Which Way Do You Swing? - Politics

Most conservative policies seem to help big business and entrepreneurs by extending tax breaks, incentives and reducing red-tape. These policies assist those already managing.  Sometimes by a little, sometimes a lot. It is the politics and policies of capitalism that fuel the age of the billionaires, and the promise that everyone can achieve those heights. 

These same policies tend to leave those not managing untouched, or, on occasion, worse off, usually in real terms across time, making it harder to quantify any direct disadvantage from an individual policy.

These are policies promoted as celebrating success and allowing the 'job-makers' to take advantage of the system, up to and including, rorting that system. Success and financial power seem to make all these indiscretions tolerable.  

The left finds these greedy, grifting, profiteering examples intolerable and they shout about them as if these are the only examples that exist. They are not. These policies help and support some truly deserving business models, across the economic spectrum, to survive and thrive.

The progressive left puts forward policies that reduce the ability of the successful to make higher profits and placing more restrictions and oversight on businesses. This makes the difficult early years of small business and small sole traders even more precarious. The left also seeks a basic minimum standard of living for all, universal health care, they look to environmental issues at the expense of corporate profits and ensure those on the lowest rungs of society can maintain an equitable standard of living.

These policies are designed to raise the greatest number possible out of poverty and ensure that working full time is rewarded with a liveable wage that covers life's basics and provides for a family. This also allows some to choose not to work and live solely off welfare. 

The right finds these greedy, grifting, freeloading examples intolerable and they shout about them as if these are the only examples that exist. They are not. These policies help and support some truly deserving individuals being let down by a system purported to be looking out for everyone.

I've always felt things work best when liberals and conservatives exchange power at around a 2 to 3 ratio. The right builds up the wealth with a strong economy and the left reforms social policies to help those who slip through the net of the conservative economic lift.

The ratio has slipped across the world because the right has outplayed the left at politics. This has happened because the left regard morality in politics as a badge of honour, and the right has long ago recognised that badges are worthless. 

Once morals counted for something in life and in politics, but then came the age of spin where both side's spokespeople focused only on the faults of the other side, and never with themselves. Where no mistake is owned or corrected and doing the right thing, a standard that was once the default, or at least the desired position, is now the exception.

How did we get here? 

It began when those charged with holding leaders responsible, the fourth estate, the news journalists, became confused with being personalities and entertainers. 

When equal representation of both points of view became more important than facts as determined and checked by multiple sources by professionally trained, skilled and schooled journalists whose reputations depended on their accuracy, facts became irrelevant.

When the politically correct ideal of regarding every view as relevant and worth scrutiny on official news broadcasts became a benchmark, this worthy notion was exploited by those looking to hide issues, spin alternative facts and obfuscate truths. You can shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and get away with it provided you do something provocative enough to misdirect people from your crime. Throw in some 'what-about-ism', cloud the facts with suggestions the victim had a gun or a record, and alert the press that many other people shot people on the same day, and your crime will hardly rate a mention. 

When the opinion/editorial/op-ed piece began to be presented alongside news with little or no delineation, news reporting stopped being news and became political propaganda. The ultimate extension of this is the dedicated partisan network that says whatever is needed by the government to convince people it's news. It is believed for no other reason than it looks like a news channel.

The multiplatform social media landscape has allowed every opinion to be a truth as the presenter presents it. All too often the term 'do your own research', a term intended to mitigate legal issues over commentary of stocks and investments has permeated into every opinion put forward as a phrase to legitimise that opinion by alerting you to the existence of any number of 'opinions' online that back up the opinion being put forward. 'Do your own research' now means, go and read equally dubious opinion pieces posted online by others who share my views.

If you see spokes-people introduced from two sides of politics or from two sides of a contentious issue, what is the point of staying to watch? Professional press agents now spruik their well-rehearsed talking points without ever listening to the other side, and those talking points are always extreme examples. For their team, they put forward positive outliers, for the other side, the negative outliers, and each example gets promoted as examples of the norm - which they are definitely not.  

Politics has stopped being an avenue of service to do the greater good and is now an avenue to get what lobbyists want and stop the will of the people from participating. Journalists began this slide into the darkness of opinions based on wants instead of facts, and the internet has sped it up and made us all contribute to the demise of facts.

How many false stories have been reposted on scientific, medical, political and even current events?

