Newsroom Factroom - News Night with Will McAvoy (S02E05)

As if on cue, the show dropped the lawyer bit longer enough to get back to real life events. Sorkin goes after Rush Limbaugh's slut comment, continuing the tradition of highlighting conservative radio's most childish lines. As stated previously concerning the Genoa storyline, the real name of the operation won't be mentioned here. The details will be compared (based on internet archives, etc.) to actual events, but the technologies used will not be verified since most of the current internet wasn't around during the time period of the original story. This episode portrays March 16th, 2012, so most of this should ring a bell...

The legend: accurate, potentially accurate, or inaccurate.  Action...

• Two car bombs went off in Damascus, Syria, in the same news cycle as when the tape of George Zimmerman's 9-1-1 call is released.
• Not quite... but the dramatization of the time period is worth the small change.
• The March 2013 Syria bombings are well documented, but the date that flashes right before Will begins reporting on the story is March 16th, 2012, which doesn't work. The bombings took place on March 17th at 7:30am local time, making it March 17th 12:30am in New York, the same day.
• Zimmerman's 9-1-1 does seem to have been released the night of March 16th during the hour of 10pm ET. This is evidenced by the few outlets which did get up the audio that same day and hour, and then the majority, which followed the next day with articles on the audio content.
• It's unclear why the date chosen was the 16th rather the 17th... Had it been one day later, there would be no issues with this.
  
• A douche-bag boyfriend of Sloan's posted naked pictures of her on the internet (in reality).
• No, but someone did try to do this to Olivia Munn...
• Olivia Munn did have alleged naked pictures of her leaked on the internet around the same time frame in which this episode takes place. Olivia is a terrific actress and beautiful to boot, so none of those pictures will be linked to here. If you want to research this on your own, Google's available 24/7 and reputable news outlets such as HuffPo reported the story as there seemed to be a rash of celebrity phone hacking at the time.
• Project Genoa: The press liaison for the ONI gives Charlie a manifest from the mission.
• Nope, because the Navy wasn't involved, at least not in the original story.
• ONI stands for Office of Navy Intelligence, which adds yet another branch of the military to the operation. Nowhere in the available information posted by CNN is there reference to the Navy. Army, Air Force, and Marines are all referenced in the apology, but never the Navy.

Two fact checks intentionally omitted: the fake World News Daily story about the "Righteous Daughters of Jihadi Excellence" and the edits to the George Zimmerman 9-1-1 tape. WND was so upset by Sorkin's portrayal of them in this episode, they responded, twice. By sending the CEO of WND on the warpath for HBO, if Sorkin was trying for earned media by picking on WND, he banked it, can retire, and live off the interest. Joseph Farah's direct response might have single-handedly renewed the show for a third season. He even said he was going to watch an episode... 

McAvoy just gained a viewer. 

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