Why is everyone talking at me?

ARE THE TALKING HEADS WHO DOMINATE CABLE NEWS WORSE THAN

EVER? NOT NECESSARILY. A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW GORE

VIDAL, WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, 60 MINUTES AND COUNTLESS OTHERS

RUINED POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN AMERICA

Stewart: Why do we have to fight? Why do you argue?

Carlson: We enjoy it.

Stewart: It's hurting America. Stop hurting America.

begala: Well, we're a debate show.

Stewart: That's like saying pro wrestling is a show about

athletics. You're doing theater when you should be doing

debate. Your show is so painful to watch.

That was comedian Jon Stewart lambasting Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, co-hosts of CNN's long-running debate show Crossfire, in the heat of another presidential cam­paign season, eight years ago.

It was a cringe-worthy moment—and not just for the stu­dio audience and the viewers who watched on television. The producers who booked Stewart were expecting jokes about the Bush and Kerry campaigns. Instead they got Carlson and Begala trying to dig their way out of a deep hole of uncom­fortable titters from the audience. It was like watching some­one trying to backpedal after asking "When's your baby due?" of a woman they quickly realize isn't pregnant. No amount of changing the subject was going to unwreck this train.

The show I had treasured since watching it with my father while growing up in the 1980s was having its epi­taph written. It was a painful descent for a program The Washington Post once hailed as one of the best on TV. Even sadder, I was among those who recognized it had passed its expiration date years before—when it lost the original hosts, Tom Braden and Patrick Buchanan, a pair of journalists with remarkable chemistry, and later, when a live, cheering studio audience was added, turning it into a Howard Beale-style spectacle.

A few weeks later, the then president of CNN, Jonathan Klein, announced he was canceling Crossfire. He said he agreed with Stewart. Going forward, Klein said, the net­work would be clearing its decks of the "head-butting debate shows." Included in the termination notice was Capital Gang, CNN's signature weekend talk show that featured liberal and conservative journalists analyzing and debating the week's news.

It has been almost a decade since CNN kissed its debate shows good-bye—and many of its viewers along with them. (Klein got his own pink slip in 2010.) CNN now has its lowest ratings since 1991. However, the very opinion-based conflict shows that CNN (continued on page 122)

TALKING HEADS

(continued from page 77)

repudiated now fill the schedules on other channels. From Sunday morning to late night, TV is full of political talking heads. And the more those heads butt, the more viewers tune in.

Of the top 20 shows in all of cable news, 12 are entirely opinion based. The remain­ing eight showcase talking heads debating politics as the highlight of the broadcasts. Candidates and the people who run cam­paigns adapt based on what's on the air, making the shows themselves one giant transmission belt for national politics.

"The bottom line is it affects the way they run their campaigns," says Aram Bak-shian, chief speechwriter in the Reagan White House and still a go-to for Repub­lican politicians. As the recent GOP presidential-primary season showed, retail politics has moved from the streets of New Hampshire and the town halls of Iowa to TV studios, especially ones for cable news.

"It's the public square," says Tucker Carlson, who has worked at all three major cable news channels for extended periods and now edits the Daily Caller, a conserva­tive website. "The internet is so atomized. How many places do liberals and conser­vatives frequent at the same time? Not that many. But people watch cable news shows they disagree with. They help create story lines that filter down to everybody."

For decades, the front page of the news­paper determined that night's TV news coverage. "You could always predict two of the top three stories on Walter Cronkite's evening news broadcast by scanning The New York Times," says longtime Washington TV producer Neal Freeman. "Now the talk shows drive the narrative."

Sometimes the talking heads can single-handedly affect candidate strat­egy, as when Hilary Rosen, a Democratic commentator employed by CNN, said on one of its news shows last April that Ann Romney "has actually never worked a day in her life." Both the Romney and Obama campaigns scrambled to exploit her remark.

While opinion journalism on TV is nothing new, its domination and reach are. Talking heads used to be bookends around real journalism and reporting, a colorful "button" to end a serious program such as 60 Minutes. Now the bookends have replaced the books. And they are gaining more viewers than ever before.

