Sorkin's Simplistic Take on Operation Tailwind: Special Report on 'The Newsroom'

by Jennifer Epps

Originally published on OpEdNews.com on August 17, 2013.



In June of 1998, CNN/Time premiered a new joint venture, a weekly program called "News Stand'. Their first segment had revelations about a "Valley of Death' (as one of the veterans interviewed called it) during the Vietnam War. The news story of this 1970 U.S. military black operation known as Operation Tailwind aired nationally over two consecutive Sundays. It quoted members of the military who alleged that commandos from the U.S. Special Operations Group (SOG) had been dispatched to a village base camp in Laos with sarin gas, a toxic nerve agent that causes a painful death. (It's the same gas that was used by a Japanese religious cult in the 1995 terror attack in the Tokyo subway.)100 people in the Laotian village reportedly died as a result of Operation Tailwind. Moreover, the story purported that U.S. military defectors living in the village were the primary target.

News of the secret attack, named "Operation Tailwind', shocked the nation and also created a firestorm of protest directed at the news organization from the Pentagon, veterans, and high-placed figures like Henry Kissinger (who had been National Security Advisor at the time of the black op). It was not long before CNN was issuing apologies and firing the story's producers, reassuring the nation that the story was untrue and the whole thing was a mistake. Consequently, "Tailwind' has gone down in the annals of broadcast journalism as a cautionary tale about accuracy.

Fifteen years later, it is back in the public consciousness thanks to the award-winning scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, who has spun his own creation off of the idea of the Tailwind journalistic scandal. In the current season of his HBO fiction series The Newsroom, the hour-long drama about a fictitious cable news program ("News Night') on a network known as the Atlantic Cable Network , Sorkin has been exploring leaks about an alleged war crime reminiscent of the Tailwind episode as CNN initially presented it. This time, the incident is more current than Tailwind was when CNN/Time ran its story; a military source reveals to Jerry, a News Night guest producer (played by Hamish Linklater), that U.S. forces used sarin gas on civilians in Pakistan during an "Operation Genoa.' (Sorkin invented the story and the codename.) Through a multi-episode flashback structure, Sorkin makes clear from the outset that the big scoop is false, and that getting sucked in by it will prove disastrous for the characters. That's certainly a rich plotline for a dramatist to mine. However, in seizing on it, Sorkin may be doing a disservice to the original producers of CNN's "Tailwind' expose, reporters who stood by their story throughout the ensuing fracas and who accused CNN of a cowardly retreat in the face of Pentagon opposition to it. And Sorkin may also be betraying the Quixotic principles the characters on his show so passionately espouse; in this case siding, not with the underdogs his dialogue so often champions, but with the powerful.

The Daily Show

Sorkin considered it no spoiler to tell the public before Season 2 premiered last month that the core of this season revolves around a Tailwind-inspired plotline: a News Night "mistake" in running a shocking story that ultimately turns out to be untrue. "Hopefully, the mistake is understandable," Sorkin told John Oliver (who was filling in for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show) on July 15^th.  News Night guest producer Jerry is scoffed at by his higher-ups (The Newsroom's series regulars) over the extreme claims a source makes regarding Operation Genoa -- they find them much too outrageous to believe. However, as the season progresses, switching back and forth between present-tense legal deposition scenes and flashbacks to how they got into this mess (a structure similar to The Social Network), various factors start to convince the News Night executives the Genoa tip has validity. For instance, ACN news division president Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) comes to believe the story is true in episode 2.5 because a federal agent   (or someone passing for one) snoops around the newsroom asking about the story -- it makes the government seem as if it really is worried about a secret getting out.

Now, when Sorkin went on Comedy Central to plug The Newsroom's Season 2 premiere, he could have been vague about the real news story that gave him the idea. After all, he has every right to dramatic license -- Operation Genoa and the ACN network are clearly fictional, so he can stray from what happened with CNN around its reporting of the Tailwind saga as much as he likes. But instead, he stated up front in the interview that CNN's 1998 broadcast on Operation Tailwind was his inspiration, and then he went on to describe where CNN went wrong with it. Sadly, the whole description was full of inaccuracies, beginning as soon as he broached the subject.


Sarin Gas

It's true that CNN retracted the news story after it aired, and fired the segment's producers, Jack Smith and April Oliver. But the pair filed wrongful termination lawsuits, and apparently Smith and Oliver had a pretty good case: one of them reportedly received $1 million from CNN, and the other settled for an undisclosed sum.

Moreover, the wrongful termination suit obviously entailed examining the accuracy of the producers' reporting on Tailwind. Far from proving incompetence on Smith and Oliver's part, the case apparently validated them. In the book Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN (excerpted here), the network's co-founder and its first president, Reese Schonfeld, relates that when the Tailwind story's key witness Admiral Thomas Moorer was confronted at the deposition by Oliver's notes from their conversation, the Admiral affirmed that he had made the statements the producer he'd met with claimed he had: "His answers indicated that Oliver had quoted him correctly about Operation Tailwind. Moorer admitted that sometimes defectors were killed and that he had been told by Singlaub [ former SOG commander ] that killing defectors was a priority. When asked about the use of sarin, the poison gas, Moorer said, "If the weapon could save American lives, I would never hesitate to use it.'" After Moorer's deposition, it was apparent that CNN's retraction was premature, cowardly and dead wrong." This is certainly not the way Sorkin presented CNN's Tailwind saga to Jon Stewart's left-leaning fan base .
But even more specifically, Sorkin told The Daily Show that what went wrong with the reporting on Tailwind in 1998 was that a producer, frustrated at being unable to get the source for the story to state on camera that sarin gas was used in Operation Tailwind, altered videotape of the interview in the editing room. Sorkin claimed that the CNN producer had changed the military expert's response from "If we used sarin gas, it would've been wrong" to sound as if the source was saying they had used sarin gas and it was wrong.

Even if it was 15 years ago, this is quite a claim to make against an individual journalist. It's especially extreme considering that an extensive internal investigation was conducted by CNN and authored by two of the company's high-powered attorneys, Floyd Abrams and David Kohler -- and this report contains no such allegation. In the text of that official 1998 'AK Report' currently posted on CNN's own site, Abrams and Kohler criticize a host of specific flaws in the reporting on Tailwind, cite some instances where sound bites from sources were cut off before an important follow-up statement, and conclude that CNN should issue a retraction -- but they also state categorically: "we have found no credible evidence at all of any falsification of an intentional nature at any point in the journalistic process." The report stressed that "the report was rooted in extensive research done over an eight-month period and reflects the honestly held conclusions of CNN's journalists," and affirmed: "we do not believe it can reasonably be suggested that any of the information on which the broadcast was based was fabricated or nonexistent."

