新闻编辑室第三季

Newsroom这部剧在美媒下还是有很大争议的，这种争议甚至不是对这部剧的for being liberal，更多来源于liberals for not doing enough。编剧Aaron Sorkin（如同你能从他的写作中看到的那样）常被描述成一个prick，一个smug，或一个chauvinist（比如一个记者曾写一篇文章来叙述Sorkin对她本人采访时候的condescension和不尊重，她说“In Sorkinville, the gods are men." 详见“How to get under Aaron Sorkin’s skin (and also, how to high-five properly)” //www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/how-to-get-under-aaron-sorkins-skin-and-also-how-to-high-five-properly/article4363455/），并且因为他的写作局限而被批评（说教性太强、自我陶醉...）

我感觉这些critic比豆瓣上目前看到的影评要成熟更多，并且也更加有效率、progressive。这篇影评来源于New Yorker的Emily Nussbaum （她本人在本剧第一季开始就发表过影评"Broken News"。见//www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/broken-news，或我的转载//movie.douban.com/review/12970899/）。Nussbaum在2016年因为她在纽约客写的影评获得普利策奖。她个人肯定了第三季的一些进步（比如她比较喜欢的Maggie & morality debate on the train），同时也特别分析批评了Sorkin对于Princeton女大学生 & rape的处理。

newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-newsroom-crazy-making-campus-rape-episode

By Emily Nussbaum

As this review indicates, I wasn’t a fan of the first four episodes of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” In the two years since that blazing pan, however, I’ve calmed down enough to enjoy the show’s small pleasures, such as Olivia Munn and Chris Messina. When characters talk in that screwball Sorkin rhythm, it’s fun to listen to them. As manipulative as “The Newsroom” ’s politics can be, I mostly share them. There are days when an echo chamber suits me fine.

For the first two seasons, the show stayed loyal to its self-righteous formula, which many viewers found inspirational. Sorkin’s imaginary cable network, Atlantis Cable News, would report news stories from two years before, doing them better than CNN and Fox News and MSNBC did at the time. Characters who were right about things (Will McAvoy, Sloan Sabbith, the unbearable Jim Harper, the ridiculously named MacKenzie McHale) strove for truth and greatness, even when tempted to compromise. They bantered and flirted. And each week, they debated idiots who were wrong. These fools included Tea Partiers, gossip columnists, Occupy Wall Street protesters, and assorted nobodies enabled by digital culture—narcissists, bigots, and dumbasses. Sometimes, the debates included sharp exchanges, but mostly, because the deck was stacked, they left you with nothing much to think about.

Often, the designated idiot wouldn’t even get to explain her side of an argument: she’d get to make only fifteen per cent of a potential case, although occasionally, as with an Occupy Wall Street activist, the proportion climbed closer to fifty per cent. There were other maddening aspects of the show—a plot in which a woman who worked in fashion believed that she wasn’t good enough to date a cable news producer, the McAvoy/McHale romance, the Season 2 Africa-flashback episode. So, you know, I had complaints. But I tried to stay Zen and enjoy Munn and Messina. And, in all sincerity, I was happy when the third and final season débuted, because it was such an obvious step up. The early episodes were brisk and self-mocking. There was a nifty, endearingly ridiculous grandeur to the story arc about McAvoy going to jail to protect a source. Even more satisfying, the show's debates with idiots had undergone a sea change. In Season 3, the people who were wrong were allowed to be actively smart (like Kat Dennings’s role as a cynical heiress) and funny (as with B. J. Novak’s portrayal of a demonic tech tycoon who ended up taking over ACN). In certain scenes, they got to make seventy-five per cent of an argument, leading to fleet and comparatively complex debates.

In the single best scene of the whole series, the number jumped to a hundred per cent. Maggie (Allison Pill)—now rehabilitated from last season’s horrible post-Africa, bad-haircut plot—took an Amtrak train from Boston. In a plot cut-and-pasted from the headlines, she overheard an E.P.A. official's candid cell-phone conversation, sneakily took notes, and then confronted him with follow-up questions. Both sides made a solid case: she pointed out that he was in public and her obligation was to be a reporter, not a P.R. conduit. Also, had Maggie gone through “official” routes, he would have lied to her. He argued that by quoting an unguarded, personal discussion, she was making the world a less humane, more paranoid place. So when Maggie threw her notes away, it wasn’t as simple as, “He was right and she was wrong”—she’d made a real moral choice. Given the kind of show that “The Newsroom” is, there was plenty of wish-fulfillment—Maggie got the interview anyway, plus a date with an admiring ethicist—but those elements felt fairy-tale satisfying.

