Bathroom Monologue: The Newsroom Day Two of Two: The Support

“We need the past to be brighter than the invisible darkness of future. We need a history of heroes to let us know that bravery is possible. A Greatest Generation and a century of inventors and soldiers and firemen leave us with the belief that many humans have the potential for action, not merely one president or general or saint. We need a canon of many saints who slump towards us. The photo of the many men raising the flag on Iwojima, the tales of many men running into the towers on 9/11, and that the Constitutional Congress was the labor of many minds rather than a gift to a lone Moses - these things tell every man and woman that history beckons widely.

“And we need to feel like we’re failing, because any other feeling will lead us to complacency. For whatever amalgam of reasons, we are the most likely nation to pursue self-improvement. By harkening to the great decisions, of Cronkite weighing against the Vietnam War and Murrow standing up to McCarthy, we invite a generation to seriously look at what present mistakes and evils are going unchallenged. The truth is that history assures we will always have made great decisions, and human nature assures we will always have great decisions we are not making. If history can goad us into living better, then we ought to lose our feet in its tide.

“A hundred years ago we saw Europe at war and could not let the forces of democracy be slaughtered. Today we see blood running in the streets of the Middle East and find ourselves too tired, too weary, too taxed and afraid, and ultimately too confused to answer the simple question of whether we should attempt to stop it.

“You were telling an audience to do more than sit, and for all the current anchors and writers and bloggers to do more than spend twenty-three hours of the day asking whether a single mother eight states away was a good parent. Using the past as a prop to coerce us into thinking we’re failing? We needed that, because we are failing, and if the truth won’t convince us of it, we’ve got to find other means.”

Bathroom Monologue: The Newsroom Day One of Two: The Attack

“When exactly was the United States of America a moral nation? When it interred a million Asians? When it only went to war against the Nazis because it had been bombed? Or perhaps it was in our golden days, when it was slaughtering natives and receiving shipments of blacks to pick cotton. We didn’t go to war for moral reasons. We went to war because we wanted Texas, or didn’t want Spain interfering with our interference in Cuba, and the newspapers were right there toadying. Benjamin Franklin was the first great American op-ed writer and he was such a stooge for the establishment they almost let him write the Constitution.

“This illusion! This illusion you have that the American public was ever informed. There was more than a century when the only reliable way to get a presidential candidate’s platform was if he happened to visit your town. And the Founding Fathers knew people were ignorant and never expected better from them, and so while they enshrined freedom of the press, they also institutionalized the Electoral College for Congress and a Presidency – a private crop of people who would select another private crop of people to decide everything while most of the country tried to survive the flu. Maybe, maybe the second private crop of people decided things for moral reasons, or maybe they fed into a Military Industrial Complex that Lyndon Johnson warned the entire country of live on television and still no one did anything meaningful about.

“So tell me when America knew what it was doing. Was it when we were scalping the natives for government credit? Was it when we were enslaving anyone even descended from an African? Was it when we dropped an atomic bomb on private citizens? When did we qualify as the greatest country in the world, who is the greatest country in the world now, and why on earth would we want to be that thing again?”

Notice: Newsroom Monologues Coming

Tonight is the season finale of HBO's The Newsroom. It's been a provocative show for many people, myself included, and we're going to play with some of what it's provoked. 

On Monday and Tuesday I’m going to run two related and contradictory Bathroom Monologues reflecting based on the series's seminal event. Will McAvoy’s inciting monologue went viral both in his fictional world and in our real one, and it’s stuck with me all season. It’s inspiring to sick-and-tired idealists, while also uniquely troubling with its rosy view of American history. You don’t need a feminist to tell you why the ethos, “we acted like men” is worrisome.

So on Monday we’ll see a monologue attacking Will McAvoy’s rant, and on Tuesday we’ll see a monologue supporting it, though maybe not for the reasons you’d immediately expect. If you like, record an audio or video performance of either monologue and link them in the Comments. It would be fun to do a mega-post of your performed debates.