 

Their chief complaint about the investigative reporters' handling of the story is not about tampering but about vague interview questions and premature extrapolations from inadequate responses. The attorneys explained: "when one reviews, in their entirety, the underlying transcripts, outtakes, notes, and other available information, much of the most important data said to support the broadcast offers far less support than had been suspected." If true (more on that later), this is obviously a big problem with the methodology behind the Tailwind news story, but it's quite different from the impression Sorkin gave.

Additionally, the Tailwind segment did not ignore contradictions between pre-show interviews and on-camera statements, as Sorkin appears to believe. The source Sorkin was referring to was probably Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970 -- who, as mentioned above, later confirmed his off-camera statements in a legal setting, though he had disputed them immediately after the broadcast. But another military source, Captain Eugene McCarley, was the leader of the SOG Operation in Laos, and the "Valley of Death' piece quotes him thus in the transcript (with narration by Peter Arnett):

"ARNETT: Captain McCarley told CNN off camera the use of nerve gas on Tailwind was quote "very possible.' Later on-camera he said:

MCCARLEY: I never, ever considered the use of lethal gas, not on any of my operations."

For the record, the "AK Report' pronounces that the segment should have given McCarley's perspective more attention, since it provided a balancing counterpoint. The producers, however, protest that they found him to be an unreliable witness, since he wasn't directly in charge of the Tailwind operation; he contradicted himself a few times (at one point stating on-camera what sounded like support for the allegations: "as I understand it, these gases -- these CBU lethal gases -- are an Air Force ordinance and are in their arsenal"),   and because he made no bones about a willingness to lie if necessary: "if operating across border [into Laos] is considered unethical or deniable, then I reckon I'm denying it."

Sourcing

Despite the fact Sorkin's entire appearance on The Daily Show was just over six minutes long, there's more in his statement to refute. Sorkin implied that the producers of the "Valley of Death' segment relied on just one source -- the military expert who wouldn't say on-camera what the producer needed to get the scoop. But the transcript of the "News Stand' broadcast quotes multiple sources just within its opening seconds. A montage of four low-ranking veterans of Operation Tailwind and of the Special Operations Group speak about Tailwind as the segment starts -- and that's just the first of two broadcasts. A handful more came forward for the second night.

Furthermore, in the transcript for part 1, host Arnett states that more than two-hundred veterans were consulted. Again, in the transcript for part 2, "News Stand' co-host Bernard Shaw begins the show by asserting: "In the course of eight months of reporting we contacted over 200 people, from the men on the ground, to the pilots above, to those in the military chain of command."

Moreover, the segment's producers refer, in their later defenses of their reporting, to their lead source, someone who could not be identified because he spoke to them on condition of complete anonymity (he could only be used "on background)." They say he read and approved the transcript of the intended broadcast, " giving the "thumbs up' signal a number of times as he read it, including in particular with respect to the use of CBU-15 [sarin gas] on Operation Tailwind." This source was, the CNN internal investigation acknowledged, a military official who had "been highly placed for years", and who was "particularly knowledgeable about chemical weaponry, [and] intimately familiar with nerve agents."

Of another confidential source, described by the "AK Report' as "a highly placed intelligence source" who provided validation "through a third party" that sarin gas was used in the operation, CNN's lawyers actually did conclude that "the statements of the source were properly viewed by CNN as lending considerable support to the broadcast."

The producers also seem to have found themselves in an awkward position wherein career military personnel told them one thing in private, yet felt the need to come out against the story in public. "I have revealed in court papers," April Oliver wrote in response to one attack on the Tailwind allegations in the press, "that a leading critic of the broadcast, retired Gen. John Singlaub, was a prime source for our story."
Finally, despite what seems to have been a quite powerful Pentagon backlash after the story aired, the producers maintain that sources continued to come forward to corroborate the allegations about Operation Tailwind a year after the broadcast.

U.S. Defectors 

However, what is most baffling of all about Sorkin's summary on The Daily Show is that he described the claims of the Tailwind story as being about a U.S. sarin gas attack on civilians. This isn't to do with behind-the-scenes information, this isn't about complicated details of process, this is the basic headline that the CNN/Time show presented to the public: central to their scoop was the claim that Operation Tailwind targeted soldiers. U.S. soldiers who had defected to Laos.

The "Valley of Death' story provided a variety of support for this allegation. There are on-camera quotes in the transcript from Robert Van Buskirk, Operation Tailwind veteran, and Jim Cathey, former Air Force Resupply for SOG Commandos. Arnett told the TV audience that Cathey recalled spending five hours, as ordered, observing the village base camp through binoculars, during which time "he spotted 10 to 15 long shadows, Caucasians, much taller than Laotians and Vietnamese." Cathey stated on-camera: "I believe there were American defectors in that group of people in that village, because there was no sign of any kind of restraint. In retrospect, I believe that mission was to wipe out those long shadows." Van Buskirk also states that after the U.S. had dropped gas on that Laotian village from the air, the bodies of 15 -- 20 Caucasians were found.

Admiral Moorer also stated on-camera in the transcript: "I'm sure that there were some defectors. There are always defectors." (This, in spite of the Pentagon's public statement to CNN that there were "only two known military defectors" during the entire Vietnam War.) And in Oliver and Smith's later rehash of Oliver's original interview with Admiral Moorer, the Admiral was asked if killing U.S. defectors was the mission in Operation Tailwind, and he is said to have replied: "I have no doubt about that."

The CNN attorneys' report suggested that the producers should have been more careful in checking out whether the Caucasians could have been Russians rather than Americans. But the producers included a source explaining why targeting U.S. defectors was considered important strategy by the military. Arnett's voice-over in the part 1 transcript declares that "former SOG commander John Singlaub told CNN: "It may be more important to your survival to kill the defector than to kill a Vietnamese or Russian.'  American defectors' knowledge of communications and tactics can be damaging, Singlaub argued, "it's better to kill defectors than to risk lives trying to capture them.'" The segment also quoted Van Buskirk's recollection of speaking in English to one of the Caucasians he sighted before the raid, urging him to come back to join them; he said the soldier told him to "F-off." (Van Buskirk claimed he then killed the defector with a white phosphorus grenade.) CNN's attorneys discredited Van Buskirk in their report for mental health and credibility reasons; the producers objected. Reasonable people can debate the entire issue and argue for or against various of the witnesses who were interviewed. But in his Daily Show appearance Sorkin didn't even mention the allegation that defectors had been targeted. That's a significant omission.

