“Sixty Festering Minutes Of Crap”: Why Do The Sunday Shows Suck So Much?
In the American media landscape, there is no single forum more prestigious than the Sunday shows—particularly the three network programs, and to a slightly lesser extent “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union.” The Sunday shows are where “newsmakers” face the music, where Washington’s most important people are validated for their importance, where issues are probed in depth. So, why do they suck so much?
I live and breathe politics, yet I find these programs absolutely unwatchable, and I can’t be the only one. On a typical episode, there is nothing to learn, no insight to be gained, no interesting perspective on offer, nothing but an endless spew of talking points and squabbling. Let’s take, for instance, yesterday’s installment of “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” We start off with dueling interviews with Obama adviser Robert Gibbs and Romney adviser Ed Gillespie. Were you expecting some candid talk from these two political veterans? Of course you weren’t. “If you’re willing to say anything to get elected president,” Gibbs says about Mitt Romney, “if you are willing to make up your positions and walk away from them, I think the American people have to understand, how can they trust you if you are elected president.” Which just happens to be precisely the message of a new Obama ad. What a fascinating coincidence! And you’ll be shocked to learn that Gillespie thought Romney did a great job in the debate: “Governor Romney laid out a plan for turning this economy around, getting things moving again. He had a fact-based critique of President Obama’s failed policies that the president was unable to respond to.” You don’t say!
Then we move to the roundtable, featuring, naturally, the stylings of James Carville and Mary Matalin. I just have to know what these two are thinking, because whatever it is, it certainly won’t be just “Your guy sucks! No, your guy sucks!” Of course, that’s exactly what it will be. Add in Peggy Noonan and her empathic super-powers to determine what the country is feeling and feel it right back at us, Jonathan Karl to repeat some poll numbers and conventional wisdom, and Paul Krugman to grow increasingly exasperated as he attempts without much success to yank the discussion back to reality, and you’ve got yourself a barn-burner of a debate.
Switch channels, and you’ll find some politicians angling for a 2016 presidential nomination come on one of the other Sunday shows to get asked questions about the polls and repeat the same things their co-partisans are saying. If you’re lucky (actually, it won’t take luck, because you can find it every Sunday), you can watch one of the two party chairs deliver those same messages. Has there ever been a single human being in America who has said, “Wow, that interview with Reince Priebus was really interesting”? Or said the same thing about an interview with Debbie Wasserman Schultz? It’s not because they’re terrible people, it’s because as party leaders their job is to come on the air and spout talking points with maniacal discipline, no matter what they get asked. And they’re good at that job. But if you listen to them for a while, it begins to feel like a virus of cynicism is eating its way through your brain.
I wonder what the producers of these shows say to each other as they’re putting together their programs. “Hey boss, we locked down Reince Priebus for Sunday!” “Awesome—the show is going to be great!” “I hope Carville and Matalin aren’t busy—they’ll bring the heat!” “Ooo, you know who we should try for? John McCain! He’s only been on our show 12 times this year, and I know people are dying to hear what he has to say.”
There could be another way. For instance, “Up With Chris Hayes” on MSNBC shows what the Sunday shows could be. Hayes doesn’t bother interviewing politicians or party hacks; instead, he brings on people who know a lot about whatever issue they’ll be discussing, aren’t constrained by the need to score partisan points, and might have something interesting to say. With a little creativity, you could come up with any number of models for how to make programs that are interesting and informative.
But the Sunday shows don’t seem to have any desire to change the 60 festering minutes of crap they splurt through the airwaves every weekend. The three network programs combine for around eight and a half million viewers every week, and I’m sure everyone involved thinks they’re a great success.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 8, 2012
“A Non-Existent Era”: David Gregory’s Tim Russert Problem
Mark Leibovich, in his 2008 profile of Chris Matthews, reported that the MSNBC talking head lived under the constant shadow of then-Meet the Press host Tim Russert.
Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother.
Following Russert’s death several months after that profile was written, David Gregory took over Russert’s seat. And since then, it’s always seemed to me that Gregory, much more so than Matthews, has suffered from attempts to live up to Russert. While Matthews wears his liberalism on his sleeve, Gregory feels he must maintain a tough-talking ‘pox on both houses’ approach that has become increasingly difficult as the Republican party has veered rightward. Take, for example, today’s Meet the Press.
