“The Social Network” writer and “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (who you may recall is developing an HBO series about cable news) sounds off on the media in The Atlantic today.
Sorkin was asked what his “media diet” is (it is regular–and soft–feature) and the writer turns it into an attack on web-based journalism and conservative figures on talk radio and cable news.
He starts out by explaining his media diet:
I’m not on Facebook and I don’t tweet but I know plenty of people who love both. At the office I’ll have either CNN or ESPN on with the sound off. At night I check in with MSNBC once in a while. The homepage on my web browser is Yahoo, which I’m told it shouldn’t be, but I’ve just been too lazy to change it.
After that, he turned media critic, with a particular focus on Fox News personalities:
Not to be unoriginal but [Glenn] Beck and [Rush] Limbaugh are eye-poppingly awful. It would be easier to buy their love of America if they didn’t have such hate for Americans. They’re my generation’s Joe McCarthy–tarring anyone who disagrees with them with schoolyard epithets and, of course, being “un-American” or even on the side of America’s enemies–but they reach a much, much larger audience than McCarthy did.
…
Yes, I’ve seen Olbermann and Matthews and Schultz and Maddow but they simply don’t compare to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and Coulter. And Ingraham and Breitbart and Palin and Gingrich. (And with Fox News No. 1 on cable and Limbaugh No. 1 on the radio, where did we get the idea that the media was controlled by the left?)