The Purpose of Media

The concept that the U.S. military could possibly have ever used biochemical warfare on its own members, even turncoats, may be completely beyond the pale for some people -- and it wouldn't be surprising if the thought alone provokes too much cognitive dissonance for Sorkin, ever a sentimentalist about several of the tropes of "patriotism'.   But other investigative reporters have uncovered glimpses of a military program which tested   biochemical weapons on U.S. forces -- and not defectors but loyal, active-duty troops. The Pentagon, naturally, denied the program for as long as they could: eventually, as the press discovered more, the Department of Defense admitted more, in increments. An article by Jon Mitchell posted on Truthout summarizes the Pentagon's admissions thus far: that it ran a highly classified testing program for biochemical agents, code-named Project 112 or Project SHAD, between 1962 and 1974, and that U.S. forces stationed in Okinawa, Hawaii, Panama, and on ships in the Pacific Ocean were experimental subjects for it. But that's alright, the DOD affirms, because "to date, there is no clear evidence of specific, long-term health problems associated with participation in Project SHAD."



It's pretty clear that the DOD didn't start to admit this testing program of its own volition, but because of a dogged media -- in this instance, CBS News. This is exactly the kind of journalism that Sorkin's Newsroom philosophy is meant to celebrate and encourage. Over and over again, the characters on the HBO show declare a passionate commitment to telling the truth even if it's unpopular, to reporting important stories even when powerful enemies try to keep them quiet. In the pilot, which takes place on April 20, 2010, much drama is built up around early bits of information emerging about the Gulf oil spill. An early lead that Halliburton was negligent is brought to the attention of senior producer Jim (John Gallagher Jr.), and he and Neal (Dev Patel) want to tell the world. However, Don (Thomas Sadoski), the executive producer of the 10pm show, tries to block them: "You're wrong about Halliburton? And that will be the first sentence of your bio, forever. They will own you... They will have their own record label. They will have their own theme park." Yet the pilot revolves around News Night anchor Will (Jeff Daniels) committing to reform the news and quit pandering, so of course they go up against Halliburton. Because an informed electorate is essential to democracy, as executive producer Mackenzie (Emily Mortimer) reminds Will. In later episodes, they take on the Koch Brothers, voter ID laws, and the Tea Party -- in defiance of explicit instructions from network owner Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda).

Sorkin even seems to hold that it was corporate pressure, not journalistic standards, which forced Dan Rather to vacate the once-hallowed anchor's chair on CBS News after his infamous report that a young George Bush didn't fulfill his required service commitment at the Texas National Air Guard. At one point, worrying that someone might be trying to bait Will with an incendiary tip just so he can be disgraced, Mackenzie wonders if he is "being Dan-Rathered." Elsewhere in Season 1, Charlie informs Will: "Dan got it right." (Dan Rather happens to agree: "I am not at CBS now because I and my team reported a true story," he stated in April 2012, a few years after his exit. "Nobody has ever proven that the documents were not what they purported to be.")

But Sorkin did not decide to write about the career costs of reporting true stories in today's media climate. His takeaway from the scandal over CNN's story on Tailwind is very different: he seems to have focused chiefly on how difficult journalism can be, how an error in judgment can ruin your career and threaten an entire organization. It doesn't seem to occur to him that the U.S. government might have tried to cover up an embarrassing story, or that the corporate media might have been complicit. In contrast to the support he expressed for Rather's position, Sorkin's view of the Tailwind aftermath seems completely oblivious to the objections raised by the reporters themselves.

He Said, She Said

Producers Smith and Oliver's lengthy rebuttal to CNN states: "In a June 18 meeting, [CNN President] Rick Kaplan said this was a public-relations problem, not a journalism problem, and that he did not want this controversy to progress to congressional hearings with "3,000' members of the establishment on one side of the room and CNN and members of the Special Forces on the other. During that same meeting, Kaplan and [CNN CEO Tom] Johnson expressed their concern about the pressure they were receiving from Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell and the threat of a cable boycott by veterans groups." If that quote is accurate, it suggests that the executives were not concerned primarily with whether the reporting was factual, but with the size of the opposition to it.

Oliver and Smith further alleged that at the height of the hubbub, "Kaplan and Johnson gagged us from publicly defending the broadcast, and pulled Pamela Hill and Jack Smith from a scheduled appearance on CNN's Reliable Sources program. Nevertheless, CNN continued to air unopposed criticism about the broadcast without any fairness or balance on the Reliable Sources program and with a news report from the Special Forces convention."

Smith and Oliver did try to salvage the story and keep it alive. CNN's former military adviser, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Perry Smith, criticized Tailwind's producers in print as misguided conspiracy theorists: "If nerve gas had been used in the Vietnam War, thousands of people would have known--commanders, pilots, soldiers, load crew members, munitions storage people, intelligence officers, supply officials, transportation officials, database managers, historians, enemy soldiers." But in a 1999 piece Oliver penned about the controversy in the American Journalism Review, she quipped that the Maj. Gen. might be "relieved to hear that some of the people he describes have in fact volunteered statements corroborating the use of nerve gas and the killing of defectors. We continue to receive calls." Moreover, she added: "It appears Tailwind was not an isolated incident."

Reading through a range of material about the "Valley of Death' coverage -- the transcripts from the two broadcasts, the AK Report generated by CNN, and Smith and Oliver's rebuttals -- it is not readily apparent which side is right. For instance, some of the reporters' questions and follow-ups do seem like they might have confused the 87-year old Admiral Moorer, who was interviewed in an assisted-living home. He may also not have understood the full weight of the reporters' intentions for the story. Also rather troubling is the finding in the AK Report that "Information that was inconsistent with the underlying conclusions reached by CNN was ignored or minimized. The views of some of the individuals best placed to know what happened -- the two A-1 pilots who dropped the gas, the officer who commanded the operation, and the medic on the ground -- were unduly discounted." None of this necessarily means that the story was untrue, but it could mean that Moorer did not quite realize what he was saying or confirming, and it might also be the case that viewers didn't get the chance to weigh both sides and draw their own conclusions. On the other hand, the producers complained in their rebuttal that several conclusive exchanges with sources, documented in their research, were not addressed by the AK Report at all.
 
In any case, even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made mistakes in chasing down Watergate secrets, as was made forever memorable when Jason Robards chewed Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford out in the middle of the night. (The "If you screw up again, I'm going to get mad" scene was memorable for Sorkin too, as he made two allusions to it in The Newsroom's Season 1 dialogue.) Tracking down high crimes and misdemeanors is surely not easy. Supervision, guidance, the checks and balances that are normally part of the journalistic process anyway, these are especially important in an explosive story like Tailwind. Yet Sorkin appears not to consider that the AK Report did not condemn the "Valley of Death' segment outright, that it noted that "this was not a broadcast that was lacking in substantial supportive materials", and that it conceded there was enough evidence to be taken as "justifying serious continued investigation". Perhaps Oliver and Smith's supervisors could have been more careful, or held off on the story until it was airtight. Or perhaps the network could have allowed for corrections and adjustments as they went along, like the Watergate reporting was able to do. But at the first sign of trouble, the entire investigation was dumped. "It is sad how the CNN executives caved," Oliver told interviewer Barry Grey almost a year after her "Valley of Death' report had been disowned by the network.
 