I first got a sense of how this world worked back in 1994, when I was a researcher for Washington pundits Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Between them they had three shows on CNN—the political interview program Evans &f Novak, as well as Capital Gang and Crossfire, on which Novak would often appear as guest co-host. At the time, CNN had an almost total monopoly on TV

opinion journalism. One of the only other options was the syndicated McLaughlin Group. But in 1996, MSNBC launched, and shortly after, Fox News joined the ranks. It placed opinion-based journalism with a conservative tilt at the forefront of its cov­erage, a move that transformed the TV news business.

However, the shows that define MSNBC and Fox News—and increasingly the entire world of successful broadcast jour­nalism—have their origin in programs that aired when there were only three networks on the dial.

Jane, you ignorant slut. Anyone who had a pulse in the 1970s will remember that catchphrase from Saturday Night Live. The Dan Aykroyd-Jane Curtin sketch on "Weekend Update" is arguably better re­membered than the 60 Minutes segment it was sending up, "Point/Counterpoint," which featured journalists Nicholas von Hoffman, Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick. While the 60 Minutes segment was one of the first regular showcases of commentators going head-to-head, the SNL parody echoed the kind of fiery ad hominem mockery that had blazed on the TV screen a decade earlier.

A man named David Susskind lit the match. He was the Harvard-educated host of the New York talk show Open End who first invited novelist Gore Vidal and National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. to discuss politics for two hours on his show in September 1962. Their confronta­tion was so compelling that Susskind took them on the road with him for his coverage of the 1964 Republican National Conven­tion in San Francisco. Susskind was like a "zookeeper trying to prevent two hiss­ing adders from killing each other," wrote one reviewer. There was nothing else like Buckley and Vidal on serious television.

The success of their Susskind appear­ances led to the 1966 debut of Firing Line, a weekly political-debate show hosted by Buckley. Firing Line would eventually have a longer TV run than The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Buckley possessed the essential ingredient needed to be a political talking head: "The man could flat-out talk," says Freeman, the show's first producer.

Buckley squaring off against such ideological adversaries as Allen Gins­berg, Norman Mailer and, yes, Hugh M. Hefner on Firing Line was scintillating, but the combination of Buckley and Vidal on the Susskind show was explosive. In 1968 executives at ABC News wanted some of the fireworks for their national political conven­tion coverage. They thought Buckley and Vidal would make the perfect antagonists and hired them as guest commentators.

"Shut up a minute," said Vidal. "No, I won't," replied Buckley. In a week already filled with skirmishes between Vietnam

war protesters and policemen at the Dem­ocratic National Convention in Chicago, this exchange still astonished the estimated 10 million viewers who were watching.

It ranks as one of TV's most infamous debates—Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" and Buckley replying, "Now listen, you queer...I'll sock you in your goddamn face." This was something viewers didn't get from ABC News anchors and correspon­dents. As legendary as Buckley vs. Vidal is today (more than 750,000 views on You-Tube), what's lost from the history is how groundbreaking it was. The topics they cov­ered prior to their 70 seconds of fury—law and order, fascism, freedom of the press and assembly—were unusual for network news coverage. It sent a rush of adrena­line through millions of TV screens across the country. "We put on a good show," said Vidal later that night.

His words were more than descriptive; they were prophetic.

Let's never forget we're the real story, not them. A line from James L. Brooks's 1987 film Broadcast News, it was meant to be a report­er's sarcastic critique of a colleague who injects himself into a news story. It was also a jab at the changing tide in news, as style replaced substance and personalities were overtaking the stories they were telling.

That's certainly the case for Glenn Beck, whose apocalyptic rants instigated his departure from Fox News; the bom­bastic Keith Olbermann, who can't hold on to a job anywhere; and even Anderson Cooper, who has shed tears while covering tragedy. But while those men exemplify how "personality" can overshadow the news, Hardball's Chris Matthews tries to use the force of personality to get closer to the truth.

Matthews doesn't suffer fools. Especially partisan mouthpieces.

"No BS," he tells me. "My contempt for talking points is manifest. You may see them elsewhere—on the network even. But they're not getting on our show."

He is wise to talking points because he used to write them. During the 1970s and 1980s, Matthews spent 15 years in Democratic circles, including stints as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. "It's flackery, and I don't want it," Matthews says. "It's inconclusive and incomplete and self-serv­ing and I like to explode it."