Bathroom Monologue: Real News

“No news anchor has ever been off television for three years and returned. If you terminate me, you’re right that the three-year non-compete clause will kill my television career. You’re wrong that I won’t be able to hit back, though.

“I get paid enough to have lawyers who have parsed this clause, and there is nothing preventing me from going to Youtube and ripping you apart. More people watch a funny cat video than your leading sitcom. Now, this won’t hit with the internet-illiterate part of our audience, but it will poison the 18-25 demo your advertisers are terrified about. If you think I can’t get an audience, you’ve never seen a famous person go inflammatory online before.

“I can take my claims to the NY Times Op-Ed and The Huffington Post, and my exit will be the top story on every other network, but that’ll be a blip in a promotional tour. The book I write about you will sell more copies for every move you try to make to discredit it, and it will go digital-first, with links and social networks that will draw anyone with a Kindle or iPad to new media. Don’t be surprised if Facebook signs me as their first anchor for their first exclusive on-site programming, where I will get to cover any story I want. If that comes to pass, I sincerely hope that I get to cover your resignation from this network.”

Conservatives Moving to Canada, and Other Wastes of Your Time

A week later, what haunts me from the pilot is the line,
"People choose the facts they want now."

Last week a different sort of news story took over the internet. On Twitter, a few apparent Conservatives claimed that if Obama defeats Romney in the upcoming presidential election, they will move to Canada. The users were not politicians, office-holders, or actually individuals of any note. They were merely people who said dumb things online. Their tweets were copied and pasted into mega-posts and ran as feature stories on sites I won’t name because I don’t want to send them further traffic.

This wasn’t the first time that the random opinions of people you never cared about before and will never care about again trended in social media. I first noticed it in March after the Hunger Games premiere, when a few bigots complained on Twitter that characters had been cast as black. That they were actually black in the novels didn’t matter to them. That there were very few people tweeting this and that none of the individuals had any significance didn’t matter to editors, who ran stories mocking their ignorance and pretended that the three or four quotes they’d found represented a large block of people.

After the “Moving to Canada” nonsense, I was disturbed at the rise of a new form of non-news: the story about someone of no significance who said something ignorant. Not who ran a KKK rally in front of a Mosque, not who protested en-masse at Wall Street, not who banned a minority’s customs or shot at soldiers. It’s much more worrisome than CNN pandering that “viewers tweeted this” about their headline story. Here, the feature is: “RANDOM GUY SAYS DUMB THING.”

"But the NYTimes needs those clicks!"

I’m used to (and sick of) the non-news story about a celebrity saying something offensive. Things Mel Gibson has said while inebriated have received more press than entire civil wars in Africa. It’s gossipy entertainment of some sort, and toxic of many other sorts, and largely a waste of the fourth estate.

These Twitter-quote stories are an expansion of celebrity infotainment. I understand that Gibson’s anti-Semitic remarks and movie-goers’ racism can be starting points for conversations about important social topics.

Except, they tend to spur very few conversations. I would have been blown away if Buzzfeed had featured a single journalist tracking down a single Conservative tweeter, finding out why they had radical misconceptions about Canada and Obama, culminating some sort of human exchange. But there is no dialogue with these individuals, only electronic shouting, and the Comments beneath such articles are full of partisan vitriol. The “Moving to Canada” story became an excuse for my Liberal friends to call Conservatives stupid all weekend. They were doing it anyway. This way they were only managing to do it more while being assured they learned nothing from reading the laziest possible news story.

It was hard not to line this “news story” up with the debut of HBO’s The Newsroom. The “Moving to Canada” nonsense was a sort of fodder for Liberal condescension, much as The Newsroom fodder for super-Conservative condescension. It’s hard not to reflect on the show’s plea for news media to focus on stories that matter. It’s also hard not to reflect on the Gawker columnist who told Aaron Sorkin that there should be a show about her site.