The message that The Newsroom feeds them is that they didn’t have enough self-esteem; they weren’t as self-confident, as abrasive and as biased as they should have been last time around. And that’s a welcome thing, not for anyone who still harbors hope that a sane two-party system will prevail, but those who want to see leftists destroy themselves, their institutions and their ambitions.
The Newsroom‘s message to the media is to be more openly biased. But the media’s last shreds of credibility come from its pretense that it is neutral. The day that news anchors routinely take to the air, announce their political affiliation and begin to rant about Republicans is the day that the last pieces of their empire come crumbling down. The day that every news channel is MSNBC is the day that they will all have to divide the MSNBC audience among themselves.
The media is already following that path, and their newspapers, magazines and news shows are turning into ghettos because of it. The Newsroom berates them for not following it quickly enough. And the faster they go down that road, the less influence they will retain. If I wanted to destroy the mainstream media, I would encourage them to follow The Newsroom’s model. And while they won’t listen to me… they will listen to Aaron Sorkin.
The real topic of The Newsroom is egotism and it’s the perfect mirror for the implosion of two egotistical administrations whose chiefs self-destructed because they had as little impulse control as The Newsroom‘s protagonist. The celebration of self-destructive behavior is self-destructive and it programs the Democrats to seek out the next cycle of egotistical, self-destructive politicians.
The Newsroom reeks of its own smugness. It is entirely self-reflective. Its politics are a matter of identity. And that identity creates its own universe. There are universes like that already in cloistered urban centers, in ideologically-gated communities and in academia. And when their inhabitants recognize that the larger world outside is different than their universe, the contest between the ideology and the world begins.
To the sociopath, the universe is a solipsistic place. So too the leftist sees the world as a place on which to impose his own sense of internal identity. He reacts to the “otherness” of those who don’t share his political identity by trying to stamp them out. If he can’t physically destroy them, then he retreats to physical and mental enclaves where he destroys them intellectually over and over again, fighting battles against legions of ghosts and shadows, mocking and ridiculing them out of existence.
With The Newsroom, the cycle continues as, anticipating defeat, the left retreats to a safe place in an imaginary version of the past, in which they can line up all their enemies and knock them down like rows of toy soldiers, in which everything seems clear and certain, and their side always wins. Their hibernation is a good sign. It’s a sign that they are afraid that they are about to lose.
Bears leave off hibernation in the spring, but, since the spring, progressives have begun crawling into their own caves, arranging the cushions, closing the blinds and shutting away the world, for the better world glowing from their television screens.