This week we discussed how the news is presented nowadays compared to how it was presented. The Newsroom is a great depiction of how news broadcasters used to do the news. The main objective then was to get critical information out to the public in an efficient way. In the first episode of The Newsroom, it presented problems with modern day news and also showed how news should be broadcasted. In the show, the major issue discussed was what type of content should be on the news. Whether or not they should focus on actually real problems that are faced in the world or focus on gaining more viewers and simply doing an entertainment show. Many of the characters had their own opinion on the matter.

The first episode was the pilot called “We Just Decided To”, the main point in this episode was to prove to the world that real news is still out there. The main character is named Will McAvoy who is the anchor on the Atlantis Cable News and is the leader of his news team. Will is stunned to find out his ex was his new executive producer and that almost his entire original news team was leaving him to work for someone else. Mackenzie is his new executive producer and brought her own employee whom she highly recommends to work on their team. Will tries to have Mackenzie fired but his agent will not allow that so instead Will sacrifices his own paycheck to have complete control over Mackenzie. He now has the power to fire her at the end of every week depending on how she preforms. During the episode, Mackenzie’s employee begins to receive a news alert about an oil spill but Will’s old employee conflicts with the alert saying that it’s nothing to worry about. The entire team does more research on the situation to find that it is much worse than they thought. This is brought to Wills attention and they broadcast a show that night to alert the public of what the task at hand is and how it could’ve been prevented.

We also discussed how news today is completely different from when it first started. The news sole purpose was to alert the public about important incidents that are happening around them. This idea has been altered and mis-interpreted. Nowadays, the news focuses on making sure the public only knows one perspective of certain issues. The news has the power to change peoples complete ideals just from how they present situations.

-Noah Soriano