There was something supremely strange yesterday about the spectacle of CNN’s chief business correspondent, Ali Velshi, standing outside in Atlantic City and getting battered by the rain from Hurricane Sandy. It’s odd enough that news networks drop all other subjects, foreign and domestic, when a big storm bears down on the U.S. (not that such storms shouldn’t be covered). But there’s something particularly strange about the decision to focus on on-the-ground reporters, rather than on reporting on actual disaster management, most of the decisions about which are made inside government and non-profit offices, rather than at the edge of bodies of water. And it’s particularly strange that we’ve focused on making reporters take risks that carry with them very little possible information reward.

There wasn’t much information that Velshi was communicating that he couldn’t have conveyed from inside the building: it’s not as if he couldn’t have told CNN viewers that the streets were flooded without standing in the street with water lapping over his boots and the wind tearing at his clothes, or that power in Atlantic City had gone out. For much of his time on air, Velshi wasn’t actually verbally communicating information and observations at all: he was just the focus of shots showing him being buffeted by gusts of wind. The point of having him out in the storm was to show him being vulnerable to it, despite the fact that all government officials, in-studio anchors, and people with any damn sense agree that you should not actually venture out into a hurricane at risk to yourself and the people who may have to come rescue you. I understand that there’s an extent to which storm reporting is a visual medium, but the same image repeated over and over again doesn’t actually convey new information. And showing Velshi talking about events, like the reported flooding of the New York Stock Exchange, that he couldn’t possibly have been party to or been able to verify or deny, in the storm is a weird form of novelty reporting. He was out there because it’s nerve-wracking and exciting to see him out there, not because it furthered CNN’s reporting in a substantial way for him to be there.

There are enough reasons journalists have to consider whether or not to take serious risks that are absolutely necessary for them to incur in order to get information that wouldn’t be available otherwise. It wouldn’t be remotely amusing for us to watch Lara Logan experience sexual assault in Egypt or Anthony Shadid die of an asthma attack in Syria, even though those scenes might have given more precise context on the stories they were covering than people standing around in raincoats possibly could about the specifics of a hurricane. So there’s something deeply strange about the idea that we treat seeing Velshi and his colleagues out in the storm as if they’re entertainment or information, that there’s this competitive streak about which correspondents stay out longest, when we could maybe get substantive information about relief efforts or available resources instead. Or as my friend Katie Welsh tweeted, “Dear CNN, If your reporter has to HOLD ON TO A TREE, we DO NOT WANT TO WATCH THEM OUT THERE.”

As much as I’m not enjoying The Newsroom, recapping it for Press Play has actually helped me clarify some things that I care about in progressive television. I don’t just want to see progressives or progressive-coded characters win because they’re factually or morally correct, or because they do the right thing against the odds. I want to see clear explanations of systems, and to see the characters work through them. As I explained in this week’s recap, that’s part of why Don is becoming my favorite character on the show, because he’s all muddled up in the gears:

After Will’s epic on-air apology for falling down on the job, Don sits down to have a heart-to-heart with Jim, who has effectively replaced him. “I would have loved to be part of that. I could have done the show you guys want to do. I’m equipped for that,” he confesses. “You’ve got a mandate. Bring viewers to ten o’clock. I don’t . . . I have to cover Natalee Holloway. And you guys set me up to look like an asshole before I even got started.” Don is like Will, to a certain extent, a talented man who succumbed to the pressure to put on a show that was likable rather than substantive. But unlike Will, he’s relatively anonymous. He could be fired and Elliot’s show would keep ticking on without him. If Don is going to live in hopes of being able to make the kind of show that Jim and MacKenzie are making for Will, he has to keep his job. And that means kowtowing to a lot of unattractive people’s unattractive senses of what counts as news…

And I’m not even sure Jim gets the message later when Maggie, in one of the few moments in The Newsroom where a woman gets to explain something to a man, tells Jim that Don’s failure has more complex roots than Jim acknowledges. “Don’s hands are tied,” Maggie says. “He got marching orders to get the ratings up at ten. And he’s driving a different car than McAvoy. Elliot’s smart, but he can’t do what McAvoy does. Plus, his salary’s tied to ratings.” That, not a studied, cowardly commitment to blandness for its own sake, is the reality of cable news—and the actual source of journalism’s problems.

