A news organization has a much different responsibility. I might not be telling you the whole story. I might not be telling you a story in a manner that is properly sophisticated.
Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.
Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word "census," and people fall asleep.
I can justify those two things by simply saying, when that stops happening, when we lose our credibility, the show isn't as good.
I worry. I feel like I say these things, and I can hear people clicking off their remote controls across the country.
It's important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. "The West Wing" isn't meant to be good for you.
It's populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling.
Our responsibility is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. That said, there is tremendous drama to be gotten from the great, what you would say, heavy issues.
There really isn't a story that you can't tell inside of it. It's very much a clearinghouse for anything that goes on in the world. So you're not at all limited.
There's a great tradition in storytelling that's thousands of years old, telling stories about kings and their palaces, and that's really what I wanted to do.
They're fairly heroic. That's unusual in American popular culture, by and large. Our leaders, government people are portrayed either as dolts or as Machiavellian somehow.
We're about to shoot an episode on Air Force One, for instance, and we're going to take liberties, small liberties, with Air Force One, as we take small liberties with our White House set.
We're not telling anyone to eat their vegetables, and we do not consider it important in the sense that you're saying.
Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.
Well, what a show like this will do that conventional news reporting can't, is, we can show you the two minutes before and after what you see on CNN.
Well, you know, I have a luxury that news outlets don't. I can tell stories, and it's more difficult for them to tell a story.
You know, one of the things I like about this world, or at least I like about the way we're presenting this world, is these issues are terribly complicated - not nearly as black and white as we're led to believe.
As a result of the awareness and consciousness of decline, an awareness and consciousness of a national ethnicity or an Islamic identity also came into being.
Energy is a concept that has been coined by physicists. There is no observable thing known as energy anywhere.
Establishing an equilibrium between the Islam of truth and Islam as an identity is one of the most difficult tasks of religious intellectuals.
If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honour has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity and this expression of an identity will take different shapes and forms.
In many of the things that people do, they themselves are the centre of attention, but they inscribe some other name on their banner.
In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear.
People first concern themselves with meeting their basic needs; only afterwards, do they pursue any higher needs.
We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality.
We must break problems down into small, digestible bits. We must define the concepts that we use and explain what components they consist of. We must tackle small problems.
In 2000, Aaron received a Peabody Award for his producing of the first season of The West Wing.
Aaron married Julia Bingham on April 13th 1996. The couple divorced in 2001.
Aaron's screenplay for The American President was originally 385 pages long, almost 3 times as long as a regular screenplay.
Aaron had a contract with NBC that was worth $15 million dollars.
Aaron's daughter, Roxy, was born November 17, 2000.
In 1989, Aaron received the prestigious Outer Critics Circle award as Outstanding American Playwright for the stage version of "A Few Good Men".
Aaron says he got the plot idea for A Few Good Men from his sister Deborah who as a lawyer was once involved in a case of a Marine who killed another Marine.
Aaron graduated from Syracuse University with a B.F.A. in Theater.
In 1993, Aaron's screenplay for A Few Good Men was nominated for a Golden Globe.
Aaron wrote the screenplay for the 1995 The American President.
Received Emmy nominations for The West Wing in the catergories of: 1. Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Writing 2000) 2. Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Writing 2001) 3. Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Writing 2002) 4. Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Writing 2003) Received Emmy awards for The West Wing in the catergories of: 1. Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Writing 2000 with Rick Cleveland) 2. Outstanding Drama Series (Executive Producer, 2000) 3. Outstanding Drama Series (Executive Producer, 2001) 4. Outstanding Special Class Program (Executive Producer 2002 The West Wing: Documentary Special) 5. Outstanding Drama Series (Executive Producer, 2002) 6. Outstanding Drama Series (Executive Producer, 2003)
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