It’s not Propaganda if I Like It
Leadership
Comedian Marc Maron once said the main way people learn something is simply “somebody told them.” Recency and latency biases mean we tend to prioritize information more based on when we hear it than on how accurate it really is. There are two television writers in particular (in)famous for demonstrating that as long as information is presented authoritatively, people will believe it regardless of whether it is true or not. These are Aaron Sorkin and Taylor Sheridan.
Sorkin had already made a name for himself in films and plays before The West Wing premiered in 1999. However, it was that show that established him as the premier writer of fictional characters who win arguments against other fictional characters who represent everything he does not believe in. He established a winning strategy – cast great actors to play the characters who support his views and then write the story in such a way that they will always get the chance to shut down their opposition. This would usually involve either a debate in which the author avatar would leave the other side unable to offer a convincing counter argument, or an impromptu speech set to inspiring music that a character was somehow able to come up with on the spot.
While The West Wing was widely acclaimed, ran for seven seasons, and won 26 Emmy Awards, Sorkin failed to find the same success in his follow-ups. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip used the same formula – with the first episode featuring an impassioned speech from Judd Hirsch about the importance of television writers using their platform to critique society. Critics and audiences failed to find the formula as compelling the second time around and the show was cancelled after one season. Five years later, Sorkin returned with The Newsroom – another series about the importance of integrity in television – this time centered on Will McAvoy, a news anchor and Sorkin’s author avatar.
Like his previous two shows, The Newsroom features an iconic speech delivered in the first episode meant to demonstrate how articulate and intelligent the characters are (the ones that Sorkin politically agrees with at least). Here, Will McAvoy is given the chance to answer the question, “What makes America the greatest country in the world?” at a journalism school. His response is to claim the question is flawed because America lags behind the rest of the world in several areas, the most striking of which is infant mortality, which he claims America is ranked at 178th.
There are only around 200 countries in the world. This would mean that America is one of the worst places a person can possibly have a child. Anyone planning to have a kid should stay as far away from the U.S. as possible. It seems almost too ridiculous to be true – because it is. Sorkin read the list backwards.
Perhaps it was Sorkin’s prestige or multiple Emmy Awards that caused no one at HBO to double-check his data, but for whatever reason, the episode aired with a supposedly smart character claiming it is safer to be pregnant in Nigeria, Pakistan, or Mongolia than in the U.S. So why did people believe this? Why did people completely accept this bizarre claim as fact? Why did this clip go more viral than the show ever did? (The episode aired to 2 million viewers. The speech on YouTube has almost 5 million). The first is that he said it authoritatively. When a talented actor says something with significant conviction, citing statistics, and demonstrating absolute assurance in his words, people will assume he knows what he’s talking about. The other is confirmation bias. Will punctuates his speech with the claim that America used to be the greatest country in the world until it got ruined by, what he calls, “the worst generation ever.”
Nothing unites an in-group like finding an out-group to call themselves better than. Baby boomers do this to millennials. Millennials do this to Gen Z. Gen Z will do this for the next generation. Whatever objections Baby Boomers or even older Gen X audiences might have had to their country being lambasted by Will McAvoy could be laid to rest because of that shot at millennials. When they were in charge, America was the greatest country in the world. It is the out-group that is really being criticized. Now, instead of feeling like they are on the receiving end of the insults, they can perceive themselves in the character Aaron Sorkin so desperately wants to be seen as intelligent (which would also imply that Sorkin himself is intelligent).
While Sorkin has since abandoned television to focus on film and theater, a new showrunner emerged who has found success using the same formula – Taylor Sheridan, the creator of the hit series, Landman. Like The Newsroom, Landman also features a speech early on that became more popular than the show itself.
Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, works for a major petroleum company. Early on, he meets a causation lawyer who makes a joke about wind turbines and green energy being competition for the oil companies. Tommy’s response, much like Will McAvoy, is to teach this ignorant millennial about how the world really works and demonstrate how intelligent he is.
His speech serves two purposes – to show how important oil is to the U.S. infrastructure, and to belittle wind power as completely inefficient. He lists various things in America reliant on oil such as cars, cosmetics, and plastics, as well as offering a takedown of the wind turbine they are standing under. He points out that because of the amount of concrete used to build it, along with the need for oil to winterize the blades, it will ultimately never offset its carbon emissions. The implication is clear – oil is necessary; green energy is a fool’s errand.
The speech is impactful – delivered passionately by a great actor giving points that are hard to counter. The young lawyer is given her humble pie and the audience gets reassurance that their worldview is the correct one. If a viewer never bothered to look up the information Norris is saying and simply trust that he must be correct for citing specific numbers, they would not realize he is completely wrong. Wind turbines generally offset their carbon emissions within a year. Ironically, his argument falls apart even if they did not, simply because they would still be producing less carbon waste than oil plants.
Much like Will McAvoy’s speech in The Newsroom, this scene went viral across YouTube and Twitter, with fans enthusiastically celebrating how ignorant supporters of the other side of the argument are. The main difference is the political perspective these shows offer. The Newsroom appeals to a left-wing audience; Landman appeals to a right-wing one.
Aside from showing how different sides of the political aisle can come together as long as the subject of criticism is a younger generation, these scenes highlight how easily people fall for propaganda as long as it is given through a performance that inspires confidence. This is why people trusted Enron when told they were “too big to fail.” This is why people trusted investment banks prior to the 2008 real estate crash when they were told their money was safe. Everything done from a PR perspective was done with the same motivation that Sorkin and Sheridan had when writing their shows. People trusted the information because it confirmed what they wanted to believe and because the people giving it seemed to know what they were talking about. What these scenes teach is not about the green energy debate or where America stands compared to the rest of the world. What they ultimately demonstrate is that speaking confidently is not the same as speaking truthfully.