Inspiration for the Newsroom?
Was The Newsroom's cast inspired by real personalities, since I know that many of the story-lines were based on true news events, but could find no reference to the inspiration behind the lead cast members?
Best Answer
Aaron Sorkin answered this question in an interview with Vulture magazine on June 2012. Contrary to his previous show Sports Night, where the news were made up, in The Newsroom
<< ...the news events will always be real. To make the place seem real, you want to see shards of a news broadcast, you want to see them in rundown meetings, you want to see them doing the job, getting the news. With Sports Night, it was fairly easy to make up fake news that sounded real. All you had to do was say, “And now, the Jets injury report: So-and-so has a torn ACL,” and you’d cut away >>
With regards to the question if the characters were based on real life people, he said that:
<< let’s be really clear about this—no character on the show is based, even a little bit, on anyone from real life. Okay? Anyone. Jeff Daniels is not playing Keith Olbermann. Will bears no resemblance to Keith Olbermann >>
Here's the link to the interview
Keith Olbermann however has a different opinion:
<< This may come as a surprise to Olbermann, who allowed Sorkin to spend several weeks "embedded with" his "Countdown" show during the BP Oil Spill in 2010. Last week, Olbermann told told The New York Times that he believes "The Newsroom" was at least somewhat influenced by his experience on cable news. "This is the second show he's done about my life ...At least this one, I knew I saw it coming. >>
Pictures about "Inspiration for the Newsroom?"
What is newsroom based on?
This story is based on a real-life news scandal from 1998, in which CNN and TIME were both criticized for reporting a dubious and unreliably sourced story that the United States had used Sarin during the Operation Tailwind excursion in the Vietnam War.Is The Newsroom realistic?
This season's focus on August 2011 through November 2012 gives "The Newsroom" plenty of real news to dig into \u2014 and one story that seems entirely fictionalized. (And yes, we see you in the back, conspiracy theorists: Yes, even more fictionalized than real news stories.)Is The Newsroom based on broadcast news?
All the news events are absolutely true. We don't make up the news events. But the characters are all entirely fictional.\u201dWhy did The Newsroom fail?
The pilot was actually pretty solid, but Sorkin's need to rehash arguments he'd had with other people made the show feel unnecessarily and unintentionally mean-spirited, and his didactic monologues on important issues were at best irrelevant and at worst ridiculous. The show died an ignominious death after a season.\
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Pavel Danilyuk, Anna Arysheva, EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA, EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA