Here's How The Newsroom Covered Reddit's Failed Boston Bombing Manhunt
The Newsroom's timeline, which trails along just behind the present day, has finally caught up with last year's Boston Marathon bombing. In the season premiere, Will McAvoy and friends turned their Sorkin-given powers of razor-sharp righteousness toward Reddit's botched online hunt for the bombers.
It's salting an old wound for redditors, many of whom now consider the incident a low point for the site and regularly shut down attempts to play internet detective with cracks about how Reddit got the wrong guy. "Well done, faceless mob," as McAvoy puts it. (Incidentally, that's also the top Reddit comment on this video.)
But Aaron Sorkin doesn't lay all the blame for what happened to misidentified man Sunil Tripathi and his family at Reddit's feet. It took a litany of reporters at major outlets, with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers among them, to magnify the crowd's mistake for mass consumption.
The Newsnight team has already been catastrophically duped once. This time, they get to watch it happen to everyone else, while they laugh, cry, love, monologue at length, crack impossibly wise, and maybe teach us a little something. Something about ourselves.