And another thing about The Newsroom
On the subject of CNN's epic fail yesterday—here's a great Photoshop illustration of the episode—Paul Waldman thinks CNN missed a great opportunity to anticipate the problem and promise to avoid it and focus on accuracy, not on being the fastest. "Maybe," says Waldman, "they would have gained a few viewers."
Maybe a few. But it's hard to imagine such a move being transformational, given the sheer number of places standing at the ready to give you the news. I'm also not sure how much this hurts CNN—a mistake like this, while certainly embarassing, also adds entertainment value to the whole 21st-century media-consumption experience. It's not clear that the takeaway is anyhting harsher than "Thanks for the lolz, news people! We'll keep watching for the next one!"
The episode brings to mind Aaron Sorkin's new show, The Newsroom (minor spoilers follow). Sorkin's premise is that a cable news channel could serve the public by recapturing the approach of Murrow and Cronkite in place of the present-day infotainment status quo. One of the early episodes focuses on the question of whether to report a breaking headline super-quickly vs. waiting till you're sure. CNN got that one wrong yesterday. Sorkin would like people to get it right, and he'd like to show them how.