   

What happened to common sense and genuinely doing your own research? Question opinions by seeking out multiple sources of facts as published by respected and accredited institutions and experts with current accredited standing. I want to hear other people's opinions, but I want to know they've taken some time and given some effort towards forming them. Reading a headline and reposting something without scrutiny becomes a waste of everyone's time, or worse, another nail in the coffin of our entire democratic system.

Hasan Minhaj in his address at the correspondent's dinner said: "I don't have a solution of how to win back trust, but I know in the age of Trump, you guys (the media) have to be more perfect than ever because you are how the President gets his news - not from advisors, not from experts, not from intelligent agencies - you guys. So that's why you've got to be twice as good, you've got to be on your A-game, you can't make any mistakes, because when one of you messes up - he blames your entire group; and now you know what it feels like to be a minority." 

In the dawning age of conspiracy, where friends and family regularly state alternative facts as truth, and when challenged, remain defiant and tell you to do your own research, clear thinking, factual journalism and finding alternative sources to double-check alternative facts seems to have become the individual's job. The news media has become entertainment. Politicians have become infallible. Special interest groups have become public relations spokes-people, and facts have become subjective, to be massaged, manipulated, and misrepresented as the truth. 

George Orwell saw this future in a misdirected democracy that delivered authoritarianism. His chilling dystopian tale is starting to feel all too real - the only thing George got wrong was the date.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

"How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."

"Sometimes, two and two are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once."

― George Orwell, 1984

President Trump presents, The Greatest Show On Earth!

Remember The Donald, before he was The President Trump? 

Remember how he held a press conference and all the journalists and networks were waiting for hours, cutting into their programming and holding off shows as they waited with bated breath?

And they waited and waited and waited some more.

Then The Donald arrived and made his big announcement. It was little more than an infomercial promoting Trump products and Trump Hotels. Remember that? I always thought it was Donald J just testing how far he had hooked his suckers.

The angry journalists waved their angry little fists and flapped their angry little gums in the middle of their angry little faces and decried, "He played us! There was no big announcement. He promised us a big announcement, and he didn't deliver!. He used us to gouge a little more of the billion dollars in free media coverage we're giving him! What a complete rogue!"

Then the media went back to giving him their undivided attention and promoting fake news they'd sourced from facebook, twitter or by quoting someone else who'd sourced the idea from facebook or twitter.

It's journalism 21st-century style... where unvetted information is raced to air in a bid to be first and Dulcie from Bachas Marsh has just tweeted, 95% of all foreigners are assassins according to a man wearing a white coat and holding a clipboard. Fascinating, Dulcie.

So jump forward a year and President The Donald is under some heavy scrutiny. First, there were claims he was part of a conspiracy with the Russians. There were claims those pesky Russlanders had infiltrated social media to the extent that they had posted unbelievable crap on facebook and Americans had failed to spot that Hillary wasn't in fact possessed and controlled by Honey-Boo-Boo and had adjusted their vote as a result. Those Russians! How did they ever come up with such an ingenious plan? Zuckerberg - Arghhh! The name of an Eastern European sleeper agent if ever I heard one.

If you submerge yourself in the exabytes of metadata the government is now legally allowed to keep on all of us, you'll find The President, The Donald's head of security was shown to have been discussing things with Russia before the election. Gadzooks! 

What had they been discussing? Fake news? Fake science? Fake reality show drama? We may never know because they removed Mike Flynn as the National Security Advisor. It's time to go - Mike Flynn - and don't answer any questions on your way out unless you get immunity, granted by The Donald's people. Tick, tick, tick - won't be a moment with that immunity - just take a seat.

Then Jeff Sessions, The Trump - The Donald - The President's appointment as Attorney General, suddenly came under even greater scrutiny as the next Babushka doll in the Russian election scandal.

 
That's the moment P.T Barnum - The Donald - The President Trump tweeted that Obama had Wiretapped the Trump offices leading up to the election. It was finally a scandal that could have used the suffix. "Gate," because it was an accusation of spying on your opponent during the lead up to an election. It would have made sense to add "Gate" to the end of it, but the media had finally worn "Gate" out.

NIPPLEGATE

Hardly a word has been heard about the controversy surrounding Jeff Sessions or any implications surrounding his connections with the Russian scandal since that bombshell was tweeted by The Leader in Tweet.

