What Aaron Sorkin Gets Wrong About America



 Perhaps next time Mr. Sorkin looks up from his keyboard, he will pick up a newspaper and note that the U.S., even in times as trying as these, is still a nation that has time for the downtrodden, the dispossessed and the forsaken

Aaron Sorkin is something like the poet laureate of American television (though, in the debased world of American popular culture, that’s less of an honorific than it sounds). Sorkin, who has also scripted such films as A Few Good Men, The American President, The Social Network and Moneyball, is responsible for two of the most celebrated TV series of recent vintage, ABC’s critically acclaimed (but lightly viewed) Sports Night and NBC’s White House-centered megahit The West Wing.

There are two hallmarks to his style: lyrical, fast-paced, whip-smart dialogue and unapologetic, sometimes militant liberalism.

To Sorkin’s credit, his undeniable gifts as a writer have often been sufficient to make even conservative viewers tolerate the reflexive ideology that suffuses his work. Not so, however, in The Newsroom, his new series chronicling an anodyne television news anchor who decides mid-career to rebrand himself as a Keith Olbermann-style journalistic vigilante.

In the show’s pilot, which aired on HBO last weekend, anchor Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels), has his moment of truth during a journalism panel at Northwestern University where, in rejecting the premise of a college student’s question about what makes America the greatest county on earth, he drops the aw shucks persona and responds with an anti-American rant punctuated by this aside to a conservative co-panelist:  Cont. Reading