Earlier this morning, Gregory asked New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to explain why Romney rarely gets specific about his proposed policies. Christie dodged the question, responding that it was Obama who needed to explain why, among other things, he rejected the recommendations of the 2010 Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. (He likely rejected it, by the way, because Congress wasn’t adopting it either, so doing so would needlessly hurt him with the base, which wasn’t happy with the entitlement reductions enumerated in the plan.) And why didn’t Congress adopt the plan? Because Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan almost single-handedly derailed it.
Ryan [was] “clearly was the leader” of House Republicans in setting the terms of a grand debt bargain, said Andy Stern, a panel member and Democrat….Ryan’s support would have likely drawn votes from (David) Camp and possibly (Jeb) Hensarling and made it all but impossible for the president to reject a plan created by his own self- appointed commission.
But rather than push back agianst Christie, Gregory shifted gears and asked him about his RNC speech. Gregory’s reluctance to mention Ryan’s complicity in the failure of Simpson-Bowles–not to mention the President’s 2011 commitment to a ‘grand bargain,’ or the general fiscal absurdity of the Romney/Ryan budgets–is borne out of his crippling obsession with impartiality. More specifically, I’d argue it stems from his instinct to honor ‘Meet the Press’s’ reputation for being ‘tough on both sides’, a trademark the late Tim Russert helped cement. Here, however, the admittedly tame Gregory’s attempts to live up to Russert’s attack-dog style serves him badly.
In Russert’s seventeen years at Meet the Press, Republicans and Democrats feared his acerbic approach equally. But it’s unclear that Russert would have remained equally balanced were he alive today. He never covered a House so radical and a Senate so obstructionist as the current models. He never encountered a Republican Party platform as extreme as this year’s. He never even got to interview Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, depriving us of the thorough grilling he might have unleashed upon her. In that way, Gregory who’s made it something of a trademark to exchange nuance for balance, has foolishly tried to live up to the Russert model in an era that doesn’t allow for it.
By: Simon van Zuylen-Wood, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 30, 2012
“If It’s Sunday, It’s Meet My Friends”: NBC’s David Gregory To Headline Conference For Major Republican Advocacy Group
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which calls itself “the voice of small business,” is one of the Republican party’s strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, “another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt” from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments’ challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.
Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).
But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states:
Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
Regardless of whether Gregory is being paid for this event and of what he says in his keynote, allowing the NFIB to raise money for its political mission using his name, reputation, and celebrity appears to be at odds with journalistic ethics.
Gregory did not to respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.
By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 12, 2012
“Meet The Republicans”: If It’s Sunday, It’s John McCain
Not long ago, I stopped watching the network Sunday shows. After all, who needs to spend an hour or two of valuable weekend time listening to elected officials and party hacks regurgitating the same tired talking points you’ve been hearing all week? But there’s no denying that Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, and to a lesser extent Fox News Sunday are enormously influential. They confer status on the people who appear, they define the limits of official debate, and they help set the agenda for the rest of the media. So while they are often tiresome to sit through, they can’t be completely ignored. That’s why I couldn’t stay silent after seeing this celebratory tweet from Betsy Fischer, the longtime executive producer of Meet the Press:
Yay!
If you watch the Sunday shows, the only thing you’ll be surprised about is that McCain hadn’t passed Dole (or anyone else) already. In fact, I wrote a column three whole years ago asking why the hell anyone still cares what John McCain thinks, and the question has become even more relevant in the time since. He’s a member of the minority party in the Senate who is not part of the leadership and has virtually no influence over his fellow senators. In 29 years in Congress, he has managed to produce exactly one significant piece of legislation (the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law), which got gutted by the Supreme Court. His knowledge of and ideas about policy are notoriously shallow and self-indulgent, running more toward phony moralism about tiny earmarks than the search for actual solutions to thorny problems. In his supposed area of expertise, national security, he can be relied on to offer the most simple-minded and uninformed opinions possible (Of course we should use military force! Which country were we talking about again?). So the public needs to hear his sage words in about the same measure as they need to hear those of other presidential losers. Why isn’t Michael Dukakis getting on Meet the Press? I’ll bet he’d be a more interesting guest than McCain.
