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Llewellyn
King
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May 26, 2008
Political TV: So Many
Talking About So Little
This is the year of the political talk show. Never have so many had so
much to say about so little.
No
wonder CNN snapped up Tony Snow when he left his job as White House
press secretary. David Gregory, the uncontested successor to ABC's Sam
Donaldson as press corps lightning rod, is missing from NBC's booth at
the White House. He is doing a talk show for MSNBC – just one more talk
show host in long lineup that includes Bill O'Reilly, Hannity & Colmes,
Keith Olbermann, Dan Abrams, Wolf Blitzer, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and
Campbell Brown. Even C-SPAN does politics.
But if you don't get cable, don't worry. You can still get your fix of
talking hosts on over-the-air broadcasting. Beginning on Friday night,
there is Washington Week with Gwen Ifill. It is the national
anthem before the main event. The first-string players take the field on
Sunday morning. On my dial the lineup is Fox News Sunday with Chris
Wallace, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, The Chris
Matthews' Show, Meet the Press with Tim Russert and Face
the Nation with Bob Schieffer.
Two programs, Meet the Press and Face the Nation, have
been around since the days of radio. But all political broadcasting
today owes much to a half-hour program which thundered to life 25 years
ago. I speak of The McLaughlin Group, and its extraordinary host
John McLaughlin.
McLaughlin redefined the television talk show. He made the host a
participant and encouraged contention, even shouting, among the guests.
He invigorated the milieu.
It
is hard now to remember how static the talk shows were. The host was a
magisterial figure, who pretended he had no interest in the discussion.
I was sometimes a panelist on Meet The Press, when Bill Monroe
moderated it. There was a single guest, who was interviewed by a panel
of reporters. You could get in two questions, and that was it. It was a
structure more satisfactory in concept than in practice. Once, when I
was on the panel, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson was a guest. I knew Jackson
well and while we were in makeup, he said, “I want you to take me to the
mat, and ask me the hard questions.” Of course he knew, and I was to
learn, that the format did not include hard questions.
McLaughlin's show itself is now in some decline, overshadowed by the
resources and sheer volume of the competition. It has moved to another
channel in Washington, and its rating are falling, according to The
Weekly Standard. The show is a little tired, and McLaughlin's
conservatism a little idiosyncratic.
Yet he remains an original. Once a Catholic priest, who worked for
Richard Nixon, he saw the potential in conservative radio, left the
church and became a broadcaster.
I
have to confess that McLaughlin has been important to me. I started a
television talk program called White House Chronicle, which airs
on some PBS stations and many public access channels, mostly because I
got tired of waiting on the short list to be a guest on The
McLaughlin Group.
At
a White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, McLaughlin came
over and told me how much he enjoyed my program. I told him how much he
was responsible for it. This seemed to make him very happy.
Meanwhile, back on the dial, it's all politics all the time. Or, more
accurately, it is more people saying more about the tiniest perturbation
in that week's presidential campaign news. The question is whether the
public interest in politics will continue after this extraordinary
election year. And with it, the 24-7 political talk.
© 2008 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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