In case you haven’t tuned in, The Newsroom goes behind the scenes at the fictional Atlantis Cable News (ACN) to examine journalism in our increasingly divided political landscape. Much of the first season focused on anchor Will McAvoy’s (Jeff Daniels) on-air tirades against the Tea Party and the political repercussions of those attacks. While the show’s creator Aaron Sorkin aims to soften his politically charged narratives with a spattering of office romance, the show’s strength is its “breaking news” segments. The Newsroom asks viewers to relive experiences like the BP oil spill, Nancy Grace’s Casey Anthony coverage, and the debt ceiling crisis, pulling drama from both the narrative world and our own memories.

At the risk of being mocked by the clearly superior chorus of The Newsroom haters, I unabashedly admit that I’m a fan. I cheered when Will revealed the Koch brothers’ Tea Party control, held my breath through ACN’s reverently cautious coverage of the Tucson shooting, and sat on the edge of my seat waiting for President Obama’s mysterious May 1^st announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Obviously, not everyone loves that kind of drama, and that’s okay. What bothers me as I scour The Newsroom’s popular press reviews is the nagging feeling that I am being judged for my fandom by some elite social club.

I’m not railing against your average “it stinks” reviews. This is a chorus of big-time reviewers–writers for Time, The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post, among others–arguing that The Newsroom is so obviously bad that its mere hundreds of fans only enjoy the show because we have no idea what good programming is because we “never watch TV.” They accuse The Newsroom’s supposedly self-righteous viewers of recommending the show to “less enlightened people than themselves” as a ploy to sound intelligent. There are even insinuations that the show’s viewers are tuning in for the purpose of “luxuriating in its particular badness [as] a kind of Twitter parlour game.” In this sea of hatred, it becomes hard to tell whether charges of “elitism, self-righteousness, windbaggery and bias” are being leveled at The Newsroom or its fans.

In the name of fairness (and balance), I’ll admit that some of the critiques of the show itself are reasonable. Sorkin likes his dialogue fast, which can make for an exhausting viewing experience. The show’s characters are on a “mission to civilize,” which sometimes results in preachy diatribes. And yes, the show’s women (all of its characters, really) sometimes act flakier than their job titles would allow in the real world. I don’t take issue with those, or any, arguments about the show’s content. I do take issue with the chorus of writers trying to prove their own journalistic savvy by denouncing The Newsroom’s fans as ignorant, illiterate outsiders, ill-equipped to draw our own conclusions because we don’t have a Master’s in Journalism from Northwestern.

The smugness that Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan detests in Will McAvoy oozes from her review of the show: “All I can do is what any other educated citizen of this great nation would do: Change the channel.” That emphasis is mine, because as an educated citizen who does not change the channel, I find her words condescending and dismissive. I’m not arguing that everyone should like the series, but there’s a certain irony in chiding The Newsroom for being overly partisan and divisive and then presuming to, in the show’s words, “speak truth to stupid.” You don’t have to be an audience studies scholar to see that this kind of elitist disdain is what trivializes soap opera fans, dismisses popular music as feminine, and ghettoizes television research. And the worst part is that this is a pile on. It’s as though entrance to the exclusive media critic club requires increasingly vitriolic and disdainful judgment, not of The Newsroom, but of its audience.

I am a fan of The Newsroom, but I won’t judge you if you’re not. There’s no reason to generalize that an entire fan community is stupid, ignorant, or media illiterate, and it’s insulting and unfair to do so. The least we can do, as media critics and human beings, is call out divisive, elitist dismissal for what it is–the enemy of real discourse. After all, the fact that I disagree with you doesn’t mean either of us is stupid; it just means we’re having a conversation.

Much of the popular press discourse on the film seems to have taken up the notion of a “real” Facebook origin story or the “real” Mark Zuckerberg as the yardstick with which to measure the film. The Wiklevoss twins have claimed on CNN that the film was accurate; Zuckerberg predictably claimed that it wasn’t. A Washington Post story argued that the film’s greatest liberties were not taken with Zuckerberg’s character, although such changes as making him a loner when he has been with the same girlfriend since 2003 were made, but with the realities of Facebook’s innovation which the article argues was not a work of sole genius but part of the more complex nexus of culture that is really behind any invention. Sorkin himself is at least partially culpable for this narrative of truth or fiction that has surrounded the film since he has stoked it in his own press appearances. On the Colbert Report Sorkin insisted that it was a “non-fiction” film that shows multiple perspectives and possible “truths” of the history of Facebook’s origin and the lawsuits brought against its founder.

However, focusing on whether or not The Social Network has the veracity of a documentary or is as “non-fiction” as an Oliver Stone bio-pic largely encourages a focus on the idea of the movie, rather than on the movie itself and the significant influence that authorial imprint has on the final product. A New York Times article on the film claims that viewer response to the film divides generationally. Older people, it claims, will see “a cautionary tale about a callous young man,” while younger viewers “will applaud someone who saw his chance and seized it.” From the generation that not only brought us Gordon Gecko but seized upon his mantra “greed is good,” such a supposed generation gap is astonishing. Ultimately, it also misses the point.

The Zuckerberg of The Social Network is a callous, or at the very least socially oblivious, young innovator who prioritizes the future he sees for his creation over relationships and fairness. He is also an entrepreneur who takes a kernel of an idea and improves on it to create a website whose cultural significance is undeniable. He is other things too: an acerbic wit whose tongue and mind is just a little bit quicker then everyone else’s, making him appear rude and blunt to the point of cruelty. He also, in the film, appears oddly easily influenced by those he perceives as his equals, making it unclear how much the origins of the film’s most heinous acts can be traced to Sean Parker (played here by Justin Timberlake).

This Zuckerberg is, for all protestations to the contrary, an Aaron Sorkin character: morally complex, subject to idealistic passions and personal failures, sharp-tongued, and ultimately ruled by public triumphs and private indignities. One of the film’s most powerful images is Zuckerberg sitting in an empty conference room sending a friend request to the girl whose rejection started it all and pressing refresh again and again to see if she has accepted. This mournful final image can be traced easily to Charlie Wilson staring into his drink or Leo in The West Wing in the hallway of an empty house after he is left by his wife. So too does a look at the other artist that crafted the film fill in some apparent gaps. Zuckerberg in real life may have a long term girlfriend and not live a socially removed life, but this is a David Fincher film. Fincher, with Fight Club and Zodiac to his name, is a master of conflicted, isolated masculinity, and to see these logics inscribed on The Social Network should come as no surprise. Since the film is in part an adaptation of a book, whose primary source was a former Facebook founder, a large number of authorial hands have taken part in the shaping of the narrative in The Social Network.

Perhaps it is here that we finally come to our link to Facebook itself. As a Facebook profile is a carefully crafted version of identity, The Social Network is an authorially crafted version of reality. However, as much as I might like to leave off on such a neat analogy, it remains beside the point. The Social Network is not a great film about Facebook; it’s a great film. There may have been a way for the film’s structure or visual aesthetic to have been put in conversation with the new media on which it was based. However, Aaron Sorkin neither uses or likes Facebook … and it shows. What also shows is the talent and skill of the creative team behind the film. No matter how much we might like for old media texts about new media to demonstrate formal innovation in response to their sources, $#*! My Dad Says and The Social Network have proven that they will rise and fall according to how well they succeed at being well crafted examples of their own forms, not in their relationship to the new forms they mine for inspiration.