The Chris Matthews viewers watch on TV is exactly like the Chris Matthews of real life. Hardball isn't an act. Matthews is a Democrat who admitted "I felt this thrill going up my leg" when he listened to Barack Obama speak in 2008. But Mat­thews is also the same man who, in the span of about two minutes on Hardball, asked Obama supporter Kirk Watson, a Democratic state senator in Texas, eight

separate times if he could name anything Obama had accomplished in the U.S. Sen­ate. "No, I'm not going to be able to do that tonight," said Watson.

Interviews like the one with Watson "can be difficult for the audience," says Matthews. "They might say, 'Why does he keep homing in on this?' And my answer is, 'Don't come on the program unless you're willing to answer the question and be exposed if you're not answering it.' I think some of the network interview shows can't go that far because they're trying to reach a broader audience of nonpolitical people who don't want to hear frisson. They don't want to hear conflict, and I'm willing to expose the conflict."

Still, Matthews is no stranger to becom­ing the story himself. In perhaps the most infamous incident on Hardball, Senator Zell Miller, Democrat of Georgia, hollered at Matthews, "Get outta my face," while being questioned at the Republican National Con­vention in 2004. "If you're going to ask me a question, step back and let me answer," Miller said. "I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel!"

After working with Evans and Novak, I helped produce a weekly Washington talk show that aired on PBS. When booking guests, I real­ized it was vital to get someone capable of providing just the right sound bite to clarify an issue or provoke a debate. (Conflict was especially good.) Later, I became acquainted with some of the titans of the craft.

I first met Tom Braden, the original co-host of Crossfire, at the Jockey Club in Washington. (He died in 2009.) As I got to know Braden, he would tell me about work­ing with Buchanan, his friendship with Bobby Kennedy and the time he was in the same room with Roy Cohn, Joseph McCar­thy's chief counsel.

"What did you say to him?" I asked.

"I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Is that you? Is that really you? I want to get a good look. You ought to be ashamed.'"

I caught up with Michael Kinsley, who had been editor of Harper's and The New Republic before signing on as Braden's successor on Crossfire. "I did it for the glamour, the money and all the obvious disgraceful reasons," Kin­sley said of his TV career. (After Crossfire, he founded Slate on the web and edited the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times.)

Kinsley told me about the time Senator Al D'Amato, the Republican from New York, was a guest. "He was calling me a communist and all that, and then the break comes and he looks over at me and says, 'How am I doing?'"

Author Barbara Howar is so entertaining when she talks about politics that when she lived in Georgetown in the 1970s, Johnny Carson frequently invited her on The Tonight Show to get her take on Washington. When I asked Howar, now living in Los Angeles, about those days, she said, "I would just try to get my foot out of my mouth before I shot myself in it."

I remember one summer afternoon last year with Ann Coulter at the Beach Club

in Santa Monica. Coulter was daydreaming about a West Coast TV network for conserva­tives. We gossiped about some of her fellow talking heads, such as publishing giant Mort Zuckerman, who supposedly has his own TV truck that follows him around so he can go on the air anytime a producer calls.

Coulter appears on TV so often that she has her own earpiece. She carries it in her purse in case Fox calls on short notice. After standing next to Coulter while she was in makeup and then waiting for what seemed to be an interminable amount of time for her to be interviewed on Hannity via satellite from the Fox News bureau in Los Angeles, I can attest to one certainty: She hates doing taped interviews almost as much as she loathes critics of Joseph McCarthy. She wants the roller coaster that live TV provides.

Even after being around these expert practitioners, I wondered about the X factor that guarantees success as a talking head. I knew I needed to speak to the mas­ter, Patrick Buchanan.

"No one has logged more hours than he has," producer Tammy Haddad, once the show runner for Larry King Live and Hardball, told me.

I first became acquainted with Buchanan in 1992, when he was running for president. As editor of the campus magazine at Wake Forest University, I invited him to speak while he was cam­paigning through the South. (In the late 1990s I also helped Buchanan research two of his books, The Great Betrayal and A Republic, Not an Empire.)

When I inform him that I am writing about political talking heads and want to ask him some questions, he invites me to the set of The McLaughlin Group, the weekly political talk show moderated by John McLaughlin. (When it was parodied on Saturday Night Live, Dana Carvey became McLaughlin and made him more famous.) I meet Buchanan at the studio in the Ten-leytown section of D.C.

