Aaron Sorkin is apologizing for The Newsroom.
No, the liberal screenwriter isn’t making amends for unfairly mocking the right via the HBO drama. Instead, he’s trying to mend fences with the same media scribes he captures–for better and worse–on the low-rated show set to air its final season this fall.
Sorkin spoke during an event at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, pleading with journalists to forgive him if they misunderstood his intentions with the show.
I’m going to let you all stand in for everyone in the world, if you don’t mind. I think you and I got off on the wrong foot with ‘The Newsroom’ and I apologize and I’d like to start over. I think that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding,” Sorkin said. “I did not set the show in the recent past in order to show the pros how it should have been done. That was and remains the furthest thing from my mind. I set the show in the recent past because I didn’t want to make up fake news.”
“It was going to be weird if the world that these people were living in did not in any way resemble the world that you were living in… Also, I wanted the option of having a terrific dynamic that you can get when the audience knows more than the characters do,” Sorkin continued. “So, I wasn’t trying to and I’m not capable of teaching a professional journalist a lesson. That wasn’t my intent and it’s never my intent to teach you a lesson or try to persuade you or anything.
Fair journalists like Jake Tapper trashed Sorkin’s drama during its early days while The New Yorker dubbed the series “insufferable” and slammed its lazy GOP slams.