The Dewey Awards Are Real

I thought I was conversant with all the showbiz awards -- even all seventeen of the ones that country music is eligible for -- but this morning I read this item and was introduced to a new one: The TV Academy Honors. Or, rather, I should say I was introduced to a newish one. According to THR, the ceremony's host Dana Delany described it as "a night to award shows that deserve recognition that will probably largely get snubbed at the actual Emmys," but which are worthy of prizes for being about "[h]ow we treat our neighbors": "I applaud all of you for asking these questions." The host giving credit to honorees for expressing their extraordinarily well-developed morality through their artistic work? Come to think of it, that does sound kind of familiar.

Now, I don't want to say these awards are masturbatory spectacles of which everyone involved should be ashamed. But Aaron Sorkin got one for The Newsroom. And since the awards aren't televised and the TV Academy didn't see fit to publish anyone's acceptance speeches, here's what I think Sorkin probably said.

Thank you so much for this honor. As any of you who has read my double- or sometimes triple-length scripts can attest, brevity is a challenge for me, but it's hard not to be effusive when it comes to thanking a body that recognizes the importance of a show like The Newsroom. When I was growing up -- when we all were growing up -- we had a better sense of the world we were living in because, as one of my characters said on The Newsroom, "we were informed. By great men, men who were revered." Some "critics" -- I won't go so far as to mime air quotes physically but I'm pretty sure you can hear them -- mostly in "blogs" or in "twits," had a problem with that line because of the word "men," but I'm just a guy whose consciousness was not just formed but cemented, such that it would and will never be altered to recognize the remarkable changes this culture has undergone in the many decades I've lived in it, at a time when men had important jobs and women -- the ones who were worth a damn, anyway -- knew how to support those men and make them better. In his introduction, Steve Kroft praised my willingness "to raise questions" about the news industry, and of course I am happy to use my work to raise questions about all sorts of things about which I have no direct experience, from social media to sketch comedy to news. And while this award is certainly very nice indeed, if The Newsroom gets passed over at the real Emmys this fall, I think all of us here will know it's because my brand of question-raising and truth-telling is too radical and intimidating to the powers that be. So thank you for this award. It will do for now.