After the Amtrak scene, I turned downright mellow, even fond of the series, the way you might cherish an elderly uncle who is weird about women and technology, but still, you know, a fun guy. My guard went down. So when I watched Sunday’s infuriating episode, on screeners, I wasn’t prepared. What an emotional roller coaster! I will leave it to others to discuss the mystical jail-cell plot, the creepy reunion of Jim and Maggie, the fantasy that even the worst cable network would re-launch Gawker Stalker, and, more admirably, the way that B. J. Novak’s evil technologist character seems to have broken the fourth wall and stepped into reality to disrupt The New Republic. Someone should certainly write about Sorkin’s most clever pivot: he’s taken the accusations of sexism that are regularly levelled at his show and pointed the finger at Silicon Valley, in a brilliant “Think I’m bad? Well, look at this guy” technique.

Yet when it comes to disconcerting timeliness, no scene from this episode stands out like the one in which the executive producer Don Keefer pre-interviews a rape victim. When Sorkin wrote it, he could not have known that CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi and, later, Bill Cosby would be accused of sexual assault by so many women, some anonymous, some named. He couldn’t have known that an article would be published in Rolling Stone about a gang rape at the University of Virginia or that this story would turn out, enragingly, to have been insufficiently vetted and fact-checked. The fallout from the magazine’s errors is ongoing: it’s not clear yet whether Jackie, the woman who told Rolling Stone that she was gang-raped, made the story up, told the truth but exaggerated, was so traumatized that her story shifted due to P.T.S.D., or what. The one thing that’s clear is that the reporting was horribly flawed, and that this mistake will cause lasting harm, both for people who care about the rights of victims and people who care about the rights of the accused. Key point: these aren’t two separate groups.

Anyway, there we are, with Don Keefer—one of the few truly appealing characters on the show and half of the show’s only romance worth rooting for, with Munn’s Sloan Sabbith—in a Princeton dorm room, interviewing a girl, Mary, who said she’d been raped. In a classic “Newsroom” setup, she wasn’t simply a victim denied justice. Instead, the woman was another of Sorkin’s endless stream of slippery digital femme fatales; she created a Web site where men could be accused, anonymously, of rape. The scene began with an odd, fraught moment: when Don turned up at her dorm room, notebook in hand, he hesitates to close the door, clearly worried that she might make a false accusation. But since this is Season 3, not 1 or 2, the Web site creator isn’t portrayed as a venal idiot, like the Queens-dwelling YouTube blackmailer on a previous episode, who wrote “Sex And The City” fan fiction and used Foursquare at the laundry. The Princeton woman got to make seventy-five per cent of her case, which, in a sense, only made the scene worse.

Before describing the scene between Keefer and the Princeton student, it’s important to note that the scene’s theme of sexual gossip about powerful men has been an obsession since this show began. For a while, Will McAvoy was tormented by a Page Six reporter who first got snubbedby him, then placed gossip items in revenge, thenslept with him, then blackmailed him. There was a similar plot about Anthony Weiner; just last week, Jim’s girlfriend Hallie sold him out in a post for the fictional Web site Carnivore. You’d have to consult Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” to find a fictional narrative more consistently worried about scurrilous sexual gossip directed at prominent men. It’s a subject that replicates Sorkin’s own experiences, from “The Newsroom” on back to “The West Wing.”

The scene between Don and the student takes place in four segments, as Don reveals to her why he was there: not to talk her into going public, but to talk her out of it. His boss, under pressure to appeal to Millennials and go viral, insisted that the segment be done in the most explosive way possible—as a live debate between the student and Jeff, the guy she claims raped her. As Don and she talk, the woman tells him her story. She’d gone to a party, took drugs, threw up, passed out—and then two men had sex with her while she was unconscious. The next morning, she called “city police, campus police, and the D.A.’soffice.” She can name the guys; she knows where they live. She had a rape kit done. “That should be the easiest arrest they ever made,” she says. At every juncture, Don is sorrowful, rational, gentlemanly, concerned about not hurting her feelings, and reflexively condescending, in a tiptoeing, please-don’t-hurt-me way. Eventually, he tells her that Jeff, the accused rapist, has also been pre-interviewed: Jeff told Don that she wasn’t raped—in fact, she’d begged to have sex with two men.

