Entertainment

Nose for news

Jeff Greenfield (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Ashleigh Banfield (Marion Curtis/Startraksphoto.com)

When Aaron Sorkin asked a star-studded line-up of 14 journalists and politicos to help him develop the second season of HBO’s “The Newsroom,” they jumped at the chance to provide feedback, answer hypothetical questions and share stories from the trenches.

These are busy people, including MSNBC anchors Chris Matthews and Lawrence O’Donnell, CNN anchors Ashleigh Banfield and Natalie Allen, and former CNN and MSNBC President Rick Kaplan. But they weren’t too busy to answer Hollywood’s siren call. In fact, Kaplan and Banfield lobbied to be consultants, and in Banfield’s case, the lobbying began three years before the series was a reality.

“I remember hearing a rumor back in 2009 that Aaron was considering doing for television news what he did for ‘The West Wing,’” says Banfield. After ferreting out his number from a contact at an LA talent agency, she cold-called Sorkin and made her pitch.

“I said, ‘I don’t know if you’re really going to do this project, but if you are, I want to be involved in any way possible.’”

Kaplan, by contrast, fell hard for the series during the New York screening of the pilot in a room full of 300 journalists. The series’ idealistic notion that television news should return to being a serious public service — rather than a vehicle for gossip, celebrity distractions and public relations posturing — struck a chord. “And I walked up to Aaron and said, ‘I have to tell you, it’s exactly where we [in the news business] should be. It goes back to some basic principles I learned when I was working with Walter Cronkite, which is that you have to tell people not just what they want to know, but what they need to know, even if they don’t know they need to know it.”

Then Kaplan took it to the next level, phoning his friend, HBO’s CEO Richard Plepler. “I said, ‘If there’s a season two, you’ve got to get me involved in this.’”

The consultants say Sorkin has been extremely open to their feedback. What he wanted in particular, says former ABC and CNN reporter/anchor Jeff Greenfield, was an idea — a legal catastrophe for the newsroom staff — that could serve as the arc for the entire season. Greenfield and Kaplan weighed in with a scandal from their days at CNN: Operation Tailwind.

The highly controversial story, broadcast in 1997 as a joint CNN/Time presentation, accused the United States military of using sarin gas against American deserters during the Vietnam War. A month later, CNN was forced to retract the story in full; two of its producers were fired. “This is not something I look back upon with fondness,” says Greenfield. “But if you want to talk about a terrific lawsuit? This is it. This is what happens when you get it wrong. And Aaron said, ‘That’s it. We won’t do it in southeast Asia, we’ll do it in the current theater of war (Pakistan).’”

The second season of “Newsroom” appears to be a reboot, and an answer to some critics who found Sorkin’s left-wing political agenda tiresome, his portrayal of female producers insulting and the decision to tailor episodes to events that happened one to two years in the past peculiar.

Do Banfield and company write notes on the scripts? “No,” she says. “He doesn’t send us scripts.”

Now, with a roster of 13 consultants on the payroll (O’Donnell opted out, reportedly saying that he was afraid he’d be too busy to be helpful), there are various ways that the feedback occurs. Says Banfield, “He would issue a question, and we could either e-mail it back, which was very simple, or if I felt I had a lot to offer on that topic, I would pick up the phone and call him and say, ‘Do you have a second? I can tell you what my experience has been.’”

But Banfield says Sorkin doesn’t always take her advice. “I’ve had arguments with Aaron over the behavior of the executive producer (MacKenzie McHale, played by Emily Mortimer). Most executive producers, male or female, aren’t as vulnerable about their personal lives as his is about hers. It makes for a fantastic dramatic character. But I don’t think my female EP would show the vulnerabilities that Emily Mortimer displays.”

And what about the newsroom canoodling? “Yeah, that doesn’t happen, either,” says Banfield.

Greenfield says his problem with the first season was that anchorman Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is a moderate Republican, but Sorkin didn’t let other Republicans strongly make their case. “If [McAvoy] was going to go to war with the Tea Party, then I wanted to see people from the other side who were more articulate,” says Greenfield.

Still, Greenfield is a fan, and an enthusiastic contributor. “It’s being invited inside this world that most people, including journalists, find fascinating. It’s like getting a laminate: You go to a rock concert or a big event and you can go backstage.”

Could they buy a Hamptons summer home with their consultants’ salaries? Says Kaplan, “I’m earning an extraordinary salary. It’s got to be about six cents an hour. It’s not enough to buy a package of gum in East Hampton. And I really don’t care. In my 43 years of doing this, this has been as satisfying an experience as I’ve ever had in my life.”

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