Discharge! Another category!

The Newsroom series: Journalism that we have lost

Discharge! Another category! Repressive laws aimed at restricting freedom of speech, the dismissal of chief editors, the closure of publications oriented primarily to the creative class, which makes up the core of protest in large cities, made the media and journalists by news and hot discussions on social networks. Hence such an interest in the new television series of the American channel HBO The Newsroom ("News Department")

In the third series of The Newsroom, there was a total of eight episodes - the director of the ACN cable channel, the charming old alcoholic Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston, who gained worldwide fame after the series “Law and Order”) fits away from the claims of the owners of the corporation, dissatisfied with the sharp drop in the ratings of the evening news. The culprit of the scandal is the host of Will Makeva (Jeff Daniels), until recently, a star of a harmless evening infotation with a contract of a couple of million dollars. So far, in parallel installation, his boss fights with capital, who does not receive any financial profits from the news, but only moral and political losses, McEvoy wet on the air of conservatives - supporters of Tea Party (tea party), showing that the brothers Kochi brothers are supposedly spontaneous and non -centralized by ordinary voters. The owner of the channel does not stand the attacks on Kokhi - advertising contracts break off - and threatens that if McEvo does not die, she will fire him, her business is more expensive for her. Skinner proudly replies to her that Makeva is not one of those who can be stopped.
Awakening of MacAvoy
NewsRoom says a lot about the tasks and duty of journalism, that television news became hostages of ratings and bear direct guilt for the fact that America was where it ended up during the presidency of George Bush Jr.. Where exactly, Makeva sets out at the very beginning of the series. He participates in discussion at the North-Western University, peacefully sits out between two experts of opposite views, politely getting off from the issues of the moderator, until the girl from the audience asks: what makes America the greatest country in the world? Here, McEvo is not able to dodge, and he blurts out in one breath: “There is no reason to say that we are the greatest country in the world. We are in 7th place in terms of literacy. On the 27th-in mathematics. On the 22nd-in science. On the 49th-according to the life expectancy ... We are leading in the world only in three categories: by the number of per capita, by the number of adults who believe that angels exist, and on defense costs, which we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of which are our allies. ” This is one of the most spectacular episodes of Newsroom, the creator of which is not anyone, but Aaron Sormin himself, who at one time made the cult political series “West Wing” (The West Wing, is the US President’s office and the offices of its administration in this wing of the American White House).
Sormin knows how to overshadow the noble political pathos, from which even goosebumps are running in cynics and skeptics - passion, rhythm, a combination of rhetoric and texture, finally. The heroes and institution of television agents seem to constantly live on steroids, in the exceeding the possibility of a normal person of excitement. And here Newsroom is most reminiscent of another famous series - an ambulance, through which frames pass, when the resuscitators, sometimes successfully, sometimes do not, try to launch the patient’s stopped heart: “The category! Another category! " "

The center is the question of what real journalism should be

"Sormin, as in the classic Hollywood comedy, the reason for the sudden civilian awakening of MacAvoy makes his relationship with the former lover, who somewhere behind the scenes changed him with another: in the past life she is a military correspondent, now the main producer of his program. But all these personal relations of the heroes look like a kind of revival. The question is about what real journalism should be. Episode: in Arizona, an attempt on a clowning woman ** is a real story that happened on January 8, 2011, when an attempt on a member of the House of Representatives from the state of Arizon Gabrielfords was committed .. All channels convey: it is dead, while in the studio, before the cameras, awaits, as it should be in quality journal. One of the owners of the channel comes to Newsrum, demanding that the news (that you are silent) go to other channels every second, ”he says. McEva was right in his commitment to the values of the profession: the congressman survived, and the competitors were shameful. In general, the series often looks like a digest of recent high-profile political news: oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, elections to Congress, when the Democrats of Obama recognized the bitterness of crushing defeat, the revolution in Egypt, finally, the murder of the Usama Ben Laden-the plot of the 7th series.
TV reality
Oddly enough, in the assessments of the American press Newsroom, not only did not become the triumphal return of Sormin to television, but, on the contrary, threw a shadow to his past television services. The main thing is that he is charged with negative reviews in the no conservative press - Wishful Thinking, the desire to give out for reality. So it was already in the “western wing”, when Sormin created a fictional ideal president-democrat named Bartlet. In NewsRoom, Sorkin again tried to create a fictional television reality: reality is much more prosaic, and the television show, unlike a high -quality printing press, most often cannot afford serious journalistic investigations: ratings and advertisers are their king and God. At the end of the first episode after the first real broadcast, Makeva, along with Charlie, the director of the channel, drinks Scotch, and he says to him: “The leading news always had his own opinion. It was at Murrow, and it was the end of McCarthy. It was with Kronkait, and it was the end of Vietnam. "

The paradox is that both of the above examples are rather the main myths of American journalism than a neat presentation of historical facts *** Louis Menand, Seeing It now: Walter Cronkite and the Legend of the CBS News. The New Yorker, July 9, 2012 .. Murrow about McCarthy was aired after the hearing in the Army against McCarthy, and these hearings showed the ABC channel, not CBS on which Murrow worked, although the Murrow program tried to close the Murrow program. The commentary of the legendary Walter Kronkait - he is mostly a prototype of the hero of Newsroom, as it was believed, forced President Lyndon Johnson to leave the political scene (Johnson, who became president in 1963 after the murder of John Kenyy, was forced to refuse to nominate his candidacy in the new elections). Johnson allegedly said then: "If we lost Kronkait, we lost the middle American." In fact, Johnson did not see the program, after the transfer of his tough militaristic rhetoric, the war in Vietnam went on for many years and only mass protests were able to stop it, the United States has literally in two. Nevertheless, the emergence of these myths, as well as the reaction of the American printed press to the series Aron Sormin Newsroom, shows how great the role of the fourth power in democracy is: even a beautiful untrue or later is exposed.