CNN, which has long struggled to locate an anchor for its 8 p.m. hour, may have finally found him.


Will McAvoy is handsome, forthright and authoritative, with just enough irascibility and skepticism to seem provocative. He believes in the primacy of news, that truth is not the hole in the middle of the doughnut and that good information will help the body politic find the angels of its better nature.


He is also a figment of Aaron Sorkin’s imagination, a confected, perfected news anchor in “The Newsroom,” a show that began Sunday night on HBO, which, like CNN, is owned by Time Warner. Speaking at the premiere in a screening room at the company’s headquarters last week, Mr. Sorkin described “The Newsroom” as “a valentine” to the news industry and boy, could CNN use one.


HBO has been on a bit of a run, connecting with “Game of Thrones” and “Girls,” shows about the battle for survival in very different realms. CNN has been on a run as well, but it’s the kind a toboggan makes on a snowy hill. Once the leader in cable news, CNN clocked its lowest rating in a decade in April. It has been flanked and then overrun, first by Fox News from the right and then by MSNBC on the left.


CNN has stuck with, well, a version of the news, and gotten clobbered in the process. Its tenuous plight as the honest tradesman of the TV news business is reflected in the scripts of “The Newsroom” — Will McAvoy works for Atlantis World Media, named after a lost kingdom, and there are liberal sprinklings of “Man of La Mancha,” with arguments over who is being more quixotic.


The studios Will roams through are very much a mirror of CNN’s, part of a vast empire with many holdings that outperform news. To tie the allegory all together, Jane Fonda — a k a the former Mrs. Ted Turner — is cast as the boss of all bosses, listening closely for a few episodes and then landing with a vengeance.


In Mr. Sorkin’s series, and out there in the big, bad world of television, there is a battle for the souls and eyeballs of the American viewing public, and CNN finds itself in a competitive business where simply delivering the news is no longer sufficient.


Mr. Sorkin rejects that mandate. In “The Newsroom,” Mr. McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels, is asked what he actually believes in, in front of a crowd of earnest journalism students, and he answers truthfully: America, and journalism, have gone off the rails. Stirred by his own speech and by his new executive producer, an old flame played by Emily Mortimer, they decide to forgo fluff and, radically enough, cover the news.


In an on-air apology that follows, the McAvoy character acknowledges that “we took a dive for our ratings” and vows to produce a show that reflects importance, not heat. At the end of his mission statement, he asks, “Who are we to make these decisions?” (Long pause.) “We are the media elite.”


The conceit is that if cable networks did a good job of cooking informational broccoli, we would line up for second helpings. Too bad it happens not to be true — not when coverage of a dolphin that has lost its way can generate more empathy than ethnic minorities being wiped out in far-flung places.


The chicken-and-egg debate over which got dumb first — the viewing masses or the news — seems less important than that cold fact that both are true. The truth is that aspirations rarely leap off the screen and into the American consciousness, and the more noble television tries to make them the more detached from reality they seem.


Mr. Sorkin, however, doesn’t mind bucking the tide. “I think the reason it’s been reviewed as far-fetched is that it’s far-fetched,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Every bit as far-fetched as a Democratic administration that gets stuff done,” he added, referring to the accomplished — and entirely fictional — Bartlet administration in “The West Wing,” which he also wrote.