Back and forth they go, discussing a wide range of issues—legal, moral, journalistic, etc. The dialogue conflates and freely combines these issues. First, there is the question of anonymous accusations, online or off. There is also the question of direct accusations, like the one this student made against a specific guy, in person, using her own name—in a police station and the D.A.’soffice, and then online. There is the question of how acquaintance rape is or isn’t prosecuted in the courts; there is the question of how it's dealt with, or covered up, within the university system; and there is a separate question about how journalists, online and on television, should cover these debates. But a larger question hovers in the background, the one hinted at when Don came in the door: Does he believe her?

When I first watched the scene, I was most unnerved by the way their talk mashed everything together, suggesting that there were only two sides to the question—a bizarrely distorted premise. It’s possible, for instance, to believe (as I do) that a Web site posting anonymous accusations is a dangerous idea and to also think it’s fine for a woman to describe her own rape in public, to protest an administration that buries her accusation, and to go on cable television to discuss these issues. It’s possible to oppose a “live debate” between a rape victim and her alleged rapist and to believe that rape survivors can be public advocates. There was also something perverse about the way the student was portrayed, simultaneously, as a sneaky anonymous online force and also an attention-seeker eager to go on live TV. (And, given the way that Rolling Stone’s Jackie is now being “doxxed” online, it’s grotesque that the episode has the Princeton woman praise Don for tracking her down, “old-school.”) The actress was solid, but the character behaved, as do pretty much all digital women on the show, with the logic of a dream figure, concocted of Sorkin’s fears and anxieties, not like an actual person.

“The kind of rape you’re talking about is difficult or impossible to prove,” Don tells her. It’s not a “kind of rape,” the woman responds sharply. She argues that her site isn’t about getting revenge, that it’s “a public service”: “Do not go on a date with these guys, do not go to a party with these guys.” Don cuts her off: "Do not give these guys a job, ever." He argues that she’s making it easier for men to be falsely accused, but the woman says that she's weighed that cost and decided that it’s more important that women be warned. “What am I wrong about?” she asks. “What am I wrong about?”

I’d love to see a show wrestle with these issues in a meaningful way, informed by fact and emotion. But eventually, the “Newsroom” episode gets to the core of what’s really going on, that shadow question, and this is when it implodes. The law is failing rape victims, says the student. “That may be true, but in fairness, the law wasn’t built to serve victims,” argues Don. “In fairness?” she says. “I know,” he says, sorrowful again, eyes all puppy-dog. “Do you believe me?” she asks him suddenly. “Of course I do," Don tells her. “Seriously,” she presses. He dodges the question: “I’m not here on a fact-finding mission.” She pushes him for a third time: “I’m just curious. Be really honest.”

Finally, he reveals his real agenda. He’s heard two stories: one from "a very credible woman” and the other from a sketchy guy with every reason to lie. And he’s obligated, Don tells her, to believe the sketchy guy’s story. She's stunned. “This isn’t a courtroom,” she points out, echoing the thoughts of any sane person. “You’re not legally obligated to presume innocence.” “I believe I’m morally obligated," Don says, in his sad-Don voice. WTF LOL OMFG, as they say on the Internet. Yes, that's correct: Don, the show’s voice of reason (and Sorkin, one presumes), argues that a person has a moral obligation to believe a man accused of rape over the woman who said he’d raped her, as long as he hasn't been found guilty of rape. This isn’t about testimony, or even an abstract stance meant to strengthen journalism. (“Personally, I believe you, but as a reporter, I need to regard your story with suspicion, just as I do Jeff’s.”) As an individual, talking to a rape survivor, Don says that on principle, he doesn’t believe her.

At this point, Don gets to make his win-the-argument speech about the dangers of trial by media, lack of due process, etc. “The law can acquit; the Internet never will. The Internet is used for vigilantism every day, but this is a whole new level, and if we go there, we’re truly fucked,” he says. He warns her that appearing on TV will hurt her: she’ll get “slut-shamed.” She begins to cry and tells him that, while he may fear false accusations, she’s scared of rape. “So you know what my site does? It scares you.” Her case will be covered like sports, he remarks with disgust. “I’m gonna win this time,” she replies with bravado. And so Don goes back to ACN and he lies, telling his producer Charlie that he couldn’t find the woman at all—and then Charlie throws a tantrum and dies of a heart attack, but that’s a matter for a different post.