The Donald, The J, The Trump, The Tweeter in Chief, The President created a bigger news story. With the skill of a world-class showman orchestrating a misdirect, he caused all the investigative journalists to run off, following the sign he planted reading, "This way to the egress."

Jeff Sessions was in the clear. This left him as the Attorney General, with his first job being to put in place and oversee a thorough investigation into the Russian influence scandal - and I am predicting, and I know it will shock many, that the verdict he returns will be that he, Jeff Sessions, did not done it.

But the pesky journalists were like a dog with a bone and they just kept digging into the story. Russia would not go away.

Kaboom! A US airstrike took out a Syrian airbase. And not just any Syrian airbase. This was the one that launched O-Zone's Dragonstea Din Tei or Numa Numa on a poor, defenceless, unsuspecting world. 

I'm sorry, I'm just being told that was Moldova, not Syria, but in Trump's world, a world of fake news - it's close enough.

Then the angry Russians waved their angry little fists and flapped their angry little gums in the middle of their angry little faces and decried, "He played us! He should have asked us first! He doesn't know the first thing about bombing ettiquete. Now we don't like him at all."

That's why relations between Russia and The Donald's USA are at an all time low - low - low! But wait! They can go even lower - if they need to.

Trump was quick to agree. Things with Russia are bad. Biggly bad, which is the very worst type of bad and let's all hope they don't become bigglier badder.

Within a month, The Donald's love fest with Putie dived into a hatefest. And coincidently, it was the very same month when the investigations into Putin giving The Donald a reach-around, election wise, was building up steam. 

But now, the bigglier baddest relations between the two ever proves how wrong those suspicions were. THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS PEOPLE!

To summarise, Russian and American relations are at an all time low. Anyone thinking there was a collaboration between Russian oligarchs and extremely wealthy American business interests, to gain a sweetheart deal with billion dollar oil pipelines or other environmentally questionable, but extremely profitable infrastructure, is simply wrong. 

Even though those very profitable projects that stalled or were impeded by global politics, ostensibly blocked through lobbying by the Obama administration and the Democrats, are now мертвый. There is no communication between the two countries at all. If people thought those billion dollar projects were more likely to go through now that Trump and his Droogs are in office - Подумайте еще раз - it's just not going to happen.

So, that's the state of affairs in Trump's American administration. Mike out, Jeff in, look over there, me and Putin aren't friends, and mind your own business or I'm going to call you a name. 

There will be no civility or agreement reached anytime soon between Donald.J.Trumperica and Vlad the Terrible's Rossia. And certainly not complicated contractual business agreements between Russian and American superbusinesses to make lots and lots of money flow. That's just not on the cards - because relations have never been so biggly bad. 

You rogue, Donald.J, you rogue - now, can you point me towards the egress?

Taking Risks and Tragedy.

John McCarthy was an Australian football player who played his junior football with Sorrento football club and then went on to play elite football. He was drafted in 2007 by one of Australia’s premier clubs, Collingwood and a year ago was traded to play with Port Adelaide.

At the end of 2012, Port Adelaide was knocked out of the competition before any final playoffs and he and some of his teammates headed to the USA and Vegas. McCarthy was, with his fellow teammates, considered to be a more mature player, having played at the professional level for a number of years and unlike many of his younger teammates was trusted to self manage himself in a mature and professional manner.

John McCarthy jumped from a Vegas balcony at 5.40 am and tried to jump into the branches of a palm tree. He couldn’t hold on and he fell nine meters to the concrete below and suffered fatal injuries.

John McCarthy was a role model to many. He was an outstanding athlete. He was clearly an extraordinary young man who was loved and socially connected, supported, loved and returned those feelings to many. The passing of a young man can not effect so many people on such a deep level without that person being an extraordinary person.

But McCarthy’s passing has been more than a tragedy in Australia. It’s been an extraordinary exercise by media to avoid any mention of the reason for his death – youthful, drunken stupidity.

The reason perhaps, is because no-one wants to devalue his passing, knowing how well he was thought of and how many people truly loved and cared about this man.

