Huffington Magazine Issue 1 | Page 25

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