Look, “The Newsroom” was never going to be my favorite series, but I didn’t expect it to make my head blow off, all over again, after all these years of peaceful hate-watching. Don’s right, of course: a public debate about an alleged rape would be a nightmare. Anonymous accusations are risky and sometimes women lie about rape (Hell, people lie about everything). But on a show dedicated to fantasy journalism, Sorkin’s stand-in doesn’t lobby for more incisive coverage of sexual violence or for a responsible way to tell graphic stories without getting off on the horrible details or for innovative investigations that could pressure a corrupt, ass-covering system to do better. Instead, he argues that the idealistic thing to do is not to believe her story. Don’s fighting for no coverage: he's so identified with falsely accused men and so focussed on his sorrowful, courtly discomfort that, mainly, he just wants the issue to go away. And Don is our hero! Sloan Sabbith, you in trouble, girl.

Clearly, I’ve succumbed to the Sorkin Curse once again: critique his TV shows and you’ll find you’ve turned into a Sorkin character yourself—fist-pounding, convinced that you know best, talking way too fast, and craving a stiff drink. But after such an awful week, this online recap might be reduced to: Trigger warning. The season finale runs next week and thank God for that. Like poor old Charlie Skinner, my heart can’t take it anymore.

Emily Nussbaum 本人在本剧第一季开始就已经发了一篇比较critical的影评"Broken News"。见//www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/broken-news（我的转载//movie.douban.com/review/12970899/）。

在当时，对此，她同编辑室的New Yorker colleague David Denby也写了一篇简短的回应as counterargument.

In Defense of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” //www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/in-defense-of-aaron-sorkins-the-newsroom

I loved Emily Nussbaum’s negative review of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series, “The Newsroom,” which had its première last Sunday night, but I also enjoyed the show—certainly more than she did—and, afterwards, I felt a kind of moviegoer’s chagrin. Movie audiences get very little dialogue this snappy; they get very little dialogue at all. In movies we are starved for wit, for articulate anger, for extravagant hyperbole—all of which pours in lava flows during the turbulent course of “The Newsroom.” The ruling gods of movie screenwriting, at least in American movies, are terseness, elision, functional macho, and heartfelt, fumbled semi-articulateness. Some of the very young micro-budget filmmakers, trying for that old Cassavetes magic (which was never magical for me, but never mind) achieve a sludgy moodiness with minimal dialogue, or with improvisation—scenes that can be evocative and touching. But the young filmmakers wouldn’t dream of wit or rhetoric. It would seem fake to them. Thank heavens the swelling, angry, sarcastic, one-upping talk in “The Newsroom” is unafraid of embarrassing anyone.