I’ve always felt young people have every right, in fact a duty to be young and stupid, short of risking death. And even that comes with exceptions. It’s certainly fine to risk even death in organized activities that take every precaution to keep participants safe. High thrill, high danger activities are always going to be a risk to be part of but provided you take every precaution while doing them, no-one should ever deny these high risk, high discipline, high talent activities.

Being young is about having fun and taking risks, but as is the case with McCarthy, even the young have a duty of care to themselves if only because of the many people who love and care about them.

This is the Youtube generation. A generation who is taught that infamy is just as profitable and just as respected as traditional fame. Jumping from a balcony to a palm tree nine meters up could well have been the next viral video we would all be watching.

Jackass, Tosh.O, Funniest Home videos, Youtube and the many other media platforms that promote risky behaviour make young people feel even more bullet proof than usual. Seeing so many others perform death defying stunts and walk away with little more than a bruise, or at worst a screaming wedgy, seeds the idea for the next person to take that leap one step further, or higher.  

I’m not for becoming a nanny state that tells our young people what they can and can’t do. I don’t even think we should be banning the shows that bring the starring idiots fame. Let young people be young and continue to do all the crazy things that we all do in youth. Being an idiot and taking risks is part of the coming of age and provided you pull up short of death – job well done.

But when someone’s Youtube heroics go too far and their foolishly planned stunt goes wrong and ends in death we shouldn’t bury that result and hide it from just as much exposure. John McCarthy’s death has effected and hurt so many people who are left to try and make sense of the senseless loss of life, that it becomes vitally important the media make it clear how and why he died. Just as the heroic Youtube leaps that end in triumph promote such stunts, this sort of tragedy should be promoted just as heavily to try and prevent it.

John McCarthy’s palm tree leap is mentioned almost as a whisper if at all and even then it’s mentioned as if it is in some way an ordinary accident that McCarthy suffered as a fateful event he had no part in. He jumped from a balcony nine meters in the air and tried to land on a palm tree and then, I guess, planned to shimmy down the trunk like a super hero. It was doubly stupid because, unlike the many nameless stars on the internet who are out to prove themselves, John McCarthy was already a super hero amongst the regular folk who idolize their football players. 

The media has a responsibility not to shy away from reporting the foolish decision that led to his death, as hard and as disrespectful to a dynamic, respected and much loved young man that it may be. What he did was stupid and sometimes, just sometimes, those types of decisions end in tragedy and a deep hurt and sense of loss is then carried by far too many people.

Maybe out of respect to such a loved and accomplished young man the media is keeping this commentary back for a week or two to allow those who loved McCarthy to grieve without any suggesting his memory is being disrespected or sullied. Perhaps then the media will remind other young people that acting the fool can and does, on occasion, end in tragic and very final consequences.

My guess is in a week or two the incident will have stopped being news.

Maybe the next young person who loses their life, spurred on by the crazy internet stunts of their generation’s survivors, will not be as well loved and respected as McCarthy and then we may have some honest media analysis of what sort of behavior should be discouraged. While it often leads to no more than laughter and a memorable video, it can also lead to death – and in McCarthy's case, a death that has needlessly upset and shattered far too many people and robbed us all of a young man who was obviously one of the good guys. 

London 2012 - May the Best Athlete Win!

The first week of the Olympics in Australia has been extraordinary. On the first day an Australian women's relay team won a gold medal and the media and the nation were jubilant. Then we saw the long slow decline of so many aspects of our modern society, in all it's ugliness, when no more gold came our way.

Australia's medal bellyflop!

Disaster, fail, poor sports, embittered competitors, media dissection, endless excuses and questioning of coaches, of funding, or the athlete's character. And all this while nine incredibly gifted young athletes from our country won silver medals and four more won bronze, not to mention a high number who made finals and then just missed being on the medal dais by the narrowest of margins. As well as those who looked so humbled by simply being in that first heat of their event and wearing a tag that made them an official Olympian, a tag they could keep for the rest of their life.

Eric the Eel - Sydney 2000 Olympics.

I'm sure everyone is proud of all of them, even those belittling their performance, but why do commentators need to voice personal opinions, during events, about the lack of an athlete's work ethic, or that the performance of the team is somehow less than it has been in the past. They are dissecting the funding received and looking at Australian coaches being lured away to train other athletes from other countries as reasons for not winning gold. No-one has yet suggested an athlete didn't win gold because they didn't have the natural ability to match that of the winner or the other athletes ahead of them.