He is in the makeup chair when I arrive. He's 73, but one still gets a sense of the Irish Catholic brawler who grew up in Northwest Washington, D.C. Buchanan introduces me to the panelists—Newsweek contributor Eleanor Clift, U.S. News 6? World Report editor-in-chief Mort Zuckerman and National Review editor Rich Lowry.

I'm sitting just off camera, behind Buchanan and Lowry. With all the panel­ists in place, McLaughlin finally appears. He's walking with the help of two young aides steadying him. He scrabbles up to the podium, and they lower him into his host's chair by holding both of his arms. This is not the same vigorous host I watch boom­ing away every week on TV.

As the technicians run through their final preparations, McLaughlin asks Buchanan who I am.

"He's writing a story about political talk shows," says Buchanan.

"I thought you were one of Pat's friends from the hinterlands," says Clift. She's

referring to the Buchanan for President supporters who, in the minds of certain media types, surely live in cabins and ven­ture out only once a year to stock up on guns and butter.

"Pat has friends?" asks McLaughlin.

In the moments before the theme music starts, the chatter sounds like what one would hear at a typical D.C. cocktail party. Topics include the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which occurred early that morning. McLaughlin asks Buchanan if he's going to see The Dark Knight Rises. "I like that Batman," says McLaughlin. "Anderson Cooper came out of the closet. Why is it still called a closet? It's like debutantes—coming out. They've evaporated. Why is it even called coming out?"

"Cooper has nice manners," says Buchanan.

"CNN is down the tubes," says Lowry.

"Fox is number one," says Buchanan, "and MSNBC a distant second, but CNN has the lowest ratings in 20 years."

"What saves CNN is its global advantage," Zuckerman says, referring to the network's dozens of global bureaus and the fact that it can be watched in more than 200 countries.

At one point the panel begins to reflect on the greatest hits of one of their breth­ren, Lawrence O'Donnell, a McLaughlin alumnus who now hosts his own program, The Last Word, on MSNBC. Few can match O'Donnell's sense of righteous indignation. When he gets angry about something on the air, it's a show worth watching. (Unlike, say, Keith Olbermann, whose tirades were bor­ing and tiresome, O'Donnell is likable and actually fun to watch, compelling even if one disagrees with him.)

Buchanan mentions the MSNBC segment he moderated in 2004 when O'Donnell appeared with John O'Neill, a spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an anti-John Kerry group. Within about three minutes, O'Donnell, a Kerry supporter, had called O'Neill a liar more than 20 times while Buchanan tried to referee.

"That was a job he did," says McLaughlin, howling with laughter.

They also mention the time O'Donnell "went after the Mormons." What triggered O'Donnell was McLaughlin discussing Mitt Romney's 2007 speech about faith in which Romney had presented himself as a main­stream Christian. It sent O'Donnell into a rage, on the air. Romney "fools people like Pat Buchanan, who should know better," O'Donnell said. He went on to describe Romney's faith as "racist" and "demented" because prior to 1978 Mormons held that "black people are black because in heaven they turned away from God." Nearly five years later, McLaughlin and the other pan­elists are still talking about that segment.

The next time I see Buchanan is at his house in McLean, Virginia. We begin discussing Crossfire's debut, in the summer of 1982. It aired at 11:30 p.m., opposite Nightline on ABC. Buchanan says he and Braden would

go on the air after they'd been out to dinner, during which they often fired down a few drinks. "Braden would really come in loaded, after about three martinis. You could hear him—'Goddamn it!'" (I recall a Washington Post reporter once saying Braden's voice sounded like he chewed sandpaper for breakfast.)

From the right, there was Buchanan— an Irish Catholic Washingtonian who had been suspended from Georgetown and jailed for pummeling a cop who'd written him a traffic ticket, as well as a graduate of Columbia's journalism school, a newspa­per editorialist, a Nixon speechwriter—in other words, not your typical conservative.

From the left, there was Braden, a para­trooper in World War II and an operative for the OSS and CIA, where one of his jobs was funneling cash to strapped anti-communists in Europe's labor movement so they would have the resources to keep Soviet operatives from taking over. Not your typical liberal.

