Will, Charlie’s grandson and Jim sing That’s How I Got to Memphis
Stuck in my head ever since the end of The Newsroom, this song really seems to want to spend today with me, which would be fine if it didn’t make me so sad.
It won’t matter much if you didn’t like the show, or if music doesn’t carry you forward and back or if you don’t mourn the decline of integrity as a core value of journalism, but the use of it at a funeral for Charlie Skinner, (Sam Waterston,) the keeper of the flame, the leader who defended the honor of every journalist and story, is a spectacular metaphor. YouTube won’t let me embed it, but here it is if you have the patience to link, it’s worth it.
Aaron Sorkin says Charlie represented the loss of decency offered by each of us to the rest of us, but for me, as Newsroom closed down, he stood for the rules that made journalism credible and critical to our country*; rules eroded in surrender to commerce and coarseness and fear. Even so, The Newsroom closed with the first moment of yet another day’s show. As Sorkin said, “They’re going to keep doing the news.” It will, though, be with the loss of just a little more of the combination of honor and power, the Charlie Skinner, that had protected them, and us, for so long.
*The Atlantic called it a funeral for “old media” but I’ve lived in “new media” for decades now and the show wasn’t about that change – at least not to me.
I gave up my alma mater, THE TODAY SHOW, for C-SPAN's Washington Journal. But no more – nope. Now I'm strictly a Morning Joe girl. My insomniac husband and I start our day with these characters, and there's good reason. They're smart, they're funny, they have real personalities, and they think and react. Both they and their guests deftly provide more information and perspective, than anywhere else you can go in the morning.
When I started at TODAY the theory was that people felt as if we were in their bedrooms. That Deborah Norville failed at replacing Jane Pauley (as if anyone could) because she was so perfect, so slick, that she was intrusive. TV was still one-way then; we produced the show, trying to make it as accessible as possible, but still, we were sending it to the audience, not talking with them.
At Morning Joe – the perfect Millennial programming, Scarborough, (former Congressman) the shredding (den mother? Zen master? daughter of Zbigniew) Mika Brzezinski, wise-cracking Willie Geist (former Tucker Carlson producer, son of CBS News Sunday Morning contributor Bill Geist) and the rest of the crew are not in our bedrooms, we're in the studio with them. There's no "third wall" (I always wanted to produce a show like that,) you see
the cameras, the cardboard Starbucks cups and even the
producers. We're all in it together. Conversations with their (very well-booked) guests are smart, sassy and collegial; lots of information emerges but from conversation, not inquisition. There is very little distance between the audience and the studio – bluster is deflated and humor is the tool of choice. ALL with considerable elan, explication, foresight and accessibility.
I almost forgot the music. Most commercial breaks are punctuated with music – often Bruce Springsteen, always connected to the last topic of conversation. During the campaign, of course, Born to Run and Jackson Browne's Running on Empty were favorites. It's another way of communicating with the audience – fun and usually spot on. When it's not music, it's clips from late night comedy or other relevant but irreverent television.
I'm not alone in this – didn't invent a new wheel. The New York Times has called the show "oddly addicting" (my experience exactly); the Washington Post described it as "a provocative, alternate-universe newstalk show." From six to nine AM Twitter is full of Joe sightings.
I spent many years in broadcast news, nine of them at the TODAY SHOW, and I've mourned its transformation from the informative show I knew to what seemed to me to be an undisciplined mush called, by many production alums, "Friends in the morning." It's wildly popular so I'm not condemning it – just saying that it isn't the show I worked for. Now, after a long, sad period of missing what TODAY was, I see in Morning Joe what it could have (and should have) become.
Myrna the Minx of Reno and Its Discontents found this. It’s a mortifying, cringe-inducing and heartbreaking example of what has happened to much of local news. How do we ever put the genie who creates this kind of television back in the bottle? I dare you to watch it to the end without raising your blood pressure.
