<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Self-righteousness is a powerful drug. One of the definitive scenes of American writing life \u2014 right up there with Mark Twain looking out over the mighty Mississippi and Arthur Miller in bed with Marilyn Monroe \u2014 is Aaron Sorkin holed up in a hotel room, huffing crack cocaine and writing The American President. That real-life scene is so perfect: the combination of idealism and sanctimony born out of a combination of degradation and deep somatic hunger. Aaron Sorkin may be off drugs now, but he sure isn&amp;#039;t off self-righteousness. The Newsroom remains high as a kite on that. In the trailer, Will McAvoy was wandering the desert like Moses. And the opening episode on Sunday did not disappoint. It takes a special kind of writer to try and out-righteous the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Sorkin is happy to go there, and so are viewers -- to the tune of 2.2 million of them.  The Newsroom is that rare show that manages to be totally right but also utter nonsense at the same time. The original premise, that a cable news show could stop caring about ratings and somehow convert themselves into paladins of hard-hitting news, wasn&amp;#039;t just wrong; it was an absurdity. Maybe it was conceivable sometime in the 1970s that a cable newsroom crew would be upset by the conflict between being a business and a news-gathering organization, but now? I literally know of no person in television who found the world created by The Newsroom even remotely recognizable.  The second season continues with its spectacular naivety. The plot swirls around a supposed screw-up by the news team, in which they have hustled a story about the American military using nerve gas which then turns out to be wrong. The hilariously credulous part of this story is that, while reporting on the evils of the American war machine, the fictional show sees a ratings boost from 1.5 million to 5.5 million. Is that really what Aaron Sorkin thinks Americans are desperate to hear about? Apparently he imagines that the television viewers rush to their screens whenever the evils committed by their government are on, rather than, say, the Kardashians.  Here&amp;#039;s a typically irritating Sorkin error, even though I know it&amp;#039;s a small thing: The title of episode one of season two is a quote from Shakespeare: &amp;quot;The first thing we do, let&amp;#039;s kill all the lawyers.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s the kind of Shakespeare quote people use when they want to sound smart while disrespecting lawyers. But in Henry VI, Part 2, that quote comes from a rioter, Dick the Butcher, a monster. In Shakespeare&amp;#039;s work, that line is actually about how we need lawyers. The Newsroom is not capable of understanding such complexities. It knows only black and white.  But sometimes black and white is all the morality you can take. Sometimes the stupidity of the world is so intense, so incredibly expansive and all-consuming, that simplistic outrage is the only appropriate response, even when it&amp;#039;s wrong. This week has been spectacular in its demonstrations of outrageous stupidity. The racial component of the Trayvon Martin judgment has, rightly, swallowed all the coverage of the murder, but underneath its terrible reminder of the persistence of America&amp;#039;s hateful prejudices lies the simple fact of how much basic stupidity went into that death of an innocent. George Zimmerman was stupid. The law in Florida is absolutely stupid, and it&amp;#039;s stupid that it took this egregious example to bring it to light. The &amp;quot;Stand Your Ground&amp;quot; law is itself a defense of stupidity. A &amp;quot;misunderstanding,&amp;quot; with a loaded gun, is enough to keep a killer out of jail. There&amp;#039;s going to have to be a new chapter in Idiot America. The idiots in power are actually devising laws to protect idiots. Smugness has a way of covering up the reality on the ground. That&amp;#039;s the flaw of a show like The Newsroom, but it&amp;#039;s also its major advantage. In a world where this is on real TV, I&amp;#039;m comforted, somewhat, to know that there are at least some brains on fake TV.  PLUS: Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a23872/the-newsroom-self-righteousness/>