If you can explain why Peggy Noonan, Harold Ford, and Sally Quinn suck so much, you can probably explain why the Sunday morning political talk shows suck so much. You can start with the problem that none of the people who host or appear on those shows have an unconventional thought in their head. About the only shortcoming these folks think our country might have is that we’re running a budget deficit. Half of what makes Bill Moyers’ programs so interesting is that his guests say things you would never hear in a million viewings of Face the Nation. Why is Frontline compelling? Because they expose big problems rather than paper them over. And even as nakedly partisan a program as The Rachel Maddow Show at least distinguishes itself by making a concerted effort to explain how our system works, or why it doesn’t.
The second, related, reason that the Sunday morning talk shows suck is that they are crushingly boring. They are boring because the guests are boring, the conversation is predictable, and there is a strange and strained conceit that they are critics of the system rather than integral parts of how the system maintains its blinkered existence.
Or, another way of looking at it is that the members of the White House Press Corp didn’t think Stephen Colbert’s performance at their Nerdprom was amusing, while the rest of America thought it was hilarious. They think they are doing God’s work, when they are really measuring each other’s peckers while people like Scooter Libby start phony wars based on faked intelligence right under their noses. And then they contribute to the Scooter Libby Defense Fund, because heaven forbid that any member of their extended club ever be held truly accountable for anything.