The show just seems to me like it’s giving up an enormous amount of dramatic potential in having characters spend most of the show making speeches, on air or to each other, dealing with their personal lives, and then, throwing us five minutes of people pulling together the guests who will appear on air or Charlie negotiating with Leona and Reese. Sorkin wants us to think his characters are Interesting Hero Journalists but we essentially never see them doing actual journalism, so we don’t get a sense that Maggie is great at weeding out idiots, or that Jim is terrific at developing relationships with sources, or that Neal is unbelievably good at sorting through documents, something that would have been particularly useful in this last week’s episode in documenting the Koch brothers’ funding of Tea Party operations.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the most important thing in news, cable or otherwise, is not what Will McAvoy says on air. It’s what his staff has the resources to dig up. It’s what kinds of pressures producers like Don are under, and what they can negotiate to broadcast. State of Play did a particularly nice job of this in the scene where Bill Nighy’s editor went to meet with a suit who laid out the specific issues at stake in their negotiations with the government over broadcast licenses, and then capped the budget for a big scandal story the reporters were working on. The miniseries spent serious time negotiating with editors over content, whether they’d proved a story well enough, whether they were at risk of getting sued. By the time something gets to someone like Will McAvoy, or to the front page of the paper, most of the pressure’s already been exerted on the information. We get flashes of that with Don. But The Newsroom can only get better the more it focuses on actual process and on actual journalism, not on telling Will, or anyone in the audience, that we’re good people because we have certain facts at our disposal and hold certain opinions.

I know I went hard on The Newsroom on Friday, but now that y’all have seen it, I want to talk about the way the show treats reporting, something I wrote about at length for the lovely people at Press Play:

The staff of Will’s show figures out earlier than anyone else that Deepwater Horizon will be a major environmental catastrophe because Neal (Dev Patel), whom Will has earlier identified as “the Indian stereotype of an IT guy” proves to have exceedingly useful insights into the workings of offshore drilling rigs. He gained this knowledge, possessed by no one else on any staff of any publication in all the land, because, my hand to God, he “built a volcano in primary school.”…Jim, possessed of the world’s most coincidental personal connections, turns out to have a college schoolmate working at BP (who makes time to give Jim a ring in the midst of a massive disaster) and a sister who works at Halliburton…The Newsroom cuts away as soon as anyone on staff has a source on the phone. The show is supremely uninterested in the actual and lengthy processes of source development and research. Maybe it’s a tactic to keep the focus on Sorkin’s fast-talking, fact-spewing sock puppets, or to make sure the show whips through a story from the near-past each week, but it lends an airless quality to the proceedings. Everything we need to know, apparently, is already here in this glass and chrome box.

The rarity with which pop culture gets reporting right remains a mystery to me, particularly given the extent to which television has cracked procedurals. Reporting a complex story is exactly like cracking a crime: you have either a precipitating traumatic event or a hint of a secret system at work, pursuit of credible leads and dead ends, development of trust, attempts to build an airtight case, and often, revisions before the final presentation. Sometimes the story changes the world, as with Spencer Ackerman’s reporting on the FBI’s use of virulently anti-Islam training materials, which got President Obama to order them scrubbed. Sometimes all a reporter gets is the satisfaction of a job well-done. Whether on an episodic basis, or on a story-as-season-long arc basis as the original British State of Play did, this should be a relatively easy thing for television to just nail.

The thing that I find genuinely disturbing about The Newsroom is its narrow identification of cable news as the problem and Will McAvoy as the solution. Cable news polarization is a problem, but it’s a problem that ultimately affects a fairly small number of Americans day to day and year to year. The larger problems are ones that affect all sorts of news programs and publications: shrinking staffs and budgets that support less-ambitious reporting, government secrecy and control of information, increasingly stultified and PR-controlled interviews that decrease the possibility of honest conversation and homogenize reporting. Tone and presentation are issues that float on top of this sea of larger challenges.

In response to yesterday’s post, in which I suggested it was time for journalists to start asking white actors, directors, and writers rather than people of color about how their careers have been influenced by race and why Hollywood is so overwhelmingly white, a reader directed me to this fantastic clip of Shame and Hunger director Steve McQueen making precisely that point, laying out exactly the questions that should be asked, and watching as his white male counterparts at the roundable get very, very nervous:

One of the things I think has been interesting about watching folks talk about Lena Dunham, Girls, and race is that it’s one of the only times I can think of where a white creator was asked (quite fairly, I think, though Terry Gross could have been more probing) about race and the role it played in her creation. Like her answers or not, at least Dunham seemed prepared to have a conversation about the assumptions and decisions that made her show what it was. That’s a lot more than any of these older, Oscar-nominated dudes were ready to do. Maybe next time, they’ll be prepared. And hopefully one of the lessons of Girls will be that many more of these conversations should be happening in interviews. As commenter Jenni put it on Twitter, “White people have race, and men have gender. We should always be talking about these things.” Or at least more often.

