The Newsroom Season 2
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Occupy Wall Street, the Trayvon Martin killing and Benghazi will all be part of season 2 of HBO's 'The Newsroom.'
USA Today reports that The people chasing the stories become the story in Season 2.
Instead of asking the questions, news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) is answering them as the season opens. A lawyer (Marcia Gay Harden) is doing the probing as the cable network faces a massive lawsuit for reporting -- then retracting -- a story alleging the use of chemical weapons by the Obama administration.
Going from hunter to target is not a comfortable position for the news team.
"In the first season, we were going after the Tea Party, what has kind of divided the Republican Party, Daniels says. "This is more about an incident that happens to us. Journalistically, we follow … a very, very wrong path."
The season-long arc, which follows the reporting of a story known as Operation Genoa, is a major structural change from the first season of the drama, which follows the personal and professional lives of a team of cable television journalists.
Newsroom creator Aaron Sorkin found the high-stakes story he was looking for when consultants brought up CNN's 1998 Tailwind fiasco, in which the network retracted a story alleging the U.S. military used nerve gas against American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam war.
"There was a problem with the story. People got fired and people had to resign," says Sorkin, who created The West Wing and won an Oscar for writing The Social Network. "I needed to update it and fictionalize it."
As the Genoa story unwinds, The Newsroom will continue examining real news events from the recent past. The opener picks up in August 2011, just a week after the first-season finale, and runs through Election Night 2012.
