It for sure was, but that story basically laid all the groundwork for how a person like Nancy Grace could take a stage and overwhelm it with the huge amount of B.S. she spews.

The problem was that I don't really think Condit was ever viewed as a serious suspect in the crime. The news outlets were just jizzing themselves over such a huge scandal during such a slow news time. As sad as this may be, I remember thinking after 9/11 that at least there would be nothing else about Chandra Levy.

I agree with all of this except the futility argument. Will it be easy to change public discourse? Of course not. Is it critical to the health of the American democracy? Yes.

Difficulty of task is not a reason not to try, it's often a bellwether of necessity.

I agree 100 percent. It's why I watch this show. No one is doing this now, and I hope the show sort of gives someone a kick in the pants to try to do a show like NewsNight in real life. Right now, nearly every show picks a side and then tries to crush its opposition, a big reason why I stopped watching all this stuff after 9/11 (full disclosure, I used to watch Hardball all the time in that era), for the most part.

Right now, because of the massive influence of Fox News on a larger portion of the U.S. audience than there should be, everything that has been thought up has been to try to do what they're doing from the left wing perspective, and that just doesn't work. The left may often have better arguments about certain issues, but the right has better tactics of getting out their message, and don't treat the truth like it's nearly as important as it should be.

I hope one day it changes, but I see nothing to indicate it will, as of right now. This election is a very good example of that. How it comes down will tell you exactly what this country is like, especially in regards to instant gratification. It's all about framing the debate, not the debate of the framing.

I honestly feel bad for Olivia Munn. What an awful awful scene with Dev Patel. Just insulting.

To disagree somewhat, Rachel Maddow did not do any Casey Anthony stories and she is the highest rated non-fox cable news host. I brought this up before, how is anything on news night 2.0 any better than what she has been doing for the last 2 years? The worst part of Newsroom continues to be its failure to articulate or portray anything different about how to do the news from how the news is already done on some msnbc shows.

Or has been done for decades on PBS Newshour or NPR.

Oops.

Though according to wikipedia (which knows everything...lol), both are biased one way or the other. Of course, in that same article, someone else said that Newshour is the most centrist news show on TV. Since I don't watch Newshour, or listen to NPR, I really have no idea about their coverage. Newshour seems to be trying the hardest to be centrist, even though that wikipedia article says it seems to be overwhelmingly pro-establishment (which Lehrer thinks is who makes the news that's important, so he doesn't care), and has a 2:1 conservative guest ratio.

Maybe for next season's research, Sorkin will go behind the scenes of PBS's Newshour, which seems like it would be as close as you can get to the "vision" of NewsNight. Even the first word is the same, but obviously a night is much bigger than an hour. Lehrer needs to step it up.

AFAIK, NewsHour didn't have a word of coverage on Casey Anthony either, so there are at least a couple shelters for people who do not want to waste their time on these types of distractions.

If that's true, then taking the implied suggestion from McAvoy's "NewsNight 2.0" speech and giving one hour a night on the airways to the public advertisement free for the news wouldn't alone make this nonsense go away. If the problem with the news is the demand more than it is the supply, that begs a lot of difficult questions. When did the public's interest turn for the worse, and what caused it? And in the information age, can such a problem ever be "fixed"? I hope the show gets deep enough to touch on those instead of wasting the last couple episodes of the season on Jim and ****ing Maggie.

It comes down to attention span. If the news thought people had one, the ticker never would have been invented to run below the actual news. Unfortunately, they're right. MTV led the big change in attention span there, and it was a cultural revolution.

The only way it can be fixed is by everyone gradually slowing down (the breakdown of the Nancy Grace broadcast was a great example of packaging the "news" in a way that viewers with short attention spans want to see it). It's clear the broadcast news has an immense disdain for the internet, but the internet will win if the broadcast news slows down to an acceptable level. People have no patience, and they want what they want now. The internet allows that to an extreme degree. So, I just can't see a real change ever taking hold, despite holding out hope that there is some chance for it.