Winning

The Newsroom's Operation Genoa storyline has only partly unfurled, but we're already half-way through the season, and considering the statements Sorkin has made in promotional interviews, it seems as if he has chosen to build his fictional spin-off of Tailwind around the angle of a "mistake' made at the bottom of the food chain, rather than looking into top-tier corporate cowardice. And this may in part be the result of who Sorkin had advising him about Tailwind in the first place: in last month's Daily Show interview, Sorkin disclosed that his consultants Rick Kaplan and Jeff Greenfield are the ones who told him about the 1998 CNN/Time "Operation Tailwind' saga. Both Kaplan and Greenfield were at CNN during that time: Greenfield was a senior analyst at CNN (1998-2007), and co-hosted the "News Stand' show that aired the "Valley of Death' segment -- he introduced it. Kaplan was president of the network 1997-2000 -- Oliver and Smith's complaints against him have already been mentioned. Both Kaplan and Greenfield weathered the Tailwind scandal while the journalists on the frontlines did not. (A year after the firing of the producers Oliver and Smith, there was also the dismissal of prominent broadcaster Peter Arnett, the on-camera narrator of the segment. Oliver has claimed his firing was Tailwind-related, that CNN planned it but delayed it deliberately in order to hide the connection.)

Despite a long-standing concern for social justice, Sorkin does not seem to consider that he's only listening to the management side regarding that Tailwind affair, that he's not hearing out the employees who maintain: "We were tried, convicted, and sentenced in a closed proceeding that failed any test of fairness or due process." They claimed that the report issued by CNN evaluating their journalism "suggests that it is designed to absolve CNN management, including Mr. Kohler, of any responsibility." The long-term ramifications of this are not, of course, just the unfairness of shutting out the labor side in a labor-management conflict. "The military and veterans' groups not only determine what CNN covers, but who covers it," Oliver complained to interviewer Barry Grey in 1999. "That the military should have veto power over the employment policy of the networks is alarming. The message is: fall in line, otherwise, you're history. Above all, don't mess around with national security issues."

What is most striking is that in ignoring this angle, Sorkin is also passing up the very themes he has cared so much about in The Newsroom: the pernicious influence of the profit motive on the news, the damage done to society when news caters to what the public wants to hear, and the shamelessness of masquerading entertainment as news. This may or may not underlie the way CNN handled the aftermath of Tailwind, but Oliver encapsulates her experience this way: "It is absolutely chilling. I see the fallout from CNN's capitulation on Tailwind continuing." If Sorkin wonders whether human error or corporate spinelessness is a more urgent tale, all he has to do is look at the Dan Rather scandal, the instances of censorship and cover-up described in the book Into the Buzzsaw, and the tragedy of Gary Webb, who authored the much-attacked, ground-breaking San Jose Mercury News series about the CIA taking money from crack-cocaine sales to fund the Contras. (Webb's career was ruined by the attacks on his professionalism, and ultimately so was his life -- he committed suicide after his employers left him out to dry. Thankfully, Jeremy Renner's production company is shooting a biopic of Webb, based on the book Kill the Messenger, to be released in 2014 with Renner in the lead.)

Blackout

Near the end of last year's season, The Newsroom episode "The Blackout, Part 1: Tragedy Porn" climaxed with Mackenzie just about to begin a broadcast she's ashamed of   -- it's full of Casey Anthony filler and an interview with one of the young women listed in Anthony Weiner's smartphone. Mackenzie has been struggling with her bosses all episode and is thoroughly disgusted by the depths to which the program has sunk, bumping crucial coverage of the debt ceiling crisis for these sexier tabloid headlines. So just before they roll tape, she half-seriously prays aloud: "God, please give me a sign that I'm not doing a big thing badly." A split-second later, all the power goes out in the studio.

Ironically, just before Sorkin's July 15^th Daily Show interview in which he misrepresented basic facts about the Tailwind story and how it was reported, all the power went out in the Comedy Central studio. Was it a sign?

SORKIN AND THESE WOMEN: “The Newsroom” Special Report #2

This article was originally published on Political Film on Saturday, September 16, 2012:

Maggie and Lisa

by Jennifer Epps

HBO’s workplace dramedy The Newsroom has an ensemble cast, but its first season, which concluded last month, nonetheless revolved around cable-TV anchorman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels). While sometimes gruff and insensitive, Will is the center of gravity in the show – much as the President was in Aaron Sorkin’s hit show The West Wing – and though Sorkin is conscious of Will’s character flaws, the anchorman’s leadership – both of his staff and the national dialogue — is generally portrayed as bold, wise, and perceptive. Many have noticed that the elevation of Sorkin’s middle-aged, white male hero has come at the expense of the rest of The Newsroom’s ensemble. In fact, several commentators have put it quite bluntly: “In Sorkinworld,” writes a Time.com reviewer, “the men are men and the women are sorry.” A critic for Daily Beast claims: “In Sorkinland, men act (nobly!) and women support (comically!)”  Slate accuses Sorkin of having a “woman problem.”  And Huffington Post media critic Maureen Ryanlabelsthe new HBO show “dismissive of anyone who isn’t a white heterosexual male.”Indeed, there are a fair number of examples on The Newsroom to back up these assertions. The young associate producer of the series’ fictitious primetime show, News Night, is smart, conscientious, and an independent thinker. Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill) is often the one who rushes in with a key piece of information on a story; the one who puts forth an innovative idea for the newscast. Yet Maggie also happens to be a young woman who cannot leave her personal problems at the door. As laudable as her input is, she spends a lot of time distracted by romantic entanglements (two of which work in the office with her), and her primary color is neurotic. She also lacks credentials – she began as an administrative assistant, and got promoted as a reward for her loyalty, not her work. There have to be more experienced news hounds among the support staff that mills around the large open-plan office; it’s simply a statistical probability, since there are so many of them. But we don’t hear much from them because it’s the older white men – host Will, and news division head Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) — who get to sound like journalistic pros, while the other News Night staffers generally sound like research assistants.

Mackenzie

Though Sorkin consciously views the flirtatious, fast-paced dialogue he likes to write as a descendant of classic screwball comedy, he seems to have forgotten that those Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s featured tough, confident, professional women. In fact, that’s what made them work; ‘neurotic’ doesn’t really go with ‘banter.’ Nor were the men put on pedestals and treated as saviors; the scales were often balanced by giving the women more power and the men less. (Hence those films in which the man was impoverished, the woman an heiress; the man a rustic rube, the woman a worldly urban careerist.) It’s not like these films are locked up in a vault — screwballs are readily available for study. Sorkin might even have gotten a refresher course in 2008, when George Clooney resurrected the cool, successful, feminine-but-at-home-in-a-man’s-world leading lady in his overlooked roaring-twenties film Leatherheads (which he directed and claims to have co-written, though the Writers Guild did not give him credit).  Though Sorkin may be better at capturing screwball comedies’ effervescence and rapid-fire wordplay than anyone else, he’s gone off-track with the core character dynamics behind the verbal jousting.

