Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” : A look at substance, and lack of it, in the TV newsroom

Watching the first episode of “The Newsroom,” the new HBO series by the “The West Wing’s” Aaron Sorkin, I found the plot preposterous, the characters hard to believe and too much speechifying in the dialogue.I also liked it a lot.Maybe it was nostalgia for a time when television news was good and I was lucky enough to have been part of it. Or maybe, despite the weaknesses pointed out by nearly every critic, it’s far better than most current offerings. (TV critics tend to get excited about low expectation shows that turn out well and have different standards for shows expected to be great and aren’t.) After a few more episodes, which the critics have seen and I haven’t, I may agree with Time magazine that “it gets more shrill and hectoring in each episode” and stop watching, but for now, I intend to enjoy “The Newsroom” and its debatable premise that TV news can return to what it was.The program focuses on a popular, overpaid anchorman who suddenly sees the light during a college panel discussion and launches a “mad as hell and won’t take it anymore” harangue on what’s wrong with America and journalism.His rant inspires his network news chief to remake its nightly newscast in the Murrow-Cronkite mode, conveniently starting the day of the BP explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. In a storyline that is incredible in every way, a producer, who looks to be in his high teens, calls his old, college roommate, conveniently sitting in on a high-level BP meeting in London and his “big sister,” an engineer at Halliburton, and uncovers, in the course of the single newscast, everything the real media dug out in a year of investigating the causes and effects of the explosion. It’s as entertaining as it is implausible.It also reminds us once again, as if we needed it, that cable TV dumbed down not only entertainment, but also news. More wasn’t always better.

***In the late 1970s, as cable was beginning to prosper in Connecticut and offer competition to the near monopoly enjoyed by the network affiliates on Channels 3, 8 and 30, the management of Channel 3, where I was news and public affairs director, conducted a focus group in the Waterbury area.As we watched behind a one-way mirror, a Waterbury homemaker explained that “we got cable so we’d never have to watch the 6 o’clock news again.” We soon discovered the lady had numerous fellow travelers on that road and, coupled with the Reagan Administration’s deregulation of the broadcasting industry, the television we had grown up with was changing. Station owners hired consultants who told them the lady from Waterbury and her friends would find fires and murders more fun to watch than real news and you can get the rest of the story every evening.Broadcast stations, unlike cable, are licensed by the federal government to broadcast “in the public interest, convenience and necessity,” which, before deregulation, meant some programming was supposed to be beneficial to the audience as well as entertaining, even in prime time. There was no objection to it being both. You could lose your lucrative license if you didn’t broadcast programs that occasionally informed, as well as entertained. Every three years, stations had to prepare elaborate license renewal applications explaining how they intended to provide programming in the public interest. Today, they use a postcard.Before deregulation and cable competition, children’s programs had to be more than cartoons, editorials were in fashion and community groups were encouraged to challenge a station’s license if they felt it didn’t live up to its obligation to produce meaningful news and public affairs programs. As a result, I enjoyed a 37- year career that included writing and producing prime time, news-oriented documentaries, news magazines and editorials that won a lot of journalism awards and can no longer be found on any broadcast station in Connecticut and most other places. Our newscasts did not bleed and burn and we believed it was important to assign the best reporters to cover politics and government, education and business even though news consultants told us the public found these subjects boring. But that was a while back. Now, when a newscast includes a “report” on Taco Bell’s summer menu, I’m told it was done because the menu was being talked about on Facebook or maybe, because Taco Bell is an advertiser. Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.