Like Emily Nussbaum, Alan Sepinwall finds Sorkin's The Newsroom wanting:
His shows are vehicles for entertainment — at his best, Sorkin is on the short list of the most purely entertaining storytellers this medium has ever known — but they are also vehicles for Sorkin's ideals about how the world should be, how often it falls short of those ideals, and how noble it is to keep trying to make them into a reality.
Sorkin claims to be politically unsophisticated:
All of my training and experience and education has been in playwriting. I have no political sophistication or media sophistication, so if I was talking to Howard Kurtz or you, you could easily dismantle whatever argument I’m going to make. It is a layman’s amateur argument. Oftentimes, I write about people who are smarter than I am and know more than I do, and I am able to do that simply by being tutored almost phonetically, sometimes. I’m used to it. I grew up surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, and I like the sound of intelligence. I can imitate that sound, but it’s not organic. It’s not intelligence. It’s my phonetic ability to imitate the sound of intelligence.
Alyssa Rosenberg counters:
Sorkin insists he’s just an artist, he doesn’t have anything sophisticated to say, even though the animating subject for a huge chunk of his career has been critiques of the media. He can’t have it both ways.
The Dish 