Unfortunately I have to agree with your assessment as far as change goes. I think the sense of entitlement these days is part of it too. This is the "on-demand" generation, and anything we've ever wanted to see or hear is right at our fingertips. Fast-forward through those damn commercials. Google a study supporting your preconceived notions in 5 seconds. Keep changing the channel till Gabby Giffords is dead. If you aren't cheapening your product to get it on their fingers faster, somebody else is, and they'll win.

I'd imagine that much like copyright owners of various sorts, broadcast/journalists are going to have to keep fighting a battle in less than ideal conditions. A lot of copyright owners are forced to compete with FREE!, offering their product online at any time like HBO-GO, or packaging an album on iTunes with exclusive videos, etc. There's no easy fix that will end these issues forever. If Will and Mac want to win, they're constantly going to need to find a way to compete with sources that aren't similarly constrained (to unexaggerated truth, issues of public importance) and convince the viewer that the debt ceiling is more important to them than Casey Anthony.

I mean the quote below covers this, but this statement is way off.
The volatility in viewership is so close related to showing or not showing some - in their opinion - stupid news story. This pretty much says it all what they think about the average TV viewer (didnt they themselves stress supply and demand quite a bit?).

It's insulting to the viewer, but what makes it worse is the fact that they report news stories where they got ALL the info on years later and pretend like everyone could have done this, actually pretending that any true news channel would have reported it just like that.

This is also an angle not really covered in the show, but true. If you got 45 minutes to fill, you can do something meaningful, but 24h will be more difficult.

I think she acts terribly. Bottom 3 acting wise out of the bunch.

I generally think she's fine, but certainly not spectacular. I don't think anyone alive could have made her scene with Slumdog something other than awful.

I thought the scene was a lot simpler than that. He got her to confirm that she was using her own companies to bring Will down, and it was at her instruction.

Just watched the Bin Laden ep. I didn't hate it much at all. Maggie is terrible, but the stuff in the plane really worked.

Grunch

Maggie's idea for questioning bachmann was soooo bad and the fact no one logically and easily diffused her was lol

Does he really have a choice? 3 people of his staff know about it and isn't not reporting on something like that making yourself a part of the crime?
Or at least a major negative thing to do as a journalist?

Why? She was someone vying for high office while at the same time claiming symptoms which would most people committed and everyone just acted like it was normal.

I was on Maggie's side as well. If a politician claimed that in Belgium we'd make a major thing of it and it would be the first question she got in every interview. And nobody would take her serious.

Because many respectable people have heard god or felt the presence of god spiritually. Reducing that to a ghost like boogeyman would be belittling and insulting to much of humanity. Bachmann (ok maybe not her but others claiming to have heard god) could easily defend that and not sound insane.

And im an agnostic. I dont think someone claiming theyve heard god is something to mock. Im all for attackingthe logic of god telling them to be president or shoot up someplace but mocking a claim that someonehas had a spiritual revelation is dumb

I'm sure Will could ask those questions in a delicate way without coming off as a huge douche...

Bachman didn't claim she felt god in her heart wanted her to run she claims he literally spoke to her in words like a conversation.

Well if thats true i stand corrected shes nucking futs

If you make it part of your campaign it deserves to be at least questioned and imo it is ridiculous to put anything religious in your election campaign because it is completely irrelevant. Your religion shouldn't influence your political stance, that is why we seperated church and government. If we ellect somehow to follow the word of God we should just let the pope rule us.

Skimmed parts of this thread for the last two eps.

PJ- that was pretty weak imo. I can't stand the guy either, but he's done nothing close to banworthy.

Last ep was differently bad- I thought the interpersonal stuff was decently done, if not on a foundation of impossibly stupid actions. Will's not that dumb or evil.

The media stuff was OK, incredibly heavy handed- but we'll never avoid that with this show. It didn't make me mad, so I guess that's good.

Olivia Munn is one of the better things about this show, and I think is doing a great job with Sorkin's dialog. I just wish Sorkin would stop trying to write her as clueless about 1- how good looking she is 2- being a human.

Also Neil going undercover with an imagined and incredibly misunderstood 4chan is just terrible. Sorkin needs to stop trying to write about the internet or just get any 17 year old to explain things to him.