终于看完S03E06，季终集也是完结季，心情久久不能平复。不想跟ACN说再见，但对于本剧来说，对于尚未想好该如何处理自己提出的问题的索金来说，在这里停止确是一个不错的节点（甚至还有点“戛然而止”的感觉）。记得在一个采访里索金说，到了第三季才觉得找对了感觉，如果有机会，他想从第一季开始重写一遍，从头开始重新来过。倘若这话有回响，真的很期待《晚间新闻3.0》的华丽转身。 从S01到S03一路看过来的感觉，正如索金所言，有种“渐入佳境”的感觉。第一季铺陈了场景、环境、人物关系，把这群对职业有着近乎偏执的坚持的人们的工作场景乃至信念大致交代了清楚。一集一个事件，短小精悍，看起来也比较轻松。第二季一共9集，用Genoa事件贯穿始终，平行剪辑的节奏控制得挺好，并不拖沓。人物的感情、情绪也都刻画得很细腻。如果说第二季是“山雨欲来”，第三季变革则真正到来。ACN遭遇拆分、收购，Neal因为涉嫌间谍罪为保护线人逃亡委内瑞拉，Will入狱，老Charlie倒在Newsroom这个他的“战场”。老查理的倒下为这场传统媒体与新媒体的较量、两种不同的新闻观的抗衡染上了悲壮的色调，给了他致命一击的不是Pruit，不是Sloan，而是他心里过不去的那道坎儿，他的矛盾与挣扎。其实老查理也意识到现如今的方式能走不动了，可是在新媒体环境下，又一时找不到能够承载他们理想的的新的新闻运营方式。面对Pruit这种近乎“亵渎”了新闻本质的做法，他无法妥协。他本能地坚持着他的新闻信仰，力求坚持正义、良知、专业、准确、真实，但是为了保护一众有着同样理想的后辈他又不得不做出妥协的姿态，走不出这个困境的查理，即使没有倒在Sloan的事情上，也会倒在Don的Princeton事情上，或者在看到Neal重建的网站后猝然离去。 老查理这个“堂吉诃德”的死（他绝不仅是桑丘啊，Will是打趣说的~），象征着一个新闻时代告一段落。ACN要何去何从，也是当下许多传统媒体头疼的事情。年初的时候一篇关于BBC转型策略的深度报道和一篇《纽约时报》的创新报告（其实是数字时代的反思报告）疯转一时，可见ACN的切肤之痛，索金刻画得并不夸张，真实的媒体转型比这来得更加的猛烈。有些媒体已经逐渐开始寻摸到了一些不清晰但尚且可行的转型道路，有些则依旧面临着生存的威胁。所谓新媒体，指的不仅仅是新的技术与渠道，还是一种新的社会关系下的媒介形态，与日常生活联系更加紧密因而要想求新求变，革新技术、拓展渠道，开微信微博APP只是个开始，从内容到思维都面临着彻底的变化。 本季提出的问题，从本剧的结尾——Mc坐上了Reese的位置，Will主播台，Neal回归重建网站，晚间新闻迎来了前所未有的新闻自主空间——来看，索金本人还是倾向于新闻专业主义的解决方案。虽然看似有些理想主义化，但个人还是比较认同。索金虽非新闻人，也是资深媒体人，已经对第一季的定调感到不甚满意的他不会在结尾又回到原点。尚且做个善良的揣测，我认为“专业化”、新闻精英主义的不完全妥协或许是索金对未来媒体发展的一个预测和预期。众包新闻也是新闻发展的一个阶段，可以说是一个向下的“分”的过程，将新闻的制作权、发布权下放给了普通民众。有道是“合久必分分久必合”，在“分”进行到一个阶段以后，新媒体的优势发挥到了一个瓶颈，而缺陷则开始逐渐暴露。即使已经被微信控制但仍然没有彻底弃掉微博的我们对众包新闻的种种再熟悉不过了。它的缺点现在已暴露得很明显：琐碎，缺乏深度，虚假信息、失实谣言等等…对于一个普通用户来说，倘若要获得准确可靠全面的信息，可能便需要选择二次（甚至更多次的）核实，这样便会增加了获取可靠信息的成本；亦或是选择不付出这个成本一笑了之；当然也有用户并不具备足够的分辨能力，在不自觉的情况下充当了谣言传播的工具。 当然随着新媒体的发展我们用户的媒介素养也在随之提升，同时随着环境越来越嘈杂，为了降低获取准确信息的成本，我们会倾向于选择可靠的信息源→专业媒体，毕竟看新闻的目的还是获取真实（有用）的信息，用户对内容的要求也在变得越来越高。新闻在向细分化、定制化发展的时候，也对专业化的需求其实是不减反增的，这种专业化的新闻生产、筛选、聚合工作，也即分久必合的“合”还是需要由专业人员来完成。这或可作为索金“新闻专业主义”不倒的结尾的一个善意的、积极的解释吧。 扯远了，再回到本剧。继续ACN新闻台原来的样子也并不明智…抱紧电视这个渠道的做法太传统，再有钱也不可能就这么一路烧下去→显然会越赔越多。Mac们需要新的手段和渠道，如果继续写，Neal的戏份或许要加，Mac和Will或许会比老查理更头疼。但无论如何，有着这样的坚持的一群人，他们有坚持但不固执，坚持己见却不固步自封，在Will决定帮助Neal的那一刻我已经隐约看到，Newsroom不会就此止步待毙，即使会付出很大的代价，那个开始于“堂吉诃德”死后的“3.0时代”正在到来。 Coming soon… ———————————————————————— 30号修改 看到哥伦比亚新闻评论的一篇文章，写最近索尼被黑《采访》被迫撤档的事件的事情，媒体应该在实践中扮演怎样的角色。有段话写的很好，摘录在此： “The new reality is that journalists simply do not own the news cycle: Even if Gawker, BuzzFeed News, and Fusion decided to stop covering it, others would take up the mantle,” Anne Helen Petersen writes at BuzzFeed. “The new role of journalists, for better or for worse, isn’t as gatekeepers, but interpreters: If they don’t parse it, others without the experience, credentials, or mindfulness toward protecting personal information certainly will.”