What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: I've seen people argue that the Newsroom speech was directly about journalism, not politics, but I don't know enough about US journalism to judge if there was ever a time when what he said was true.

From the context and phrasing of the speech, I don’t see how that can possibly be true - he’s talking about America building things, exploring things, curing diseases and going to space, none of which are exactly applicable to either journalism or politics - but even if it were, the thing about journalism is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Commentary on culture is still informed by culture. Journalism in the past was no more progressive when it came to issues like racism than it is today, and in fact was demonstrably worse, because there was no impetus to be tactful or evenhanded about the dissemination of biased, stereotyped assumptions that the majority of uninformed citizens held to be unquestionably true. You only need to look at the language in the coverage of something like McCarthyism or Freedom Summer to realise that American journalism, for all the good that can be laid at its door, still suffered from the same prejudicial idiocy as most everyone else. Point being, I’d be extremely skeptical of anyone who tries to defend the end half of that speech by saying it’s really about journalism, because not only does that show a spectacularly bad comprehension of language, but it also misses the point of what’s being criticised.