Thread by @boardingsoon

[THREAD] I recently started re-watching The Newsroom, my favorite TV series ever. If you set aside the love triangle dramas, the sometimes cringe-worthy physical comedy and the episodes when the journalists are covering fictitious stuff, at the core it is a wish list for /1

Responsible journalism. It depicts a news show that starts covering events through the lens of what the American electorate needs to know to make informed decisions. They refuse to cover the outrageous and the click-baits because they are entertainment and not news. I was a /2

Reporter in my early adult life. I started working as an intern at the second largest newspaper in Brazil while I was still in college pursuing simultaneously my journalism degree and law degree (law is undergrad in Brazil). At first I worked in the afternoons, after going to /3

Journalism school in the morning, and before going to law school in the evening. I got home at midnight, left at 6:30am, studied and did school assignments on the weekend. I had no life for years. But through it all, being a reporter was everything. I was driven by the thought /4

That what I was doing every day made a difference in how people understood the world and what they decided to support or protest. Growing up in a military dictatorship with strict censorship, I was taught at a young age to treasure information. From the earliest time I can /5

Remember, I wanted to be a journalist. In my childhood fantasies I’d defy the government and tell everyone about the torture, the disappearances, the presence of censors in newsrooms. I would tell people what they needed to know to stop it forever. So you can imagine my /6

Excitement at finally making it into a real newsroom. At that point Brazil was a democracy again but people were still ignorant and suspicious of news. I think some had forgotten what news were. After being promoted from intern to reporter I was assigned to the crime desk /7

covering one of the most violent cities in the country. Drug cartels, massacres in slums, kidnappings, I covered it all. I was shot at. I watched police return fire and kill a drug dealer ten feet away from me. With every story I published, I thought things are going to change /8

Eventually I lost that naïveté and gave up reporting. Found a different career and didn’t look back. But series like The Newsroom, movies like The Post, All the President’s Men, The Paper, etc. make me miss journalism. While I admit a soft spot for the theme, I still consider /9

The Newsroom to be a fantastic wake up call. Example: this morning I scrolled through CNN headlines. A sample:
Biden’s response to a heckler
CNN anchor’s stepson reacts to video call of deployed father
Alex Trebek discusses his cancer
SUV swallowed by sinkhole
/10

Truck stuck in reverse in car wash
Promising football recruit killed by train
Netflix most popular titles in 2019
Sharon Stone blocked from dating app
Padma Lakshmi has comeback when mistaken by Priyanka Chopra
Model’s selfie - he looks like his mom!

I could continue but.../11

You get the idea. Good news though: if you manage to scroll all the way down, there is an article about the Iran-US proxy war. I can’t begin to imagine why that is less important than a model looking like his famous mom or video of a car in a car wash, but there you have it. /12

We are being turned into a mob of morons, conditioned to click on entertaining crap because we can’t be bothered to read the real stuff. And because media has shareholders and shareholders care about share value, as long as the SUV in a sinkhole gets more clicks than the /13

Iran-US proxy war, that’s what CNN will place higher. This destructive circle is killing our brain cells. I find myself yearning for a newsroom that will say “enough with the bullshit, let’s make people smart again”. I guess I haven’t lost my naïveté after all. Please watch /14

The Newsroom, then go to the websites of the top 10 news media in the US and scroll through the headlines. Make a list of what would be covered by fictitious ACN. It is fucking scary. Dictatorship-fighting motto: “you get better when you demand better”. /end