Australia is a country of 24 million people. In some Olympic competitions we have punched well above our weight. Very rarely if ever, that I can remember, have we fallen below. This year we are about were statistics would place us if one of those geeky maths guys ran the Olympics and took all factors of wealth, opportunity and populations sizes into consideration and then assigned medals from his calculator. That's an Olympics I certainly wouldn't care about, at least, on my statistics, I would be 71.483 percent recurring less likely to care about it.

Australian Olympics Medal Tally

2008 - 14 gold, 15 silver, 17 bronze - 46 medals

2004 - 17 gold, 16 silver, 16 bronze - 49 medals

2000 - 16 gold, 25 silver, 17 bronze - 58 medals

1996 -    9 gold,  9 silver, 23 bronze - 41 medals

1992 -    7 gold,  9 silver,  11 bronze - 27 medals

1988 -    3 gold,  6 silver,    5 bronze - 14 medals

Maybe, just maybe, the Olympics have some lessons for us. Extraordinary lessons, astounding ideas that have never been thought of by anyone before in human history:

Winning isn't everything. Anon.

I want to be able to say: I gave it all I could, I gave it my best. Anon.

Don't judge those who try and fail, judge those who fail to try. Anon.

If you are not big enough to lose, you are not big enough to win - Walter Ruether.

 People succeed when they realise their failures are the preparation for success. Emerson

It seems I am wrong - many people have thought these same things, many times before - so why is the media acting like a top floor executive and only caring about the bottom line?

Once again it's because the news has become entertainment. It's big business to attract viewers and keep them watching. They do this with proven formulas of emotional back stories that tug at our hear strings and by creating controversy. Then they elevate the personality of correspondents they own and these correspondents allow themselves to be swept up in the world of celebrity, forgetting what it means to be a journalist and a reporter.

I have some favourite Australian reporters across many fields. These are people I trust and admire. When it comes to sport Australia is blessed, but all too often you can see the drift of a great journalistic mind being slowly chipped away and perverted as to what their role is by aligning themselves with a network who own them and push them towards being the story as opposed to reporting on it.

I'd like to see them all keep their conjecture to themselves and report on what is in front of the. If a person is at the Olympics they've already won. If they win a medal they're extraordinary. If they don't, it doesn't reflect badly on anyone and needs no excuses or derision from anyone.

The Newsroom - HBO TV - Review

The news room is both brilliant and baffling. Brilliant in the way Aaron Sorkin television usually is, informed, layered and with something important to say on not just one, but many issues. It's done in a context that comments on the reasons real news events were treated the way they were and raises incredibly important questions that are grander than those stories themselves. 

But it's also baffling television in that it leans so far to the left while screaming that its roots are on the right of any political debate. Maybe that's the point the show is trying to make. It places itself close to the middle of most issues, a position that was considered a conservative stance until the middle shifted. The Newsroom argues very strongly that the Tea Party movement is to blame for that shift and the shift is harming America.

Will McEvoy is a right wing news anchor and he's on the crest of the populist wave when we meet him. Not yet committed to the full ride on the tsunami sized swell of a dumbed down ideas the media sweeps along in its path, he knows what news should be. He possesses a brilliant intellect, easily capable of narrating and adjudicating debates towards informing and serving, rather than pandering to the masses. He's the voice of the news we all hoped would follow in the footsteps of great men and women gone before. But Will has settled for ratings over content, or at least allowed his network and producers to position him to accept it and he, until this very moment, has gone along for that ride.

At minute one of this superb television drama, we find Will seated between furious left and right wing rivals who lean across him to trade frequently voiced arguments on divisive issues. Will sits passive, letting the familiar rhetoric wash across him until they are all asked by a homespun American type college girl, to answer, in a few words, why America is the greatest country in the world? Will displays his, 'don't offend anyone' stance as he answers in various shades of beige without ever really answering. But when he's forced to declare his hand he finally snaps and declares America is not the greatest country in the world any longer.

It's a stunning opening, backed up with ample facts on how we judge a nation's achievements. Clearly, according to statistics held in Will's head, America is nowhere near where it once was. That's a bold way to start a new series. It's the equivalent of meeting your partner's parents for the first time and telling them their house was probably a nice place to live - once upon a time. But it is Will McEvoy, as a right wing lead, camouflaging a very left wing debate that is likely to create the biggest obstacle to this show reaching the masses it deserves. The liberal bias is hard to miss despite Will and his team continually reminding us they are against increased taxes, government intervention and other populist right mantras. The focus of this show is towards the moderate and in this day and age, sadly, the moderates are now seen as left wing. 

