I’d wondered about that.
Yeah, but we did get to hear him say it. That was a hell of a tirade in that last episode.
I’ve been following this thread since the show premiered, and it looks like I’m the only person who’s whole-heartedly loved the show since it began. Maybe it’s because I agree with every word that comes out of Will’s mouth and love him for saying it. But, I really love Sorkin’s dialogue, and the supporting cast is killer, too.
That’s all, just wanted to chime in and say at least one Doper loves this show. 
Maybe that explains why the other outlets were reporting Giffords as dead - they had their stupid weekend guys around, while (thanks to Bigfoot) the Newsroom had their A-Team assembled and ready and would never do something that careless.
I guess this is Sorkin’s way of trying to be fair and balanced.
In the real world, some organizations wrongly reported that Giffords was dead and others correctly held off on making that report. The Bigfoot stupidity was an excuse to get the News Night team into work that day.
I gathered, yes. Kinda like how the interesting stuff on Star Trek: TNG never happened when Lieutenant Nosepicker had the bridge for the night watch.
From a journalistic perspective, Sloan was absolutely correct in trying to go after her Japanese friend to get him to answer the question and McCoy (why can’t I remember his name on this series?) was absolutely correct in saying her credibility is now completely shot to hell because she broke the unwritten “off the record” rule.
In real life, the episode wouldn’t have ended the way that it did. The news director honestly wouldn’t have given a damn about some Japanese guy losing his job or tried to save it. Yeah, you can say “this is Sorkin TV, it’s supposed to have elevated moral standards.” OK, but look how it plays out. You get Sloan, one of your anchors, to disgrace herself on air and you lower the value of the news network by saying “you know that scoop we had? Yeah, totally a mistake. We’re walking it back.” Even though it turns out it was completely true and they knew it was completely true. No, they’d have hung the Japanese guy out to dry. Made Sloan pay her pennance, and touted that this station was the first to know about the massive imminent nuclear situation in Tokyo.
Oh and the solution they came up with doesn’t save Sloan. It still indicates she’s willing to break the off the record seal when the cause arises…it’s just that now she may apologize for what she misheard when you said something off the record.
That’s not how I remember his tirade. (Waterson’s character is named Charlie, but yeah, I just think of him as Sam Waterston. ;)) He said that nobody would want to talk to her off the record in the future because they wouldn’t trust her to keep the information off the record, and that’s reasonable. She was absolutely right to press her friend about his changing answers about the state of the reactors. However she was wrong to broadcast something she’d been told off the record. You can’t do that. Charlie was upset about that but I thought he was angrier about the fact that they had just broadcast some unverified information that was going to send large numbers of Japanese people fleeing for the hills. Her basis for that was not only off the record, it was a conversation nobody else had heard. So to an outsider they had no way to prove it was real. On top of that, it was bad TV - Sloan bickering with the translator and then arguing in Japanese with Daisuke and then going off the chain by taking out her earpiece. Good drama, bad news broadcast.
Right. And they sure as fuck would not have decided to resolve the situation by broadcasting a deliberate lie since that could destroy their credibility and jobs and also happened to compromise everything they’ve said they stand for in the series.
I don’t get why anyone in the Newsroom would care what some internet nerds in Japan were saying about it, during a brief pause in their ongoing tentacle vs nontentacle debates. For that matter, why would Japanese internet nerds interrupt the their ongoing tentacle vs nontentacle debates to take note of some interview on American TV, unless they were bilingual and it was to complain about the mistranslations.
Anyway, I guess this’ll be what passed for an ethical debate on this show - do I do the ethical thing (and report the truth) or the ethical thing (and respect “off the record”)? Woe is me! I have to decide which kind of hero to be!
The deal they struck was that she’d say she misheard him to save his job, and he’d say he was on the record to save her reputation. That sounds kind of spurious, but I guess if the public believes she misheard, it wouldn’t be too hard to believe he was on the record, since supposedly he didn’t say anything that wasn’t keeping in line with the company’s official statements.
