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ICYMI, Dan Rather is reviewing HBO’s the Newsroom for Gawker. 

Among the issues dealt with in this episode: The fact that we journalists are reluctant to call lies… lies (and thus seldom if ever do.) How anchor persons deal, and don’t deal, with the celebrity aspects of their jobs. What an ego-centric job anchoring is. Office romances, especially among young staffers. And the dangers of going on the air in the early stages of big, breaking news with early reports and rumors, even when your competition is running hard with them; the gut-checks demanded by the pressure of such situations.

Things I especially liked (and know to be true based on my own experience): How a newsroom springs to life when a big breaking story hits. (The example they used is the Giffords shooting in Arizona.) How it’s nearly always true that some good reporter gets fixated on some “way out” story (The example for this is the “Big Foot” story that won’t die.) The sleepless nights of anchormen (and women), who, if they are any good, have more of them than most people—sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for trivial ones.