Fluent in Sorkinese. "I'm a registered republican", says news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). "I only seem liberal because I believe that hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not gay marriage".
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As media criticism, The Newsroom makes excellent points: that stories don't always have two sides (some have one, some five); that money pressures are a threat to serious news; that viewers don't need a pal but an advocate. But there's something off about the series' basic premise that Will used to get huge ratings by being safe and anodyne, "the Jay Leno of news." The past decade of red-meat cafeterias Fox and MSNBC argues the opposite. If anything, Will's old don't-piss-anyone-off approach is what has led CNN (a unit of Time Warner, like TIME and HBO) to dive in the prime-time ratings.
This blind spot is all the more puzzling since Fox, MSNBC and CNN all exist on the show, in which Will works for the fictional ACN channel. Sorkin's best idea was to set The Newsroom in the real world (roughly two years ago) amid real news. In the second half of the pilot, as Will's staff covers the breaking BP oil spill, the show really bursts to life. It's tense, electric and genuinely stirring, giving us a gut sense of why this ugly job is worth doing.
But big news can't break all the time, as today's cable channels know well. In between, they prop up the ratings by dragging out the soapboxes. In that sense, The Newsroom will fit right in.