Jordan

The most knowledgeable and most serious female on the News Night staff is economist Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn). She is fluent in Japanese, hosts her own afternoon show, is given a regular 5-minute segment on News Night, has two Ph.D.’s, and teaches at Columbia University. She also tends to speak in an amusingly affectless tone like Star Trek’s brainiac Mr. Spock. Still, her expertise is as a scholar; as a journalist she fumbles, and is insecure about her abilities as a broadcaster. But all her diplomas are truly for naught when Sloan has a bizarre attack of paranoia in a horrible moment when co-worker Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) asks if he can post sexist comments about her online to catch internet trolls. She doesn’t mind that the comments are crudely sexual or even slanderous: he wants to post that she slept her way to the top, and she doesn’t even seem to have heard him. What she freaks out over is a sudden fear when he suggests he post that she has a large backside; she demands to know if it’s true. She doesn’t call him a sexist, she doesn’t sound offended. She turns it on herself. Even worse, Neal tries to reassure her by telling her that some men like that in a woman — as if she really does have a big rear. Not only is that rude, crude, sexist, and out of place in the office, but for God’s sake, it’s Olivia Munn. She probably hasn’t seen a piece of chocolate since 1990. Note to Sorkin: if you want to instill confidence in your pre-teen daughter, this eating-disorder-in-the-making kind of dialogue is no way to go about it.

Dana

Then there’s the fact that Will seems to get last word on each decision concerning News Night. His executive producer, Mackenzie MacHale (Emily Mortimer), makes her recommendations, but she either retreats to wait on tenterhooks and see if her former flame follows her guidance, or she tries to control him and fails — she issues instructions into his earpiece rather weakly, even when he’s really screwing up. Mostly, she just hangs out in the control room, listening silently to Will say whatever he wants to on the air. She is ultimately so admiring of McAvoy, she even considers his altered state of consciousness stabler than her own — she lets him go on-air to announce a huge bombshell, Osama bin Laden’s death — though she can hear that pot brownies have affected his speech patterns.

Mackenzie is unprofessional in a variety of ways; she cries in the workplace, has trouble understanding email technology, obsesses over past mistakes with Will, discloses very personal secrets to a woman she’s just hired, and assigns her minions background research on McAvoy in a romance revenge plot. She is supposed to be a successful former war correspondent, but apart from vague tales of getting shot at, there is nothing about her that seems even remotely informed by that past – given her hystrionics, her confession to having cheated on Will, and her inappropriate, borderline sexual-harassment comments. This well-coiffed, leggy fashion plate seems more like the editor of a lifestyle magazine than a war-zone survivor. And her staff seem unimpressed by her: in a moment of professional crisis, financial reporter Sloan pleads “I need wisdom”; Mackenzie responds “I have wisdom.” Without even pausing to listen, Sloan tells Mackenzie that her ‘wisdom’ sometimes ends in – and then she mimes a nuclear explosion. Mackenzie (her boss) doesn’t take offense, but quietly agrees with her. Sloan then immediately turns to the Father Knows Best standing next to Mackenzie – News Night’s host Will – and his face is already serious and focused.

Gossip writer Nina Howard

Obviously Sorkin is not the only writer to weave love stories into dramatic fiction, nor is there anything wrong with creating romantic tension. But he’s not writing Sex and the City, in which the women’s careers were almost completely irrelevant to their real focus: dating. In fact, in the season finale, he overtly contrasts Maggie’s life with Carrie Bradshaw’s in that other HBO show — an odd reference for him, but he did after all recently date Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis. Throughout his oeuvre, he has elevated educational accomplishment and high professional standards as the ultimate signs of worth — and has really given no props at all to housewives who dedicate themselves to a family, grandmothers who volunteer in their community, etc. So, particularly in light of his own framework and his narrow definition of value, when the women on The Newsroom are so easily flummoxed by romantic feelings, and so concerned with how the men in the office see them, he is ipso facto presenting his female characters as second-class.

There were precedents for these kinds of portraits on his previous TV series, NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin created an intelligent, discriminating, and risk-taking maverick for Studio 60, Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet), and placed her in charge of network programming. Yet this key female character spent the whole season alienating the press with needless hostility, being scolded by big-wigs for foolish mistakes, worrying about the security of her job, and begging her staff to befriend her. After repeated bizarre outbursts, Jordan derides herself as “hormonal” (something I don’t recall any of Sorkin’s male characters ever calling themselves) and she laments her behavior as the “stereotype” of a woman in charge. It was not a stereotype I realized anyone believed in, actually, but I guess it’s one that pops up readily for Sorkin.

C.J.

The show sexualizes Jordan, defining her by biology much more than by her opinions or her work performance. When network chair Jack Rudolph (Steven Weber) wants to warn her to do a good job, he has to bring in her gender: “You saw how fast I fired Wes Mendell? Screw this up and I’ll fire you faster. I’m not like every other heterosexual man in show business, Jordan. I don’t find you charming.” Several episodes are taken up by a scandal that erupts when her ex writes a sordid memoir of sex clubs they frequented together, and other episodes revolve around her being pregnant and single. When Jordan exhibits an intellectual disdain for reality-TV to Hallie Gallaway (Stephanie Childers), a woman who heads up that division, the ambitious young V.P. sneers at Jordan: “That’s right. There’s another pretty girl at the dance, and this one’s not pregnant.” WTF? Is Sorkin, by any chance, going meta and poking fun at sexist reality-TV cat-fighting, like Tina Fey did (hilariously) in special episodes of 30 Rock? Could he be about to critique the deplorable way women are presented on ‘alternative programming’?  Not on your life. After Hallie’s completely unrealistic and insubordinate outburst, Jordan does not reprimand her in any way; instead Jordan feels bad about her own conduct, seeks out the V.P., and apologizes to her! Even when commiserating with a female friend, Jordan doesn’t sound offended by the objectification. But then how could she be, when a few episodes prior, she had advised a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (Christine Lahti) to get access for a Vanity Fair piece by dressing sexily and flirting with Matt and Danny?

