One Cheer for THE NEWSROOM

I suspect that The Newsroom will have a hard time holding its own against Homeland in the Best Drama Golden Globes category, but it was good to see that it at least got as far as nomination. There was nothing particularly new about its premise: The idea of using a show about producing the news as a platform for expositions of various insights from investigative journalism goes back at least as far as Lou Grant, if not further. Nevertheless, The Newsroom managed to do an excellent job of rendering through "dramatic fiction" a keen analysis of just how far "big money" has gone in undermining current political practices in this country. Then, just to make it clear that they were not just picking on the United States, they offered a particularly barbed treatment of how the Japanese media handled the Fukushima reactor story. Stuff like this rarely gets further than penetrating analyses in the progressive press, so HBO deserves credit in letting The Newsroom boldly go where no television drama has gone before.