![]() ![]() But the fact is, that’s not selling papers. In fact, he loses his job in part because he’s not willing to bend to the times, and he has an idea of what good journalism is. So her boss, Hammerschmidt, does not operate like Zoe at all. In the halls of Congress, in the White House, in the media and in personal relationships. I guess if there’s one thing that cuts across the entire show, it’s how ambition and power cut across all sorts of different worlds. Her story is there to explore the nature of youthful ambition. We’re exploring characters with deep, unbridled ambition, and her story is not there to paint a portrait of the media. operates in the way that Zoe Barnes does, just like I don’t think politicians operate the way Francis does. I don’t think that most journalists in D.C. Often when I’ve gotten pushback from journalists about Zoe, it’s assumed that we’re trying to posit her as the archetype of what a D.C. She’s not meant to be representative, in a general way, of the media landscape in Washington. NYO: Is Zoe representative of a certain brand of DC journalist or new media journalist? Is she a critique on the lapse of standards in the modern journalism arena?īW: Look, I don’t think one show, no one story can fully encapsulate American media, that’s not our aim. You’re saying, this is something we’re saying is important. What you choose to put on the front page of The New York Observer is a choice. The choice of what facts to report, what facts not to report. The entire history of humanity was agenda-based, in the way that language was used, the way that facts were organized and presented to the world, the ways that lies were presented and organized to the world. ![]() The idea of objective journalism is a concept that’s less than a century old. The notion that’s worth asking, and maybe this show does, isn’t whether Zoe is a good journalist, but whether there’s such a thing as objective journalism. He finds them limiting, because they are a prescription for human behavior, that doesn’t allow you any flexibility. He doesn’t entertain the notion of good and evil. He is a man who doesn’t operate on the same spectrum of ethics that a lot of other people do. It’s like when people ask whether Francis is good or bad. And Zoe Barnes was the perfect opportunity to explore that.īW: I don’t think the terms “good” and “bad” apply to her. Who felt no allegiances, either through nostalgia or prestige, to the old way things were being done. But we were interested in a journalist who felt much more comfortable in this new, instantaneous, fast-paced age. And they still do, people still look at The Times, The Observer, The Post, The Tribune, as a place to localize the discussion, what is important. In the 90s, the big print organs still ruled the day. This is what we were thinking about, how to dramatize the media in House of Cards, as the BBC version couldn’t be used. People were typing out stories on Blackberries and over emails. I remember as an advance guy for Dean, one of my major jobs was trucking around Iowa making sure we had a T1 line everywhere we went so our reporters would have somewhere to file. Now we always have people writing in real time, people are tweeting about events, taking photos of them, and the media has to compensate. ![]() We had full-time bloggers who were writing about these events in real time. That seems par the course now, but in 2004 it was really extraordinary. I remember on the Dean campaign, Joe Trippi was the major architect of this, we instituted a wireless bubble for the press bus. There was very little thought put to the Internet as a campaigning tool. NYO: How did your time working on the campaigns of Chuck Schumer, Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton inform your idea of what Zoe Barnes would look like as a new media blogger?īeau Willimon: When I was working on my first campaign, the Schumer campaign, the Internet was in its infancy. Willimon–the 36-year-old screenwriter and playwright whose next project will be The Breathing Time at the Faultline Theatre (March 21 – April 13)–to help explain the genesis of TV’s most divisive journalist character. ![]()
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