HBO’s The Newsroom returned to television last night, and it was borderline obsessive about drone strikes. (As for the storytelling itself, there is, so far, no sign of improvement since the conclusion of Season 1.) In the midst of the rhetorical maelstrom — this is an Aaron Sorkin show, after all — I couldn’t help but notice that Sloan Sabbith (Olivia Munn) had this to say about drone strikes during an on-air panel:

We don’t know exactly what that collateral damage is because of the lack of any transparency or accountability. Now factor in that the B.D.A. — the bomb damage assessment — counts all military-age males as militants.

The show depicted this particular airing of News Night as having taken place on August 24th, 2011. The only problem? The New York Times actually broke the story about all military-age males being counted as combatants nearly a full year later, in an article published on May 29, 2012:

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

…

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

As far as I know, the closest that most of the mainstream media came to openly contesting the administration’s counting policy before the night of August 24th, 2011 was in another New York Times article from August 11th of that year:

The civilian toll of the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, which is widely credited with disrupting Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan’s tribal area, has been in bitter dispute since the strikes were accelerated in 2008. Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.

The debate has intensified since President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, clearly referring to the classified drone program, said in June that for almost a year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” Other officials say that extraordinary claim still holds: since May 2010, C.I.A. officers believe, the drones have killed more than 600 militants — including at least 20 in a strike reported Wednesday — and not a single noncombatant.

But that article is a far cry from the definitive declaration made by Sloan Sabbith on last night’s episode of The Newsroom. I suppose this is just one more trademark of Aaron Sorkin. It’s not just his depiction of women that’s anachronistic: even his series on news reporting can’t get the story in the right order.