Enter
You mention writing romantically and
idealistically, but The Newsroom feels
slightly more jaded than The West
Wing. Has the past decade chipped
away at your optimism? Not on paper
it hasn’t.
MACKENZIE: You know what you
forgot to mention in your sermon?
That America is the only country
on the planet that since the beginning has said over and over, “We
can do better.” It’s part of our DNA.
How’s that for romantic optimism?
What’s your regular media diet? I
read the New York Times, the L.A.
Times and The Huffington Post,
and in the last year or so, writing
The Newsroom, I’ve been watching
CNN, Fox, MSNBC and the networks as much as I can.
What do you make of the state of our
modern media world? With the exception of Fox and MSNBC, I
haven’t noticed an ideological
bias. What I see is a bias toward
fairness — a bias toward phony
balance and false equivalency.
Did you and your actors go to any of
the real TV networks for research? I
spent time in a number of news-
Q&A
HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
rooms being a fly on the wall. I
think if you asked anyone who’s
worked in the real White House,
they’d tell you that The West
Wing was nothing like the real
White House but that there was
something about it that felt like
the real White House. At the risk
of sounding too cute, it’s not important to me that something be
real