I think this show is improving. It’s AWFULLY preachy, and the characters are all fairly unbelievable (Will and Sloane are both successful TV personalities but are both so shy and awkward in their every day life that they need help talking to people?), but I thought the scene with the Santorum aid who will was lambasting was actually quite well done. Not really “realistic”, in the sense that I would be shocked if a conversation like that actually happened on US cable TV, but I thought it was nice not to have Will just always come off as the saint who is always right about all issues no matter what.
It was also nice to see someone stand up and fight back against Will.
I swear, I thought his next sentence was going to be something along the lines of a grudgingly respectful “Good for you”, so when he delivered the knockout blow I was actually shocked and surprised. The way I was meant to be.
As far as who in Japan would care what the American reporter said, it seemed quite political.
The government is saying one thing, and one Japanese is supposedly saying something else entirely, something that makes the Japanese government look very, very bad. The Japanese people don’t want to believe that the government lied, the government sure doesn’t want the people to know it lied, and Tanaka was scape-goated so the government could cover it’s ass. I could see that being kind of a big deal.
For the record, Here is the real life news debate between Santorum’s openly gay, former communications director and Chris Matthews.
This reveal was intended to make Maggie look naive (like they haven’t done enough of that already), but it also made a bunch of people look stupid, including the moderator in the debate at the beginning of the show and “everybody,” meaning the mass of viewers who supposedly have no idea about Will’s politics. If you can’t tell them from the show, good, but if he were a former Bush speechwriter, that information would be easily available online and in articles about Will.
Hell, there was a lot more West Wing in this ep than that: Will talking to a shrink because he can’t sleep = Bartlett talking to a shrink because he can’t sleep; “your father hit you, didn’t he?” could have been a transcription of the Toby/Bartlett conversation; and Will taking the gay Republican to task was a retread of Josh and his gay Republican congressman buddy. Down to the “I’m more than just my sexuality” retort. Though this time the Republican was black, too.
I like this show well enough despite the persistent deja vu, but sometimes I wonder what I’d think of it if I’d never seen (let alone purchased the DVD set of) The West Wing.
Make that two - although I do have the advantage of never having seen a single episode of West Wing or Sports Night…
I enjoyed last night’s show. I might even look up movies and documentaries about 9-11 now; I have avoided them ALL since it occurred. I am guessing that the pilots on the plane were the same airline as Flight 93? I really don’t know; it was impossible to miss the reference, but quite effective anyway.
Maggie must DIE!
Double ditto that! She is a human bobble-head. A complete goofus. And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of her bug-eyed, obnoxious boyfriend, too.
The whole “are we just friends or something more” between Maggie and her friend-friend (I haven’t gotten all of their names down yet) is a subplot not worthy of a program that aspires to the stature I hope *Newsroom *is aspiring to.
I like that Will was completely sober on the air while being totally stoned.
I’m not too fond of Mackenzie, either, but I’ll let her live if we can lose Maggie.
I didn’t get this either-- did seeing their uniforms just make it hit home that terrorism and idiots causing a ruckus on planes are a real issue for pilots? I don’t get it. Beyond that, I thought the whole point of the super barricaded door is that the captains don’t come out until the plane is at the gate, so you can’t just knock 'em out and go steal a plane, 9/11 style?
Anyway, I can’t stand Maggie. I hate her. They need to kill her off in the next episode . . .or retroactively 2 episodes ago. Also, the relationship between the roommate and Jim is so contrived that it’s almost painful.
How about we forget the love stories and focus instead on the actual Newsroom, since that’s what makes this show interesting.
From what I recall, he was at the time loudly asking why we were so paranoid, and seeing the pilot reminding him why they were so paranoid.
As to the previous poster, the pilots were United, same as the plane that hit the south tower and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.
My wife loves loves loves this show, musical theater references and all. I like it too but not quite as much. But I expect we will watch every last episode.