Theirs was a dynamite combination for a political talk show.

Buchanan says that talking about poli­tics on TV comes naturally. One of the first times he got a taste for addressing con­troversial issues in a public format came during the mid-1960s when he was an edi­torial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Buchanan attended teach-ins on the Viet­nam war held at Washington University. Nervous as he began to speak to the crowd, he was eventually in his element. Buchanan says he "noticed they'd all line up to ask me questions. You know, I was just good at it." In 1973, when he was a speechwriter for President Nixon, he testified at the congres­sional hearings on the Watergate scandal, a session that was carried on live TV. "I did five hours," he says, "and as soon as I was done they dropped the hearings off TV. Things were turning the other way. The committee looked like a fool."

By the time he went on the radio with Braden, Buchanan had perfected a style that telegraphed to adversaries, " 'Let's go right to them' and 'Don't give me that crap,'" he says as he clenches his fists and pulls them close to his chest.

Night after night he brought that to Cross­fire. The goal was to use true believers to get to the essence of the issues. "You really push them," he says. "You get their real feelings and sentiments. Some of the shows almost broke out in fistfights. It was real television."

Sometimes too real. Buchanan recounts the time when a fervent Crossfire producer convinced Braden to ask a prominent Repub­lican conservative fund-raiser, Terry Dolan, if he was gay. On the air.

There were rumors around town about Dolan, whispers about his sexuality. He supposedly frequented gay bars in Wash­ington, which back then was scandalous for a conservative who raised $2 mil­lion for Reagan's presidential campaign. "There were all these stories floating around," says Buchanan.

"The producer got suspended for prompting Braden to do it," says Buchanan.

"It was awful. I thought, You don't ask a guy that. Dolan was very bitter." He died from AIDS in 1986, at the age of 36.

I was astonished by this story. A search on LexisNexis didn't turn up any news coverage or a transcript. I requested one from CNN, but a spokesperson, Megan Grant, said she was unable to locate it. I did, however, find the producer.

"I was thinking about it not long ago," the producer told me. "I really don't want to get into that whole episode."

Recalling those days when talking about politics on TV could be raw, Buchanan tells me that there were some nights "that were so tense, Braden and I walked out not talk­ing to each other. We were both passionate about what we believed. Maybe I'm not that passionate anymore. When people say stuff, you let much more of it go by."

Today the news channels and the networks are stacked with one-hour talking-head shows like a totem pole of opinion journalism. But getting a one-hour political show on TV— especially one that showcases journalists and strategists expressing their own views—once took a bit of crafty subterfuge on the part of Roone Arledge, the television visionary who created ABC's Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football and Nightline. He recognized that the discussion and debate of politics on TV could be compelling.

In the 1970s a show called Agronsky & Company caught Arledge's attention. It was a weekly panel of journalists debating and analyzing Washington, moderated by net­work anchor Martin Agronsky and featuring George F. Will, a young conservative colum­nist. It aired on PBS and a few stations owned by the Washington Post Company and was must-see TV inside the Beltway.

Arledge wanted something similar for ABC, but he knew it would be a challenge to convince the network. So when he went to affiliates he pitched a one-hour program that he said would begin by featuring inter­views with senators, congressmen, cabinet secretaries and other elected officials—the same basic newsmaker interview format that had been working for Meet the Press (NBC) and Face the Nation (CBS) for decades but in a half-hour format. (ABC had its own half-hour version, Issues and Answers, whose unfortunate title sounded like a brochure one would get at a free clinic.)

That was merely a strategy, however, to achieve what Arledge considered to be the most important part of the program, some­thing he knew would set ABC apart from the competition: the roundtable discussion. It was the exact opposite of a parent tricking a child into eating something nutritious by touting its sugary taste—Arledge was selling the network on something entertaining by emphasizing its substance. He persuaded the epigrammatic former NBC anchor David Brinkley to be the host and brought along the young man who wore bow ties, the conservative he'd liked on Agronsky. The result was This Week With David Brinkley, which debuted on ABC in November

1981. It was a shift for Sunday mornings, and viewers responded.

"We just popped to the top of the rat­ings and stayed there," says George Will, now 71. "What Roone started, everyone has followed." (Indeed, the three other Sun­day morning network shows, and State of the Union on CNN, now follow the format established by This Week.) Will calls This Week "destination television." He explains, "Peo­ple get up in the morning and turn to that channel because they want to see us. It's a self-selected audience."

