Aaron Sorkin is sorry if journalists thought “The Newsroom” was a training video instructing them how to do their job.
When the creator of the HBO drama about a cable news broadcast team was asked what he learned about the media through the series, BuzzFeed reports he told an audience at the Tribeca Film Festival that he would like to “apologize” for the “terrible misunderstanding.”
See video: Amy Schumer, Josh Charles Skewer Aaron Sorkin in ‘Foodroom’ Parody
“I’m going to let you all stand in for everyone in the world, if you don’t mind. I think you and I got off on the wrong foot with ‘The Newsroom’ and I apologize and I’d like to start over. I think that there’s been a terrible misunderstanding,” Sorkin said. “I did not set the show in the recent past in order to show the pros how it should have been done. That was and remains the furthest thing from my mind. I set the show in the recent past because I didn’t want to make up fake news.”
“It was going to be weird if the world that these people were living in did not in any way resemble the world that you were living in… Also, I wanted the option of having a terrific dynamic that you can get when the audience knows more than the characters do,” Sorkin continued. “So, I wasn’t trying to and I’m not capable of teaching a professional journalist a lesson. That wasn’t my intent and it’s never my intent to teach you a lesson or try to persuade you or anything.”
Also read: Aaron Sorkin on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Death: 10 Other People Who Were About to Die Won’t
“Newsroom,” which Sorkin said he’s “just now starting to learn how to write,” will return this fall for its third and final season.