New York, NY: One of the greatest things about Aaron Sorkin programming is how realistic it seems to be. From sports journalism in the fast-paced dramedy Sports Night to the humanity that lives in the White House in The West Wing, Sorkin has a knack for making shows seem like real renditions of its subject matter.
Sorkin’s latest opus, The Newroom on HBO, continues this tradition by following the lives of reporters, producers, and anchors of live news reporting. Unfortunately, most fans are taking the subject matter a bit too literally, as searches for the show’s latest focus, Operation Genoa, have been flooding the internet.
“So far, this [Operation Genoa]s is the only news event that I didn’t already know about,” stated fan and conspiracy theorist Roger Mueller. “9/11, check. Gulf of Mexico oil spill, check. Osama bin Ladin, check. Nude photos of Olivia Munn, check. The only thing that I wasn’t clear on was this whole Operation Genoa thing, but I knew it had to be real. This is Sorkin we’re talking about. How could he possibly inject a political spin on something as big as this?”
Operation Genoa, the featured story arc of season 2 of HBO’s The Newsroom, is a fictional account of a Black Ops mission in Pakistan where the chemical weapon sarin gas was presumed to be dropped in a US Marine Corp extraction, did not actually happen, although this has not stopped fans of The Newsroom and fans of conspiracy theories to stop hunting. The events were based on the coverage of Operation Tailwind by CNN and TIME Magazine in 1998, a look back on an operation in the Vietnam War where sarin gas was used, although who used it remains debatable.
But you don’t have to take our word for it.
The clarification, however, did little to appease conspiracies. “Obviously the government is trying to shut Sorkin up after giving us an inside look at the White House and the shenanigans surrounding any president,” explained Mueller. “Operation Genoa is real, and I’m going to prove it. Even if I have to splice interview tape and add CGI to prove it.”