Aaron Sorkin is sorry for some things about The Newsroom
After two seasons of weathering criticisms from journalists who would question his methods, likely out of fear and cowardice, Aaron Sorkin has answered the backlash to The Newsroom the way Aaron Sorkin knows how: with an Aaron Sorkin speech. The setting was the Tribeca Film Festival, where Jon Favreau (the former Obama speechwriter, not the other one) asked Sorkin about what he’s learned about the press, after two years of appearing to scold it about how it does its job. Unexpectedly for a man who often seems to respect only those members of the media he himself invents, Sorkin apologized—to them and to everyone.
“I’m going to let you all stand in for everyone in the world, if you don’t mind. I think you and I got off on the wrong foot with The Newsroom and I apologize and I’d like to start over… I think that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. I did not set the show in the recent past in order to show the pros how it should have been done. That was and remains the furthest thing from my mind. I set the show in the recent past because I didn’t want to make up fake news. It was going to be weird if the world that these people were living in did not in any way resemble the world that you were living in… Also, I wanted the option of having a terrific dynamic that you can get when the audience knows more than the characters do…