Aides of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign are speaking out about what they say is counterfactual coverage on HBO's "The Newsroom."
The Salt Lake Tribune reports the former aides are angry at the show's depiction of character Jim, a campaign embed, getting kicked off the press bus for confrontational and aggressive questioning in the most recent episode.
"You all would have heard about that if it had happened" in the real campaign, says Ryan Williams, a Romney campaign spokesman who traveled with the former Massachusetts governor. The show "doesn't seem to be very close to the truth," he adds.
If there was space, Williams says, legitimate news outlets -- even those who were super-critical -- were welcomed aboard the campaign's press bus or on the campaign planes. At one point, some reporters covering Romney had to take a separate press plane but that was only because so many journalists were traveling with the Republican candidate, Williams notes.
A consistent theme in defense of "The Newsroom" is that it presents an idealized depiction of how newsgathering ought to happen, not how it does. But with Jim's quixotic mission, following the press bus on his own, the six episodes remaining in "The Newsroom"'s second season may be presenting a straw man villain.
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