And the executive suite is hardly the only chamber at the fictitious Studio 60 soundstage where women are treated in an icky way. One of the performers in the SNL-like sketch-comedy show is openly portrayed as the resident slut, and she allows head writer Matt (Matthew Perry) to use her as sexual bait; Jeannie (Ayda Field) obligingly flirts with other staff members, or even reporters, when her boss asks her to pitch in as part of some con scheme he has going. Not to harp on the ways in which Tina Fey’s own SNL-inspired series beat Sorkin on the same network, but 30 Rock had a story where Liz Lemon tried to use sex to manipulate someone for work-related goals – and Liz ended up suspended and forced to attend sexual harassment sensitization sessions. Clearly, Fey and Sorkin have different mind-sets.

Sorkin actually seems resentful of the very concept of sexual harassment law: towards the end of Studio 60’s first and only season, a former employee files a sexual harassment lawsuit. The character never shows up on-screen to give the suit any credence, and instead we get to hear why the defendants – and people who weren’t even around at the time — dismiss and deride it. She was too touchy, she just didn’t get the way a writer’s room works. She made too big of a deal out of the sexual jokes, which are just part of the creative process. (Creativity being, perhaps, a male domain?) When a female lawyer (Kari Matchett) is sent in by the network to investigate the details, her actual investigation goes nowhere; she and Sorkin seem to have little interest in the case itself, and focus instead on – I kid you not – the attorney’s attempts to ask Matt out. In fact, she’s so persistent she comes across as a sexual harasser herself, though Matt doesn’t seem to mind. All of which kind of makes sense if you read the report of a correspondent for The Globe and Mail, a woman who Sorkin demeaningly called “Internet girl” (though the newspaper she writes for is Canada’s second-largest daily), then insisted on high-fiving with the line “I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five…let me manhandle you”, and bid farewell with a “Write something nice” parting shot in “the ‘Smile, honey’ tone of much less successful jerks.”

Let’s not forget the Christian comedienne Harriet Hayes (Sarah Paulson), one of the star performers on the “Studio 60″ sketch show; a talented mimic, singer, and actress. When she gets a breakthrough role in a major feature, it’s offered to her by a director who wants a relationship with her; not, perhaps, simply on her merits. In another episode, she has to be dissuaded by three male colleagues from posing for a lingerie spread; she has no idea anyone is trying to take advantage of her as a Christian icon. (Meanwhile Sorkin’s series itself takes advantage by interrupting her changing in the dressing room.) In another episode, the show’s producer Danny (Bradley Whitford) feels it is perfectly acceptable for him, as Harriet’s boss, to give her orders on her dating life — she doesn’t seem to disagree. And though Sorkin tries to use Harriet as a foil to Matt’s sanctimonious, hedonistic, Hollywood-liberal views, her arguments rarely hold much weight. Instead, Matt repeatedly insults her religious beliefs and she puts up with it, pining for him.

Some have claimed that Sorkin has been writing this way for a long time; as The Guardian.com reports, “Critics say Sorkin has a habit of creating one-dimensional female characters in male-dominated settings.”  One side note that may be related is that, from A Few Good Men all the way through to The Newsroom, he has frequently given unisex names to women in the most demanding professions: Jo (short for Joanne), Sydney, Dana, C.J., Mandy, Joey, Ainsley, Jordan, Hallie, Mackenzie, Sloan. In Sorkin’s subconscious, he may believe that women who aspire to positions of responsibility need to have something male about them – perhaps he feels that power is a more natural fit for men?

But still, he should get some credit for creating gifted and accomplished women over the years. Especially considering the fact that he does, after all, work in the same industry that gave us Charlie’s Angels and Baywatch. He inventedSydney Ellen Wade, the headstrong environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening in Sorkin’s 1995 feature The American President. Sydney earns more than the fictitious president (played by Michael Douglas) and is highly respected in her field. She is leery of a romance with the widowed dad while he’s president because she doesn’t want to be on the short end of the power differential, provoking this exchange with her sister:

Sydney Ellen Wade: Why did I have to kiss him?…I gotta nip this in the bud. This has catastrophe written all over it.

Beth Wade: In what language? Sydney, the man is the leader of the free world. He’s brilliant, funny, handsome. He’s an above-average dancer. Isn’t it possible our standards are just a tad high?

Just a few years later, in the 1998-2000 sit-com Sports Night, Sorkin created Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman), the witty, hard-driving, and perfectionistic producer of a late-night sports round-up show. This is a woman to whom authority comes easily and almost unconsciously, as her senior associate producer Natalie implies:

Dana: People in Graphics are my friends.

Natalie: That’s not quite right.

Dana: I am so nice to them!

Natalie: That’s one way of looking at it.

Dana: What’s another way?

Natalie: That often times you express your displeasure with their work in ways that make them want to take their own lives.

Dana readily gives orders to low-ranking staff members…

Dana: Dave, Chris, Will, what are you guys doing tomorrow morning at ten?

Dave: Gotta basketball game at the “Y”.

Will: Yeah, it’s a 3-on-3 with the guys from…

Dana: Dave, Chris, Will, what are you guys doing tomorrow morning at ten?

Chris: Fixing the sound system?

Dana: There ya go.

As well as to her star anchors…

Dana Whitaker: You mind telling me what the hell’s going on?

Dan Rydell: We’re just –

Dana Whitaker: I don’t wanna hear about it. This show’s supposed to be fun. You guys sound like you’re giving stock quotes. Is there a reason I’m not aware of?

Casey McCall: We think we should be able –

Dana Whitaker: Don’t give me your excuses. We’ve got 18 minutes of show left. What I’d like is you guys to start earning your money. Do you have anything you’d like to say?

Casey McCall: Yeah –

Dana Whitaker: Good!

[She leaves the room]

While the two seasons of Sports Night had plenty of romantic banter, and even some moving twists in its love stories, Dana seems comfortable with her own sexuality, and uninterested in boosting the male ego.

Casey: Was there a stripper?

Dana: At the party?

Casey: Yeah.

Dana: Yes, there was.

Casey: Did he have a better body than me?

Dana: Of course he had a better body than you Casey. He was a professional male stripper.

Casey: Let me tell you something. When we’re asked, men know how to answer that question.

Her speech to a suitor about self-realization sure sounds feminist:

“The truth is, I have a job that involves me, and stimulates me, and rewards me, and takes up a lot of my time, and I’m not willing to do my job just a little bit. I want to do ALL of it. It’s part of me, and I’m different without it. And that is who I am, and that is who you need to love.”

And she is capable of delivering a lecture as forcefully and incisively as The Newsroom’s Will McAvoy, even one that is about her love life:

“You’re mad at me? You spend six months making me feel guilty for liking my job. Then propose to me, then two days later, you tell me you slept with the woman who wants my job? I say fine. I say fine! Then six days after that, you tell me you wanna break off the engagement. Here’s the thing. I think only one of us should be angry at a time, and I have a hunch it’s gonna be me.”

