Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
When I went to visit my mom a few weeks ago, she asked me if I had ever seen the HBO series The Newsroom. I said yes, of course, and that it was a terrific show, and we began watching it. For the uninitiated among you, The Newsroom was written and created by Aaron Sorkin, the man who brought us The West Wing, The American President, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, and Sports Radio—among many others, all of which feature snappy, intelligent dialogue and believable characters usually set in realistic political settings.
The Newsroom focuses on ACN, a fictional cable news network. The series began in 2011 and spans three years—or so. Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the brilliant news anchor, is convinced by his producer McKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) to not bow to corporate pressure and produce a news show that actually informs the public by holding those in power to account, a battle that is currently being waged in newsrooms across the country. ABC, The Washington Post, and other esteemed news outlets have been bought or controlled by corporate interests. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos bought The Post, and after
Mr. Sorkin cleverly incorporates real-life news stories into his scripts. The Newsroom pilot, amidst all sorts of personal dramas (and sharp comic relief) features ACN’s coverage of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, featuring the real details and scandals involved with the disaster.
Another episode addressed the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and yet another detailed the advent of Arab Spring.
As the show progresses, Will McAvoy takes on extremist politics. He starts to challenge some positions of the Tea Party, the branch of the Republican Party that rose up in defiance to the status quo in Washington, specifically Barack Obama’s spending policies. The Tea Party (if you recall) called for smaller government, lower taxes, and a reduction of the national debt. While purportedly an “astroturf” supposedly populist movement, it was funded by hidden monied interests—a point that McAvoy draws out during scathingly incisive interviews.
While re-watching episodes with my mother, I was struck by how the real-life events chronicled in the show were such clear signposts to where the country was heading—to where we are right now. I couldn’t help thinking that we should have seen this coming.
In one of the episodes, Will interviews a respected Republican senator who was successfully primaried by a radical tea-partier. Sound familiar?
In another, he plays footage of one of the Koch Brothers denying he had ever heard of The Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank to which he was a major donor.
McAvoy also covers the massive demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, after Republican Governor Scott Walker enacted Act 10, the bill which eliminated collective bargaining for public employees—union-busting legislation designed to hamstring public education.
In hindsight, now that we are aware of Project 2025, it’s easy to see that these were not isolated incidents, but part of a grand master strategy, a “vast right-wing conspiracy” if you will. The emasculation of public education, the rise of MAGA Republicanism, and the influence of the one-percenters were all there—much like the seven warning signs of cancer.
At the time, we chose to shrug off or ignore these signs, partly because it seemed unfathomable that such extremist positions would be anything more than a blip on the radar of American democracy.
The present state of our democracy, and the meteoric rise of a man like Donald Trump, would have been unfathomable then and seems nothing less than surreal now. If Mr. Sorkin, for all his foresight in predicting the dangers of corporate control of the media and the corporate interests controlling the media, could not have foreseen that America (at least part of it) would be seduced by a brazen and tasteless huckster like Trump, and that the Republican Party, which spawned this unholy monster, would stand aside and passively allow him to demolish their own government.
Who could have predicted the President of the United States would have allied himself with The Proud Boys, a white supremacist group?
Who could have predicted that Trump would attempt to topple our democracy by instigating the January 6th riot—or coup d’etat?
Who could have predicted he would have summarily pardoned over one thousand of these rioters during his first week in office?
Who could have predicted the American people would forget—or disregard—this attack on their own government and reelected him?
Who could have predicted Trump would be reelected after being convicted of thirty-four felony counts? Did voters forget he has been convicted in a court of law—or simply choose to ignore it?
Who could have predicted his weird aspiration to annex Greenland? To make Canada our fifty-first state, or to take over Panama?
Who could have predicted that he would unleash a crazed billionaire buddy to recklessly (and illegally) rampage through key federal departments and steal reams of sensitive personal information?
Who could have predicted that he would attack some of the nation’s most prestigious law firms and our most distinguished universities?
Who could have predicted he would be deporting US citizens to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without any sort of due process?
Who would have predicted his DOJ would arrest a Milwaukee circuit court judge and the mayor of Newark?
I guess it might have been fairly easy to predict that President Trump would use the office of the presidency—as he had in his first term—to line his own pockets. So far, in a little more than one hundred days into his first term, Mr. Trump has accepted (over the objections of the Congressional members who still have a conscience) $400 million dollar jet from the nation of Qatar (illegal under the Constitution), started $Trump, a meme coin scheme which will enrich his family to the tune of billions of dollars. He has also had dignitaries from foreign countries stay at his hotels, rent condos at Trump Tower, and signed foreign real-estate developments in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAR (Mother Jones). And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
A decade ago, any one of these transgressions would have resulted in impeachment, or—at the very least the end of a political career—or jail time—but now we’ve entered a dark time when the unbelievable has become reality, when corruption has become a White House norm, and when our democracy is fighting for its very life.
These extremes would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but the signs were there. We all saw the rise of the Tea Party, the increase in the number of hate groups, the emasculation of the media by their corporate owners, and—with the Citizens United ruling—the increasing influence of monied interests in politics. We can draw a straight line between these events and where we are today.
We just didn’t read the signs, or worse, we didn’t pay attention to them. And we’re paying the price. Let’s just hope it’s not too late to turn back the hands of time..
Comments