Hmm.

In the first scene of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, Jeff Daniels' Will McAvoy, setting up the entire basis of the show existing, has an "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" moment during a heated political panel discussion wherein he snaps out of his cozy web of neutrality and starts dropping bombs about the reality of America's global standing. The thing I don't understand is that if McAvoy is considered to be by definition a man "whose success is largely the result of never offending anyone," why the hell would he even be on such a panel in the first place? Hell, the first thing we hear the moderator say to him is that he doesn't expect anything mildly interesting from him one way or the other, that he is the "Jay Leno of the news." It's not as if we're led to believe McAvoy planned on the event being his coming-out party and he asked to be on the panel, and yet for some reason the event's planners, when putting together a rabidly partisan panel that would generate YouTube heat on college campuses, ie create the very media buzz for it's own sake that McAvoy later rails against, said "hey you know what, let's get that guy who has built an entire career on getting paid to say nothing and perturb nobody, and stick him right in the center of things!" It'd be like suggesting they put Derek Jeter on The Jersey Shore: you should be laughed out of the meeting.