Moreover, with Sports Night Sorkin tackled the most extreme form of sexism in an episode when diligent associate producer Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd) is sexually assaulted by an athlete in a locker room interview. Though one insightful blogger found some flaws in the follow-up episodes, surely Sorkin should get some points for broaching the subject and displaying the sensitivity he did – as well as for writing a female character who is so well-versed in sports history and so devoted to sports reporting.

As Sports Night went into its second season, Sorkin began writing The West Wing. Although some have complained about sexism in the Sorkin White House (such as this blog at Feminist Law Professors) the criticisms I have seen so far have seemed rather minor and perfunctory, and rather unfair to a television writer who turned in almost 88 hours-worth of scripts for a pioneering show. (Sorkin created the series and stayed for four seasons.) Sometimes characters on the series were themselves quite sexist: series regular Leo McGarry (John Spencer), for instance, held very old-school views; and the British ambassador Lord John Marbury (Roger Rees), who appeared in four episodes during Sorkin’s tenure, was a lecherous 1960’s-throwback (evidently a big Benny Hill fan). But as one site about the show points out, sexist characters are not the same thing as sexist authorship.

Instead, what I always remember from the show are numerous vivid and capable women walking and talking their way through the halls of The West Wing. C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) endures pressures and crises that any White House press secretary would find daunting (pressures which George Stephanopoulos implied could be unbearable in his memoir All Too Human: A Political Education), and she stays grounded, principled, and sharp as a tack through it all. Moreover, Sorkin didn’t pretend that her gender would never be an issue for her – sometimes she is shut out or overlooked, and has to fight back. But C.J. is certainly able to stand up for herself and others:

C.J.: One other thing—

SAM: Are we done?

C.J.: No, Sam, when I say ‘one other thing’ that means we’re not done, that means there’s one other thing…Before, now, in the future, anytime you’re into something and you don’t know what – and you can’t tell me that you thought there was nothing to it, ‘cause you sat down with Josh and you sat down with Toby – anytime you’re into something and you don’t know what, you don’t keep it from me. I’m your first phone call.…

SAM: C.J.–

C.J.: We’re done talking now. You can go.

SAM:…I’ll see you later.

C.J.: Count on it.

——————

C.J.: You’re pissed at me?

Toby: I’m saying, I could’ve used your support in there.

C.J.: You get my support the same way I get yours: when I agree with what you’re saying or when I don’t care about what you’re saying. This time I disagreed.

——————

C.J.: They beat women, Nancy. They hate women. The only reason they keep Qumari women alive is to make more Qumari men.

Nancy McNally: So what do you want me to do about it?

C.J.: How about instead of suggesting that we sell the guns to them, suggesting that we shoot the guns at them? And by the way, not to change the subject, but how are we supposed to have any moral credibility when we talk about gun control and making sure that guns don’t get in the hands of the wrong people? God, Nancy! What the hell are we defining as the ‘right’ people?

——————

C.J.: You know if I was living in Qumar I wouldn’t be allowed to say ‘shove it up your ass Toby.’ But since I’m not, shove it up your ass Toby.

The President’s wife of 30 years, Abbey Bartlet (Stockard Channing), was a specialist at two hospitals, a Harvard professor of thoracic surgery, the mother of three young women, and a very rational and self-possessed woman who took seriously the potential to make a difference as First Lady. She was also an opinionated feminist. Her husband had enormous respect for her, and considered her a formidable opponent in any argument:

President Josiah Bartlet: You know what I did, just then, that was stupid? I minimized the importance of the statue that was dedicated to Nellie Bly, an extraordinary woman to whom we all owe a great deal.

Abbey Bartlet: You don’t know who she is, do you?

President Josiah Bartlet: This isn’t happening to me.

Abbey Bartlet: She pioneered investigative journalism.

President Josiah Bartlet: Then she’s the one I want to beat the crap out of.

Abbey Bartlet: She risked her life by having herself committed to a mental institution for ten days so she could write about it. She changed entirely the way we treat the mentally ill in this country.

President Josiah Bartlet: Yes. Abigail–

Abbey Bartlet: In 1890, she traveled around the world in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, besting by more than one week, Jules Verne’s 80 days.

President Josiah Bartlet: She sounds like an incredible woman, Abbey…

Abbey Bartlet: When it comes to historical figures being memorialized in this country, women have been largely overlooked. Nellie Bly is just the tip of the iceberg.

Abbey’s Chief-of-Staff Amy Gardner (Mary-Louise Parker) is likewise a fiercely independent feminist. Before working for the First Lady, she held top positions in various feminist political organizations and lobbied within the Democratic Party on behalf of powerful women’s caucuses. During the series, she is sometimes in a relationship with the President’s Deputy Chief-of-Staff Josh (Bradley Whitford); this often leads to a certain amount of personal and professional conflict. Unlike the women on The Newsroom, she handles these conflicts with steely determination.

Josh: So I just came from seeing Amy Gardner.

C.J.: Yeah? How’d it go?

Josh: Well, I showed her who’s boss.

C.J.: Who’d it turn out to be?

Josh: It’s still unclear.

Then there’s pollster Joey Lucas (Marlee Matlin), a confident and forthright political strategist who can also flirt with Josh without losing her cool  – even with a male ASL interpreter accompanying her everywhere. Josh has a romantic/adversarial relationship with her too:

Josh: When I get back, you’re gonna argue with me and we’re gonna argue about the things I wanna argue about and you’re gonna do your best not to annoy me too much.

Joey: It’s almost hard to believe you’re not married.

There was also Nancy McNally (Anna Deaveare Smith), the hard-as-nails National Security Advisor. There was Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter), Associate White House Counsel, a lifetime Republican who clashed frequently on issues with the rest of the staff – but with equanimity and confidence. For the first two seasons, the aging Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten) was the President’s smart-mouthed, no-nonsense, personal secretary, and as it turned out a guiding influence on him since his youth. In the first season, there was also the hyper-educated, super-confident White House consultant Mandy (Moira Kelly). And throughout the series, Josh’s alert, aware, and wry assistant Donna (Janel Moloney) treated Josh more like a college classmate than a boss.

Josh: I don’t need a doctor.

Donna: Are you a doctor?

Josh: No.

Donna: Then be quiet.

———–

Donna: Josh, this was delivered by messenger.

Josh: What is it?

Donna: It’s… wait, wait. No, damn, my x-ray vision is failing me today.

———–

Josh: I’m thinking about firing you.

Donna: You’ve fired me twice already tonight. I’m impervious.

So what are we to think? Is Sorkin a sexist or is he a feminist? Perhaps the answer is he’s neither, or a little bit of both. And perhaps a writer’s work can’t be examined as if it contained clues to some secret permanent state. It’s possible, after all, that his attitudes can be in flux.

