Will McAvoy from The Newsroom

Screengrab via The Newsroom/HBO

Say goodbye to the worst parody account on Twitter

The fake Will McAvoy Twitter account is no more.

 

David Covucci

Internet Culture

Posted on Sep 15, 2017   Updated on May 22, 2021, 5:20 pm CDT

We are living through a time now where journalism is more besieged than ever. Sitting in the White House is a man who constantly rails against the spirit of the free press, the protections of the First Amendment, and the media as a whole.

Now would be the time for a journalism man—a man who does the journalism—to redouble his efforts, hunker down, maybe take a large pull of his whiskey, and deliver the truth—the unvarnished, real truth—to a public desperate for it.

Not cower and duck away. But that’s exactly what @WillMcAvoyACN is doing. That’s right, Twitter’s most sanctimonious account, which (remember) is a man channeling the voice of Jeff Daniels’ character from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (yes, this is a thing, and yes, it’s awful)—is finally calling it quits.

Wow. @WillMcAvoyACN (That stands for Atlantis Cable News, mind you), a fake journalism man who spends his time tweeting and trying to match the esprit of Daniels’ character, who has been the subject of much scorn from Twitter, simply for his desire to tell it like it is, despite being a pretend newscaster from a fictional TV is calling it quits. In the era of Trump no less!

How will we get our truths?

Not from @WillMcAvoyACN, who changed America by holding politicians’ feet to the fire. For instance, here’s one of his (more than 125,000!) tweets, this on the scourge of gun violence.

Damn. He even tagged them and everything. That is how you do real journalism, that is how you affect change (note: gun laws were not changed in the wake of this tweet nor were any laws changed in the wake of anything @WillMcAvoyACN did because @WillMcAvoyACN was a person cosplaying a fake journalist).

As befitting a (fake) man who never missed an opportunity to pontificate, @WillMcAvoyACN, who is a fake character based (again) entirely on snippets of witty Sorkin dialogue, gave a long-winded epilogue to his time as a fake throwback newsman for the millennium.

The right time being presumably when the fake Twitter newsperson had ended injustice through his incisive tweets or something.

Something one can do while not pretending to be Jeff Daniels reenacting a news broadcast challenging the Tea Party in 2011.

Is this you talking or Jeff Daniels playing Will McAvoy as written by Aaron Sorkin talking?

Twitter took the loss in stride.

https://twitter.com/fart/status/908465371375484928

The person cosplaying Will McAvoy’s ACN boss Charlie Skinner, played by Sam Waterson in the short-lived Aaron Sorkin show about a newscaster who delivers the news and the newsroom that stood behind him (hence the title The Newsroom) did not respond to a request for comment. He did, however, recently call Donald Trump bad.

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*First Published: Sep 15, 2017, 9:43 am CDT