McAvoy’s Final Remark: Who is Undermining Who?
In The Newsroom, news anchor Will McAvoy has a very tense and embarrassing conversation with Nick Santorum’s assistant. In an attempt to expose Nick Santorum’s homophobia, he mistreats his black, gay assistant focusing on the hypocrisy of supporting a man who believes that homosexuality is a disease. The conversation ends with McAvoy forcing the assistant to make a claim against Santorum about his homosexuality after being told by the assistant that the issue is larger than the issue of homosexuality. What we see here is a conflict between non-consequential ethics and virtue ethics. In order to figure out if McAvoy was right in getting the last word in, we have to examine whether the means justify the ends or if the means themselves are the problem. McAvoy refuses to let Santorum get off the hook for his homophobia at the expense of the assistant while the assistant attempts to show that the truth is rarely so black and white and that his situation must be looked at from more than one angle.
Couldry suggests that “there are at least three virtues…which we should want anyone involved in media practice to exhibit: accuracy, sincerity and care” (Couldry, 2012, p. 190). For Couldry, accuracy is “doing what is necessary to achieve truthfulness in specific statements” (Couldry, 2012, p. 192) which means making sure everything told is a fact. Sincerity is “all the background checking and reflecting necessary to ensure that whatever one says is not just accurate in itself but fits more widely with the whole range of other things that one believes about the world” (Couldry, 2012, p. 192). In that way, sincerity is about remaining true to oneself. Care, Couldry writes, “means care over the consequences (of what we say and show through media) for the common space of communication that media makes possible and for the specific individuals who may be damaged by a careless use of that space” (Couldry, 2012, p. 197).
Will McAvoy exhibits the virtue of accuracy because everything he says about Santorum is factual. He also exhibits the virtue of sincerity because he is coming from the non-consequentialist view that supporting an unethical man is unethical. If non-consequentialist perspectives hold that “an act is right because it honors an obligation or fulfills a duty” (Ward, 2011, p. 40) then the action of him confronting the assistant regardless of the assistant’s feelings is just because it fulfills his duty to take down bullies by showing uncomfortable truths. In the words of his friend, he is “hardwired to hate bullies like the way a comic book hero’s born out of a childhood trauma”. Just like Captain America refuses to kill regardless of context, so too does McAvoy refuse to let a bully get off under any circumstance. Where he fails is by not caring. McAvoy thinks Santorum’s assistant is a hypocrite for supporting a man who has a toxic and outdated view of gay marriage. It is a very sincere liberal view. What McAvoy doesn’t realize is that by reducing Santorum’s assistant to just his sexuality he does the same. In failing to see the assistant as a complex human being, McAvoy is also sharing a view of the world that is toxic by the same liberal standards.
When McAvoy talks with the assistant, he is not concerned with anything that might complicate his world view. He doesn’t see the person in front of him as a real person, but as a way to get his message out. He does not think about all of the minorities that are hurt by that kind of careless thinking. That means that McAvoy becomes the bigot as he tries to fight against another bigot which goes against the foundation of his goal. If we apply Kant’s categorical imperative to the situation, the problems become more obvious. McAvoy needs to act in a way that could be made into a universal rule. On the surface, acting in a way that ends bullying seems like a safe moral duty. But McAvoy is simultaneously also acting in a way that supports bigotry which does not pass the categorical imperative. If everyone where to act in a narrowminded way that reduced people to a single thing then the world would not be a better place. Bullies might disappear, but bigotry would be everywhere.
What is most problematic is not that Will was a bigot but that he has an opportunity to not be one and turned it down. Instead of getting the last word in, Will could have apologized or changed his questioning to reflect the fact that there is more to the story than just homosexuality. Will could have also responded to the assistant’s speech and defended his reasoning for only focusing on homosexuality. The fact that Will ignores the main point of the assistant’s argument about how he is more than just a gay man is bad because it is dehumanizing. In the exact moment Will could have shown care and could have reflected on his questions, he choses to be a bigot, making his actions even more dangerous. If Will had been more aware of the consequences of his actions, he could have acted in a way that did not undermine his position.
Trying to bring down a bigot by acting in a way that creates a new bigot is self-defeating and therefore not justifiable. In not showing the virtue of care McAvoy ultimately also violates the non-consequentialist Kantian rule of “respecting humans as ‘ends in themselves’” (Ward, 2011, p. 45) since he selfishly disrespects the assistant by ignoring what he says at the end and using him as a tool to hurt Santorum. When Will’s friend tells him about his comic book heroism about hating bullies, Will responds that Santorum’s assistant wasn’t the bully, which shows us that he’s aware that he treated Santorum’s assistant in a way that wasn’t in line with his non-consequential hero values. In the end, Santorum’s assistant shows us exactly how “virtue ethics of media may be a good way to expose the emerging contradictions in which media implicates all of us” (Couldry, 2012, p. 199).
References
Couldry, N. (2012). Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice.
Ward, S. J. A. (2011). Ethics and the media. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
