With typically articulate thunder, Aaron Sorkin opens his HBO series The Newsroom by establishing his latest man on the ideological verge, newsman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), with a speech railing against America’s ridiculously high opinion of itself. “There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world,” McAvoy snaps at a young member of the “worst-period-generation-period-ever-period,” rattling off statistics reminding her of the nation’s abysmal standings in education, income, labor, and death, and its embarrassingly high rates of imprisonment, defense spending, and overall stupidity. Though it begins as an angry rant, it ends as a eulogy for when “we sure used to be,” lamenting a time when the country “aspired to intelligence. We didn’t belittle it. It didn’t make us feel inferior,” and “we didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy.” But despite those aims at inspiration, the fact that McAvoy’s tirade is generally received as a case of temporary insanity underscores the show’s theme of how speaking truth to power doesn’t really matter when the powerless refuse to listen.
