The 112th Congress
From The Newsroom (Season 1, Episode 3, “The 112th Congress”)
Categories:
Run time: 4:18
Clip Description: An indictment of the failure of the media to serve the central role of monitoring politics and a review of the foundations of news media Episode timestamps: 3:06 to 7:24.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip is useful for the monitorial or watchdog role of the press – the idea that a free press exists to hold power to account rather than simply to report what each side said. It raises the difference between objectivity as balance and objectivity as accuracy, and the problem of false balance that follows when the two are confused. It also opens onto the commercial incentives shaping news production, the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the question of who decides which arguments belong inside the sphere of legitimate debate.
Possible Uses in Classroom: Use this clip in a unit on the media, early, as the statement of what the press is supposed to be for – before students look at what it actually does. It pairs with the site’s other clip from this same episode, Will McAvoy Calls out News Organizations in News Night: that one is a newsroom turning its criticism inward on the business it belongs to, while this one is the broader indictment of the press’s failure to monitor politics. Running them together lets students separate a critique of journalists from a critique of the conditions journalists work under.
Discussion Questions
- The charge in this clip is that the press stopped doing the job of monitoring politics. Test it against the competing account: audiences have more news available, more choice, and more of it free than at any previous point, and they have largely chosen what they have chosen. If the watchdog function is failing, is the failure with journalists, with owners, or with readers — and which of those three could be fixed by anything other than money?
- The watchdog role is a professional norm, not a legal duty. Nothing requires any news organization to put a reporter in a statehouse, and the number who do has fallen sharply over the past two decades. What fills the gap — partisan outlets, nonprofit newsrooms, officials’ own social media feeds, or nothing? And what specifically changes about how a state legislature behaves when no one is in the room to write it down?
- This is a speech built to be agreed with, aimed at a Congress the audience already dislikes. So do the harder version: name one story where the outlet you trust most did the thing the clip complains about — covered the conflict instead of the substance, or let a convenient claim stand because checking it would have annoyed its own readers. If nothing comes to mind, is that because it does not happen, or because you have never gone looking?
Video to come. In the meantime the scene runs from 3:06 to 7:24.