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The second mistaken impression Aaron Sorkin believes he created about “The Newsroom” was that it was a sort of revisionist version of the news reported on between 2010 and 2013. “I think that there was a feeling that I was trying to show the pros how it ought to have been done,” he told Vanity Fair. “That we’re going to do this again, only we’re going to give it the ‘West Wing‘ treatment, where honorable people are doing it right — obviously leveraging hindsight. And I wasn’t trying to do that.”
The reason he used fairly current events as his breaking news pieces was for practical reasons, as opposed to a need to be insufferably moralizing. Sorkin said that the alternative would’ve been to just make up news, which he thought would feel far too unrealistic and would make the show “silly.” It would also spare the series from having to bring the audience up to speed on everything it would be making up — not to mention, featuring literal fake news on a show about journalists just felt counterintuitive.
As Sorkin told The Telegraph in 2012, the show was “not meant to be a documentary” but rather a “romanticized, idealized newsroom.” And in case you missed just how lofty the goals of his characters were, Sorkin made it pretty plain by having Will McAvoy identify with Don Quixote and analogize his hopes for the newsroom with Camelot — which pretty much dooms him and everyone else to failure. But it also reveals the exceptionally thin line between a valiant underdog and a self-righteous clown, which McAvoy struggles to recognize throughout the show’s run.
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