Sorkin's Newsroom and American exceptionalism

Charles P. Pierce on the university question-time panel scene from Sorkin's new TV drama:

Things fade in on a panel at Northwestern University, although it's hard at first to determine whether or not it's an episode of Real Time. A liberal and a conservative are yapping at each other like angry Muppets and McAvoy is sitting between them, obviously uncomfortable. He is, it appears, famous for not making waves. People call him "Leno." Anyway, in an answer to a student's question about why America is the greatest country in the world, he goes off on a rant about how it's not, really. Daniels gets to do some discreet scenery-chewing here, and he clearly enjoys it. He gets to wax lyrical about how the country "once went to war for moral reasons, and once struck down laws for moral reasons," thereby confusing the hell out of everyone who ever took an American history class in college. It's what Howard Beale would have said, had he been a professor of American studies, and not a network anchor. Daniels is mad as hell and he's going to throw his BlackBerry across the room.

While we're talking about the idea of American exceptionalism, Uri Friedman provides us with a short history of the term. Apparently it was coined by Josef Stalin. Alyssa Rosenberg calls the show pretentious. Money quote:

It would be easier to overlook this persistent unpleasantness if The Newsroom had hard truths to utter about the state of American political discourse or piercing insights into the workings of cable news. But Sorkin seems unaware or unwilling to admit that quite a lot of people like polarized cable news.