There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don't mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that's provisional, and purely functional, if barely-your Meadowlands, your Knights of Columbus halls, your strip malls. These are dumps, but our dumps. Among my own cherished dumps are old newsrooms. My first was the Trentonian, a New Jersey tabloid that's still limping along, though its former headquarters, where I worked, now houses a gypsum-supply company.
Peacock's The Paper, Apple TV+'s The Morning Show, FX's The Lowdown, and Netflix's The Woman in Cabin 10 offer their own visions of who newspeople currently are and what the news should be. Their genres vary, as does the degree to which they actually assess current media culture and whether it's under attack. But they all share a baseline amount of respect for and hero worship toward their protagonists, which feels sometimes comforting, sometimes naïve.