Sorkin, it is increasingly clear, is less interested in vagaries of cable news than he is in telling us how the country should be as a whole, and is busy fantasizing television as some sort of magic wand that might just be able to cast a curing spell on us. Cable’s role in the show is not just a funhouse mirror of our behavior as voters and political theater in Washington; it’s bigger.
Alas, in Sorkin’s world the Internet, the driving force behind everything on cable, remains the domain of a guy named Vinny in his efficiency apartment, when in fact it’s the phenomenon that has both dismantled and reconstructed the media in its entirety, and cable news particularly. (The Internet, Fox News, and “The Daily Show,” three of the most powerful forces in terms of how we consume media and understand democracy in the last five years, have yet to factor at all in “The Newsroom.”)