Hemingway & Gellhorn, HBO’s splashy biopic of Ernest (a mustached Clive Owen) and journalist Martha (an ass-baring Nicole Kidman) has been thoroughly filleted by my fellow critics, and I’m not going to replicate their complaints against what I found to be an oddly trite movie. But there was one thing I found rather striking about it, though more as a cautionary tale than as a thing to praise: the shifts between dramatically different styles of cinematography. Watching Hemingway & Gellhorn felt more than a little like flipping through an Instagram stream, though to less evocative effect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with juxtaposing these different styles and signaling changes in tone for a pair of extremely mercurial people. When Hemingway battles a marlin in Key West, the frame is saturated in blues that in a final shot are soaked in red to mark his suicide by shotgun. In Cuba, and in the throes of marital bliss, they’re captured in blurry pops of color. The image takes on an HD sharpness when it lingers on the breasts and buttocks of dancers in a club who inspire Hemingway and Gellhorn to slip away from a drunken twist, the sight of these beautiful women in their act and changing costumes heightening their mutual desire.

But when it come to the couples’ work, the stylistic showiness of Hemingway & Gellhorn ends up distancing us from the emotion it wants to convey rather than strengthening it. When Hemingway and Gellhorn are working together in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, she filing dispatches for Collier’s, he shooting The Spanish Earth, the movie captures them in the sepia tones and occasionally jerky moments that replicate the kind of footage he and his crew are capturing. When Gellhorn sees a burned baby in China or encounters a young girl with a pet turtle in an opium den, they’re in black-and-white, which lends a documentary cast to her encounters, but also means we don’t have to reckon with the full, horrifying state of the baby’s skin, the damage done to the young girl. And when Gellhorn flees the sight of the horrors at Dachau, she stumbles through a Brothers’ Grimm-style forest cast in mossy grays. Maybe the show’s budget prevented a full-scale or even minor-scale recreation of a concentration camp, but the sequence ends up treating her more like a fairy-tale heroine than a correspondent bearing witness. She sees ugliness, her capacity to bear witness to it is one of the things that defines her, but the movie can’t bear to show us anything but loveliness even in the midst of Gellhorn’s trauma. Both of these sequences would have had much more power had they been presented straightforwardly, if we saw what she saw with a Hollywood approximation of how she saw it.

The thing that’s fun about Instagram is that we can use it to make our lives look more heightened and dramatic than they usually are. But Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn’s lives are supposed to already be as exciting as we’d like to make ours look. The flashiness of the cinematography in Hemingway & Gellhorn feels like an indication of lack of confidence in their story, rather than the deployment of available tactics where they’re needed. Just because you can saturate something with color or swath it in sepia doesn’t mean you have to.

I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I will be spending my White House Correspondents Association Dinner watching punk rock documentaries and drinking wine. But the whole thing is a hilarious spectacle, particularly the rush by news organizations to secure high-profile guests at their tables. And these are the funniest, most revealing guests each of the outlets have scored this year—that we know of so far.

ABC: Christa Miller and Bill Lawrence of Cougar Town. The network keeps the show in limbo forever, but hey, it’ll throw the folks involved some rubber chicken!

AFP: Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters. Oddly appropriate for a newsgathering organization.

Atlantic Media: Sex and the City‘s Darren Starr. Did Carrie ever score a byline in The Atlantic? Her fights with big would fit her in just fine among some of the magazine’s other female regulars.

Bloomberg: Zooey Deschanel. Clear win for odd couple of the evening

CBS: Homeland star Claire Danes. Blatant, but brilliant, Obama-pandering.

Fox: Lindsay Lohan. Not that Fox engages in tabloid journalism or anything.

Huffington Post: True Blood stars and parents-to-be Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer, who will also edit HuffPo’s Vampire Parenting section.

The New Yorker: Portlandia stars and New Yorker profile subjects Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, who presumably will enquire after the welfare of their rubber chicken.

Newsweek/The Daily Beast: Reese Witherspoon, who will totally play Tina Brown in the inevitable biopic.

People: Peeta, we mean, Josh Hutcherson, who will be a mystery to the core WHCA dinner demographic.

POLITICO: MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt who should make for the evening’s most awkward table pairing.

USA Today: Kelli Garner of Pan Am. Well, maybe not anymore. But I guess they could have bet on the Playboy Club?

And though I’m generally loath to yield them pride of place, the Washington Times totally schools the Washington Post. The latter scored Pierce Brosnan. The former, The Artist scene-stealer Uggie.