While the hosts have changed—after Brin-kley hosted for 15 years, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts took over, followed by George Stephanopoulos, who was succeeded by Christiane Amanpour; now it's again Steph-anopoulos's show—the one constant is George Will. Neal Freeman told me that Will's TV longevity should be attributed to the feet that he's "utterly reliable as the slightly belea­guered Tory with the gimlet eye." Freeman adds, "One of his secrets is that he's a pro­digious worker. I've never asked him, but I assume that everything he says on air has been honed and memorized. While his man­ner never wavers—I could swear I remember

some of those bow ties from the 1970s—his views evolve constantly." (Indeed, in the past few years, Will's views have become more lib­ertarian. He's also sharpened his criticisms of neoconservative doctrine.)

From Will's perspective, "television is survival of the briefest. You have to get it said quickly. Thirty seconds is a long time on television."

Will is critical of the tide of talking heads who have come in the decades since This Week started. When I ask his assessment of Ann Coulter, who has been a frequent guest on the roundtable of late, he answers, "I'd rather not talk about that." He will, however, say that the endless loop of talking heads and their "ax grinding gets tiresome. In this ever-shorter news cycle, TV is driven to focus on insig­nificant things. These people on cable think everything is more important than I think almost anything is."

The new generation of talking heads is charting its course in well-traveled waters. The emerging faces of cable news have grown up in a world where the market for opinion is firmly established. For Andrea

Tantaros, becoming a conservative panelist on The Five—one of the highest-rated programs on Fox—is the fulfillment of a dream she's had since childhood.

A pretty, 33-year-old lean brunette with the kind of toothy smile and perfectly coiffed hair befitting a sorority president, Tantaros started to prepare for a life in broadcast journalism when she was young. "I have videos of me as a little girl taping my own newscasts," she says. "I'd be sitting at a desk and I'd make a sign for the news. 'We have a tape of someone being abducted. Let's go to the video.' And the tape would be me in a ski mask kidnapping my younger brother, Dan. He would just look at me like, What are you doing?"

While everyone else in her generation was idolizing celebrities such as Madonna, Tanta­ros says, "I was fascinated with KYW-3 news in Philadelphia." Eventually she made her way to D.C., where she interned at CNN, working on Crossfire just before it jumped the shark. She worked on the Hill, then in campaigns and is now a columnist for New York's Daily News.

Sometimes more people watch Tantaros on The Five than read the top newspapers. And it is through programs such as hers that politics is shaped.

"They beat TV political ads, that's for sure," says Morton Kondracke, senior edi­tor of Roll Call and one of the original panelists on McLaughlin.

This fall the talking heads will focus their "analyses" on who won and who lost and will likely impact the election like never before. Even in the age of social media, TV—a 70-year-old medium—is still where the big splash is made. Twitter, Facebook and You-Tube provide outlets for the ripples.

If the candidates and their surrogates need a choir to preach to, they've got one. Fox News offers up the right, MSNBC delivers the left, and CNN increasingly caters to the leftovers.

Will the surge in talking-head programs help voters cut through the issues and come to a decision? Probably not. Will they help us learn more about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney by Election Day? Maybe. Perhaps the real question is, Why does it matter? It matters because Americans are getting their news from cable news channels more than anywhere else, according to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this year. And those channels are chock-full of talking heads.

"On the run-up to the GOP primary in South Carolina, a Republican vastly experi­enced in politics there told me that they had a poll indicating that 72 percent of all likely vot­ers got all—not most, not some but all—their news from the Fox News Channel," says Will. "That means that a candidate who appeared on Fox News, or bought advertising there, wasn't broadcasting. He was narrowcasting." The same could probably be said for what comes out over the MSNBC airwaves.

Many people will claim that reliance on talking—or shouting—heads is unhealthy for America and the political process. Michael Kinsley disagrees. "When you think about what else they could be watching," he says, "I don't think that's so terrible."

'Ax grinding gets tiresome,"

says George Will of ABC's

This Week. "These people

on cable think everything is

more important than I think

almost anything is."