This doesn't take away from the drama in any way, but the balancing act between delivering the message that I believe Sorkin is trying to deliver and being labeled a 'liberal biased' show will be difficult to achieve. If the tag sticks the show will likely be dismissed as leftist propaganda and the incredibly important and timely message underlying this drama will be lost. That message - think. Don't listen and agree, think. Find facts. Source facts. Question sources and data until you know you are dealing with facts that have not been tampered with or spun in any way and then think again about what you've heard. Only then should you make up your own mind about what is at stake and what you should do about it.

I often wonder why watching John Stewart's Daily show is often the most probing investigative journalism into political news and views on any given day. It's easy to say the reasons for this are the interests of the few oligarchs running the media who ensure certain questions don't get asked in the main stream media, but it's more complex than that. It's this complexity Sorkin is trying to take on and investigate as a backdrop to the drama of The Newsroom. Not for the first time we have the creative community shinning a spotlight on issues the mainstream media have purposely left unlit.

Will McEvoy and his team vow to treat viewers as intelligent and give them facts as they happen. Not half truths or conjecture in a bid to be first, but hard facts that are confirmed. They have decided to trust that people will eventually see through the 'entertainment' of news delivered by others and gravitate to their show where all they'll get are the facts surrounding an issue and not the hard sell on how they should feel or think about that issue.

This is fantasy of course. It's television drama. The truth of television is that when ratings drop a show gets chopped and as the movie 'Network' grimly predicted, news is no longer news, but entertainment. Sorkin does a good job to bed the notion in that his team can deliver more and be the envy of others in the field, but it's a sad reality that this is only likely to happen in a fiction.

By the end of the fourth episode the true protagonist in this piece has been given a face - and what a face. Cast perfectly against her historical real world left wing roles, she's the most evil of money grubbing, right wing conservatives - Jane Fonda.

When Will McEvoy stops dancing to the organ grinder's tune, it is Jane Fonda's, Leona Lansing, who outlines the modern MO for assassinating public figures; trap them in a damning moral situation, shame and humiliate them, then remove them and be praised for placing morals over profits. It's a chilling reminder of how often even the facts of a story are not actually the facts. But this is Sorkin's skill as a storyteller. To give us multiple layers of intrigue and complication and to twist them and torment the characters involved. He manages to do this moments after making us love them. 

Played against the big stories as they unfolded across 2010 and 2011, this historical merging of drama and reality will no doubt infuriate the more anal retentive viewers, as dates are mashed together and stretched in order to deliver the wanted news story to the correctly themed episode. (Gun control features as Gabrielle Giffords shooting unfolds, shortly after the BP oil spill begins - factually out by as much as six months.) For those who can suspend their disbelief and enjoy the drama for what it is, the whole thing is a masterful re-working of history, done to examine the media and not the events being reported on.


The casting is terrific with Jeff Daniels leading the ensemble cast and Emily Mortimer as his EP and ex lover. Sam Waterston is understated but all powerful as the head of news.


The rest of the cast combine well and are set to do  what successful ensembles should do, grow slowly over time so the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. As each of the Newsroom's characters gain depth, so will all those around them until the audience can't help but love each and every one. 


Dev Patel from 'Slumdogs' fame is suitably meek and mild as the office tech head. Olivia Munn gets to play with one of the best character on TV in years, a double PHD wielding financial analyst with killer looks. But it is Sorkin's mastery of the frisson of unrequited love that promises to make this show such a joy. I already long for Jim and Maggie to be together, although I know they won't go there easily. I know Will and his EP should be together but their shared baggage prevents them and all around are other couples waiting to declare themselves.


The Newsroom should end up being a huge critical hit. Will it be a rating hit as well? Who knows. It deserves to be, but it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

Overall the Newsroom has gone to the top of my weekly 'MUST SEE' list and it gets a solid 4+ stars. I'm hoping the final star will come in future seasons as I'm drawn to love each and every member of this great ensemble drama even more that I do after four episodes.