Opinion

Break the news

In the speechiest moment of tonight’s speech-clogged pilot of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO show “The Newsroom,” a bland news anchor played by Jeff Daniels is sitting between two stentorian TV pundits (a liberal and a conservative) when he decides to uncork an explanation of why they’re both wrong.

They think America is the greatest nation. Daniels’ anchorman — think William Hurt in “Broadcast News,” plus 20 years of reading “The Nation” — sprays, at the Ludicrous Speed that indicates Sorkin thinks he’s being particularly brilliant, a long list of misleading and downright absurd assertions about America’s alleged flaws, of which the most spurious is that we rank “178th in infant mortality.” Out of 220 countries on Earth? Really?

As far as I can tell, Sorkin took this lie from one of several raggedy unsourced leftist websites. Or he visited the CIA Factbook, which put the US at No. 173 in infant mortality, and got the number wrong by five.

But wait: The CIA survey is in reverse order. So No. 1, Afghanistan, is the worst country for infant mortality. The best, Monaco, is No. 220. That puts the US at No. 47 (while other surveys put us slightly higher, in the 20s).

Still alarming, no? Not really. As the identity of the winner hints, a lot of the states ahead of us are not so much countries as country clubs. It’s hardly fair to compare a diverse continental power of 300 million souls with a rich city (Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau all beat us) or a tax haven (Isle of Man, Jersey, Luxembourg). You might as well break off New England and count that as a country.

Cuba beats us, but Cuba is a dictatorship that lies about everything. I doubt Sorkin would want his next child delivered in Cuba.

Still, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia and Japan beat us. Why is that?

Because doctors in other countries look at a premature fetus and think “medical waste.” Our doctors think, “life to be saved,” because in fact ours is the greatest country and that’s how we roll.

Premature birth, which is the leading cause of infant mortality, is much higher in the US than in other countries — 65% higher than in Britain. The National Center for Health Statistics calls this the “primary reason” Western Europe has better numbers.

The World Health Organization notes it is “common practice” in Western Europe not to count a delivery as a live birth until the child has survived for a set period of time. If the baby draws one breath outside the womb in the US, that’s a live birth. A lot of these babies don’t make it and drive up our mortality numbers.

Moreover, minority babies in all of these countries are afflicted with higher infant mortality, and the US has a lot more minorities than places like Britain. (And Britain has a lot more minorities than places like Finland). Somehow I doubt Sorkin wants the US to return to 1952 demographics.

Later in the show, Daniels’ character is galvanized by his impassioned producer (Emily Mortimer) after an argument representing the only political positions Sorkin knows: Cynical Left and Idealistic Left. She warns (in 2010) that “there’s gonna be a huge conversation: Is government an instrument of good or is it every man for himself?” and the anchor is needed to “frame that debate,” i.e. blatantly editorialize and slant, which doesn’t really sound like the thing that will, in her words, “restore journalism as an honorable profession” since it is, in fact, the reason Americans hate journalists. (Also: Paul Ryan’s plan to increase spending from $3.6 trillion to $4.9 trillion over the next decade is hardly “every man for himself.”)

Daniels’ anchor praises the Constitution as a masterpiece; has Sorkin read it? It’s an elaborate map of roadblocks to grandiosity and a list of negative freedoms, things the government can’t do to you. Daniels literally scoffs at freedom; in another ridiculous line he claims that of 200-plus nations, 180 “have freedom.” Sure.

Sorkin may fancy himself a sophisticated World Citizen but he doesn’t seem to get out much. Even in Britain and Canada there is no First Amendment. In both countries you can be prosecuted for what you say. In the UK, a college student spent two months behind bars this spring for tweeting racist remarks about a soccer player.

Mortimer fires off a line that journalism’s duty is “Speaking truth to stupid.” The speed and the liberalism of Sorkin’s dialogue reinforce each other. The audience, nodding along, thinks that people are liberal because they’re smart. The Mortimer character also says it’s time for the anchor to use his brains to be “patriotic,” but someone who, like Sorkin, is prepared to believe, without checking, the foulest rumors about his own country is pretty far from a patriot. And pretty far from smart.

Sorkin’s foundational intellectual error is Nostalgism, a lazy faith in some perfect past. Daniels’ speech envisions America getting back to being a better place, saying we used to “wage wars on poverty, not poor people.” The facts are otherwise. Welfare spending increased under George W. Bush, plus another 40% under Barack Obama, and is now just under $1 trillion (and yet the poverty rate is up to 15%).

When was this imaginary moment of American splendor? The segregated, repressed, Red Scared 1950s? The rioting, assassination and Vietnam-poisoned 1960s? The 1970s of Watergate, stagflation and energy crises? The “greedy,” AIDS-wracked, jingoistic 1980s? Don’t even get me started on the 1990s, when a “liberal” president threw millions off welfare, screwed the unions with NAFTA, blessed the banks with deregulation and signed the Defense of Marriage Act.

If there was a moment in American history when liberals ever declared, “This is great. Let’s freeze things as they are,” I missed it. But Sorkin isn’t interested in thinking anything through; he is, like the blowhard TV pundits “The Newsroom” deplores, interested merely in lashing out. His speeches are what Lionel Trilling once called conservatism: irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.