This week in class we continued to cover the news and how it can shape our opinions on different topics. One of the largest forms of news available, cable news, can be a very misleading outlet for people who are looking to find news, especially if the person looking of it does not know what they are looking for. Many news channels tend to lean one way or the other when it comes to politics, and if you are unaware of that, you can get very misleading information about any number of topics. This can be from either the pundits and producers only giving the side of the issue that shows their party in the better way, or by the pundits telling lies about someone or something to make their party seem innocent or better than the other.

This idea was shown in and also tried to be refuted in by a team in the show “The Newsroom”, a show about a news team that wants to be more truthful about that news and wants to show more meaningful news to its viewers. The anchor, Will McAvoy, is someone who wants to be able to keep his ratings up, and he gets help doing this from his new executive producer, McKenzie McHale, who wants to show real and important news to those who watches their program. The first episode we saw dealt with the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana in 2010, and in the show their program was the first to have any coverage of the accident. Every other news program showed a different story to begin with, while they had a full hour coverage of what was going on. This showed that they were worried about something that was of major importance to almost every person in the country versus something that would only bring in people watching for entertainment, like most news programs seem to do today.

In the second episode we watched of “The Newsroom”, they talked about the controversy that was the Casey Anthony trial. In this episode, McAvoy and McHale had a disagreement over whether or not to cover the trial like the other programs. Their program had lost half their viewers to HLN’s Nancy Grace, who was covering the trial. McKenzie did not believe that it was important enough to show, while McAvoy wanted to do whatever it took to keep his viewers so they could host a debate on their show. This correlates to real life because there are many news stations that show the viewers the entertaining things to keep them around, so that they in turn get more money for their station. What is so good about this episode is the way that McKenzie argues against covering this kind of story when she goes into the staff meeting and starts marking off the topics they were going to cover in a very dramatic fashion. The way it ends is also great as they are planning to prerecord an interview with a woman about Anthony Weiner and what has happened with his Twitter account, and right before the interview that McKenzie does not want to do, the power shuts off. She asks for a sign to not go on with the interview, and after the power shuts off says “I didn’t think you had that comic timing”, which I think is a great line.