The answer to these questions is probably no. But, even if a film showing the M.P.A.A. speechifying on the trade value of Adam Sandler movies could be, somehow, good, Sorkin’s ringing defense would sound tinny. The Sony leaks revealed ugly stuff. There were embarrassing numbers (female movie stars getting paid less at Sony than their male counterparts); cruel ad-hominem attacks (the young producer Megan Ellison was described as a “bipolar 28 year old lunatic”); and cases of flagrant racism, including the suggestion that our President watches only movies having black people in them (because, you know, his family is black). Sorkin’s point is that this is none of our business—just part of the messy creative process, the “juicy stuff” of prurient interest. “Is there even one sentence in one private email that was stolen that even hints at wrongdoing of any kind?” he asks. He thinks it’s a rhetorical question. The answer, though, depends on where the standards of wrongdoing rest.

Most people, mercifully, are not saints, least of all in the churn of competitive industry. This is a Sorkin-y idea. Onscreen, repeatedly, he’s led us through the boiler room of Camelot: here are the young, fast-talking, best-and-brightest types, perennially at one another’s throats, maybe a little Machiavellian, but still good. Their hearts are in the right place—that’s the difference between these people and the bad guys—and they’re looking out for normal folks like you. Sorkin is a creative child of the eighties, which is to say that he came of age at a moment when the possibilities of institutional ascent, governmental and otherwise, were being remade after a period of shame and disappointment. He’s the liberal answer to Tom Clancy, celebrating the hidden mechanics of power not as a source of perfidy but as a site of grace.

Is this world view—Sorkinism—what the world needs now? A year ago, the answer would have seemed clear enough: sure. But the past few months have seemed to shift the liberal politics of trust. Now thousands of people take to the streets to protest not broad injustices (war, inequality) but specific perversions of process: the small-scale stuff, abuses that might have been be fixed up by heroes on the inside (as in “A Few Good Men”) or washed away by major progress (as in “The West Wing”). Since the Garner grand-jury decision and its Missouri precursor, the private processes of powerful people have started to seem like our public problem. A slew of racist jokes between producers, we’ve realized, isn_’t_ just sausage-making gore. Cruelties that go on behind closed doors stay behind closed doors. And their effects over time are insidious if the space behind the doors is also where the power structure lives.

The legacy of that distrust became horrifically apparent in this weekend’s shootings. But it came to a head for Sorkin a couple of weeks ago, when Alena Smith, one of the writers on his show “The Newsroom,” mentioned on Twitter her misgivings about a rape-accusation plot in the latest episode. Sorkin chewed her out in a letter to Mediaite the next day. During the writing process, when Smith wouldn’t let go of her reservations about the episode’s storyline (it drove home the idea that one is “morally obligated” to believe in the innocence an accused rapist over the account of his accuser), Sorkin had “excused her” from the room. That’s just part of the process, he explained in his letter. Mentioning the expulsion on Twitter, however, “violated the most important rule of working in a writers room which is confidentiality.”

Sorkin’s response had a patriarchal aftertaste that bothered some people—interesting point about rape, my dear, but I know best!—and no small measure of authorial vanity. But his greatest tone-deafness may have been insisting that whatever absurdities went down in the writers’ room ought to stay there, secret, the better to give audiences what he believes they want. That’s not the kind of backroom judgment that the public needs in this season of controversial grand-jury announcements. The past few days have set an uncomfortable precedent for capitulation to terrorist pressure. (The cyber-terrorists who instigated the Sony leak—seemingly dispatched by the North Korean government—sought to block the release of a Seth Rogen comedy, which sounds like a great premise for a Seth Rogen comedy. They succeeded, for now.) The way past it will be the un-Sorkinist way, relying not on the secret labors of a few good, half-crazed men whose best intentions we are forced to trust—this month’s Senate torture report gave the lie to that notion—but on a truly public process, without dark corners where ugly notions might thrive. Lofty dreams and big ambitions, an eye to abstract values and the gift of gab, are no longer enough to bear the moral conscience of the nation. People now want purity of heart and honesty of action. Truth is the new standard for the messy work of power, and, for the first time in a long time, we’re ready to handle it.