Review by David A.Sylvester
The Morning Show goes out of its way to present a fresh perspective of a #MeToo case. And it does have a lot going for it: dynamic script, great acting, wonderful scenes. The story is patterned on the NBC case of Today Show co-anchor Matt Lauer who was fired for indecent behavior, sexual misconduct and in one case, rape.
This version of the case deliberately tries to present all sides, including the culprit’s experience and identifies with the victims in their own offices – at last!
In the end, however, it’s only a crack in the surface of corporate collusion and denial of the abuse of victims in their own offices. If they admit to the hidden suffering among themselves, how can we expect them to recognize the obvious suffering of the poor and powerless around the world, victims of American policies left out of the “news”?
Celebrity cast including Jenifer Aniston as high-priced, social climbing celebrity who goes through life, as the up-and-coming “nobody” Reese Witherspoon puts it, “like a wet cat.” Steve Carell is the bombastic narcissist who spouts cliches of entitlement and doesn’t notice how everyone cringes when he goes on his rants.
Still, it’s hard to have much sympathy for either Carell or Aniston. Aniston captures the nastiness of her character all too well and Reese Witherspoon claws her way back into the show with a unpleasant but apparently necessary toughness. Yes, Carell’s Matt Lauer gets a well-deserved ostracism, and to its credit, The Morning Show goes beyond the specific cases of sexual abuse and delves into the corporate culture of denial that enabled the abuse to continue for years.
However, truth be told, the #MeToo movement is only touching the most obvious veneer of the real scandal of corporate news: the culture of denial about reality itself. Every major network uses a tightly controlled scripted theater of “news” to peddle an airbrushed, feel-good, self-flattering, consumerist illusion that diverts readers from the reality of life outside these golden cubicles,
When do the multi-millionaire news anchors of this Morning Show style of television reveal any twinges of conscience for their own failure to report “news” about the victims of the U.S.’s wanton bombing – without a declaration of war – of eleven countries since the end of World War II (Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran)?
When do these newscasters question the “news” that glorifies the ideology of free market economics and abandons the mentally ill and drug-addicted to the streets of American cities? Have you ever seen these anchors and reporters discuss or show charts clearly illustrating how the tax cuts have benefited the richest and most powerful compared to the shredding of the social safety net for the weak and vulnerable in the U.S.?
On occasion, there are stories of those “poor dears” suffering from of poverty and neglect, stories that are called “weepers” in the news business, but there is a fog of denial that blurs or distorts any questions about the structures of exploitation and degradation within the system itself.
These highly paid corporate employees interpret “objectivity” to be moral neutrality so they can avoid appearing “political” and alienating advertisers and elitte audiences.
These days, it requires no courage for a TV show or newspaper to castigate the male culture of sexual exploitation of vulnerable women, but why is the abuse of upper class women in corporate America more important than the maiming and murder of whole populations in Palestine, Guatemala, El Salvador, to name a few?
No one in the public arena, neither Republican nor Democrat nor, with a few rare exceptions, Independent, is exposing the roots of the system that is killing and crippling hundreds of millions of lives in the U.S. and around the world in the system’s thirst for control and financial gain. All of it, both the sexual exploitation behind corporate closed doors and the destruction of resistant cultures, comes from the same source: the objectification of other peoples for the gratification of one’s own people’s pleasures.
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