For one thing, in the middle of his rise to prominence he went through a divorce. He later had a significant relationship with actress/singer Kristin Chenoweth, much of which is said to be reflected in the Matt and Harriet push-me-pull-you romance in Studio 60. And he also happens to be very, very successful. In a patriarchal industry like entertainment, if you’re acclaimed as a sparkling intellect and placed in charge of vast high-profile endeavors (as a show-runner of a TV series, for instance), it’s quite likely that you will find yourself surrounded by sycophants. And if it goes on long enough, you may start to think that that’s the way the world looks.

Woody Allen is another prolific and comedic writer whose female characters do not seem nearly as independent and self-sufficient as they once did. In Allen’s early films the nebbishes he played were shy and clumsy around women, while many of the women were poised, articulate, cultured, and seemingly out of reach. Annie Hall, however, ushered in a series of neurotics, harlots, and harridans. This is not meant to cast aspersions on Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, or Soon-Yi Previn; but when artists have had some degree of painful personal experiences in their own relationships, it’s going to be very tempting to use their public platform to express that – and if at the same time they’ve also been showered with accolades for their artistic work, it’s going to be especially tempting to use that platform to blame the Other, rather than question themselves.

Moreover, both Sorkin and Allen seem to have begun to view beautiful young women as creative muses. In Studio 60, Matt writes better if Harriet hangs out at his office to inspire him; Harriet even feels guilty when she hears he has been having writer’s block without her around. In The Newsroom pilot, the catalyst for Will’s inflammatory, Paddy Chayevsky-like public speech is the sight of Mackenzie at the back of the lecture hall holding up cue cards. He thinks it’s a vision. That’s all dandy, but where are the shows with male muses inspiring female geniuses? Artists may think they’re complimenting a woman by calling her a muse, but won’t she feel more gratified creating her own work?

Incidentally, the opening speech that Will makes in that pilot has had a second life on You Tube, as many have been eager to see facts about America – its abysmal world rankings in literacy and infant mortality, its chart-topping percentage of incarcerated citizens and its astronomical defense budget  – exposed on the national stage. One statistic Will missed, however, was that the U.S. has one of the lowest percentages in the world of federal seats held by women; the Inter-Parliamentary Union puts it in 91st place worldwide. This ought to be of enormous concern to the person who worked so hard to rehabilitate civil service in his White House dramedy. It ought to be a thunderous alarm bell for him.

But as liberal as Sorkin is both in topics discussed and in his donations to the Democratic Party, he seems a little out-of-step with the status of women these days. There are grounds to conclude it hasn’t always been that way, and reasons to believe it’s not incurable. However, now he’s on the defensive, and has denied there’s anything askew about the way he has written for women on The Newsroom.

May I just say, actually he shouldn’t listen to everyone out there who attacks the show’s depiction of women. Not everyone has gotten there from a feminist place. (Much as the Bush Administration’s sudden concern for the women of Afghanistan in Oct. 2001 did not mean they’d joined N.O.W.) Some of the criticism has, bizarrely, claimed that Sorkin’s vendetta against unscrupulous and trivial tabloid journalism is just further evidence of his misogyny. The logic behind this, apparently, is based on a pretty flimsy list: the scheme to smear Will through a tabloid magazine is conceived by a woman, company owner Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda); the shameless gossip reporter who writes hatchet jobs about famous people just for the hell of it is a woman (Hope Davis); and the primary consumers of such fare are women. Okay, first off, the definition of misogyny is not “women do it, therefore it must be terrible” (objections to the wearing of fur, for instance, are not mainly driven by hatred of women); and the feminist flipside is not “women do it, therefore it must be positive” (the ancient practice of Chinese foot-binding comes to mind). Secondly, I can’t believe that anyone writing about broadcast media can defend our trash culture with a straight face, or pretend to be ignorant of the direct relationship between an American public gorging on infotainment and an American public starved for real information – an electorate bursting with the details of Britney and Lindsay’s rehab stints and custody trials but unclear on whether we actually located weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

If Gloria Steinem guested on News Night, she’d almost certainly agree with Will that gossipy ‘takedown’ trivia is “pollution” and “human cock-fighting,” and that it’s “destroying civilization.” She and the rest of the activist-editors who founded the groundbreaking feminist magazine Ms. in 1971 viewed the existing women’s magazines of the time as “contentless.” Ms. writers, much like the 2011 documentary film Miss Representation, the blog affiliated with the film, and the 1991 Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth, have profoundly criticized the beauty-fashion-celebrity matrix for its effect on women’s psyches. Lisa Bloom’s 2011 book Think: Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World also cautions women to break their obsessions with what she calls “our shallow, self-absorbed celebutainment culture”; she urges this for women’s own survival, among other reasons. Sorkin’s detractors would, in short, be hard-pressed to find a feminist to stand up for reality TV or checkout-counter rags. In fact, the Miss Representation blog specifically praised the episode of The Newsroom in which Will lambasted the TMZ (Sorkin dubs it “TMI”) industry, agreeing with him that the gossipy ‘takedown’ culture is toxic.

Sadly, Sorkin was not strategic enough to lambaste TMZ et al from a feminist angle, and indeed there are no feminists in sight on The Newsroom yet – unless Leona Lansing can be counted, by virtue of her power. Sorkin has instead laid himself open to charges of chauvinism with things like Will’s opening-episode speech, in which he waxes nostalgic for a time when Americans “acted like men,” when we were able to be and do great things “because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered.” Sorkin may think he’s using the word “men” in a gender-neutral way, but his scripts for The West Wing are dotted with similarly worshipful uses of “man” and “men” and definitions of manhood. And The Newsroom’s opening credit sequence – a black and white montage that pays tribute to selfless and sober males of a bygone era in TV news – just reinforces that gender exclusivity.

What we need is for the former First Lady Abbey Bartlet to show up and harangue Will McAvoy for forgetting accomplished women reporters like Nellie Bly. (Or Ida B. Wells. Or Margaret Fuller. Or Lorena Hickok. Or even Christiane Amanpour or Leslie Stahl.) Let him eat some humble pie. Oh, if only Dana Whitaker would come over on loan from Sports Night and fill in at the control panel, showing Mackenzie that she doesn’t have to pussyfoot around Will. And what is Amy Gardner doing these days? Can’t she stop by and give News Night staffers some insights on how right-wingers are spinning the war on women? The Newsroom is not so far gone that these kinds of injections aren’t possible.

But if Sorkin is going to reverse his recent trend in TV writing, he’s going to need to become conscious of what he’s been doing lately. He can’t assume that because he gave female characters strength at times in the past that he’s in no danger of slipping into sexism. That was part of the lesson of the feminist revolution — Consciousness Raising 101: that good intentions are not enough when sexism is so ingrained in the culture. No-one can sit back and assume that they are immune.

As Will himself says in The Newsroom’s kick-off speech: “the first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.”