is May 27, 2011 and while there’s one extra super serious news story unfolding, as Congress dithers and bitches about the debt ceiling leading the US to the brink of defaulting on its debt and possibly maybe tanking the global economy, Casey Anthony’s trial and Anthony Weiner’s dick were also headlining the news. So, of course, News Night gets the directive to dedicate 20 minutes out of a 42 minute broadcast to covering Totmom.

This sets off Mackenzie to alternate shrieking about ethics, and being journalists and Don fucking Quixote and Will’s “mission to civilize” and pouting like a pissy little brat while rejecting all stories other than Casey Anthony and Weiner’s dick thereby dedicating the full 42 minutes to stories she thinks are beneath them rather than the 20 she was told to use.  Good thinking, Mackenzie.

Which in turns sets off Sloan because, even though this crisis had been building since December, News Night never got around to covering the debt ceiling crisis until it was too late because they had to cover Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner’s dick.

This is also the week where we meet Mackenzie’s ex when Will handpicks him to do a profile on Will for New Yorker magazine, like anyone really gives a shit about some news guy who doesn’t even pull in a million viewers, even if he does host the second most watched cable news program. That’s like being the crown prince of the dipshits. Sorkin gets off some cheap shots at print journalism and blogs because being a broadcast journalist like, say Ed Schultz or Sean Hannity is far, far, far nobler than being a guy who writes a blog for Rolling Stone or The Nation. And because Sorkin hasn’t a clue in hell how print publications generate readership.

And in case there wasn’t enough disjointed and unrelated exposition this week, last week’s mystery caller is this week’s deus ex machina, dropping the Murdoch wiretapping story in Charlie’s lap. Only he called it an AWM wiretapping story, because Sorkin realized he had to write himself out of the jam he wrote himself into when he had Jane Fonda threaten to fabricate a cause to fire Will.