In the waning weeks of the presidential campaign, I found myself no longer watching the Sunday talking head shows: they tended to drive me crazy and only increase the general angst I was feeling. Turns out, there may have been a reason. Today, in fact, the schedule is as follows (per Atrios):
7 Appearances by Republican current elected officeholders
3 Appearances by Democratic current elected officeholders.
2 Appearances by Republican former elected officeholders.
1 Appearance by a Bush Cabinet Secretary.
T. Boone Pickens
Ted Turner.
(The myth of the "liberal" media has, in my opinion, long since been debunked. But it serves as a convenient whipping boy for the right wing. Lazy? Yes. Vapid? Certainly. Superficial? Like scum on a puddle. Liberal? Not so much.)
Nevertheless, because I noted Paul Krugman (Nobel Prize winning economist, whom I read regularly, acknowledging his partisanship) was on, I tuned into This Week this morning. It was quite amazing.
There are perhaps none on television as fond of hearing themselves talk, as smug and self-satisfied as Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, and George Will (as opposed to the first two, I think he's a very smart guy and often worth listening to; how the other two are elevated to thrones of thought-production, I don't know). There they sat, with the opportunity to hear from an actual expert on the economy, and they barely allowed him a word. Literally: no sentence passed his lips, but that it was interrupted by one of the triumvirate. Not one. It was stunning, even for them.
Not that it matters. None of them (the regular panel of pronoucers) has an actual say in anything of substance. Still, it's amazing what passes for discussion on television nowadays, and it reminds me why I turned it off a while back.
[Update: Here's one that got through more or less uninterrupted, and showed George Will a thing or two.]