Yet all the Sunday shows call McCain, again, and again, and again. Why? There are a few reasons, but what they all come down to is that people in the DC media just love, love, love them some John McCain (God help me, I wrote a whole book about it). He spent a couple of decades massaging their egos and convincing them that he was their best buddy, an investment that paid off splendidly. They love his alleged mavericky maverickness (don’t get me started on what a crock the whole “maverick” thing is). On the Sunday shows, McCain is what passes for “unpredictable.” So they’ll keep inviting him on. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day Betsy Fischer tweets, “Congratulations to John McCain on his 100th appearance on Meet the Press!”
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 18. 2012
Newt Gingrich And “The Food Stamp President”
Newt Gingrich doubled down on his clever new slur against President Obama as “the food stamp president.” He tried the line in a Friday speech to the Georgia Republican convention, and he used it again on “Meet the Press Sunday.” It’s a short hop from Gingrich’s slur to Ronald Reagan’s attacks on “strapping young bucks” buying “T-bone steaks” with food stamps. Blaming our first black president for the sharp rise in food-stamp reliance (which resulted from the economic crash that happened on the watch of our most recent white president) is just the latest version of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Obama’s social policy amounts to “reparations” for black people.
But when host David Gregory suggested the term had racial overtones, Gingrich replied “That’s bizarre,” and added, “I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist.” That’s not quite as extreme or silly as Donald Trump declaring “I am the least racist person there is,” but it’s up there. He also told Georgia Republicans Friday that 2012 will be the most momentous election “since 1860,” which happens to be the year we elected the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln president, and he suggested the U.S. bring back a “voting standard” that requires voters to prove they know American history — which sounds a lot like the “poll tests” outlawed by the Voting Rights Act.
Just last week Gingrich said Obama “knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit,” which just happens to be home to many black people. And last year Gingrich accused Obama of “Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior” that made him “outside our comprehension” as Americans, spreading Dinesh D’Souza’s idiocy that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from the Kenyan father he never knew. “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich told the National Review Online last year.
All this from the guy who’s supposed to be the “smart” candidate for the GOP nomination?
Republicans have done well with their quest to stigmatize social welfare programs as handouts to the undeserving, and to pretend that most of the undeserving are black people. But it may not be working as well today. Paul Ryan’s class-war budget is going down in flames, largely because seniors are up in arms over Ryan’s attacks on Medicare. Ryan and his GOP allies tried to be clever, making sure his plans to phase out Medicare wouldn’t apply to today’s seniors, who happen to be disproportionately white and disproportionately Republican. But seniors are seeing through the ruse, telling Ryan and the GOP that they want to protect Medicare for their children, too. Even Gingrich is now backing away from the Ryan budget, telling Gregory it’s too “radical” and “too big a jump.” A jump off a political cliff for Republicans, that is.
Let’s hope Gingrich’s attacks on our “food stamp president” backfire, too. I learned about the ex-GOP speaker’s latest use of the term from the group Catholic Democrats, which Tweeted Sunday morning that the twice-divorced Catholic convert ought to have a look at Catholic social teaching if he’s going to call himself a Catholic. The American bishops have lately been trying to remind Americans (and themselves, perhaps) that Catholic social teaching is about more than abortion. The church has long been a force on behalf of the poor and powerless, going back to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor) at the height of the Gilded Age in 1891, which put the church on the side of labor organizing, through Pope Benedict’s “Caritas in Veritate” (Charity in Truth) of 2009, which restated the church’s commitment to support for workers and the poor worldwide, in the wake of the greed-driven financial crisis of 2008.
House Speaker John Boehner got a taste of the rising Catholic concern for social justice when 83 Catholic scholars wrote to Boehner protesting his attacks on programs for the poor, after Boehner was chosen as Catholic University’s commencement speaker. They didn’t call on the university to cancel Boehner’s address, unlike Catholic conservatives who protested Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame in 2009). They wrote:
Your voting record is at variance from one of the church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policymakers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.
The scholars also noted that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called Boehner-promoted Ryan budget as “anti-life” for its cuts to programs for pregnant women and children. Boehner’s commencement address went on Saturday with a quiet protest from students who wore green placards reading “Where’s the compassion, Speaker Boehner?” over their graduation gowns. Of course the Catholic Boehner didn’t address the controversy; instead he shed tears remembering how his high school football coach called him the morning he became speaker to tell him “you can do it,” which he considered an answer to his prayers.
Boehner may have been crying about what his support of the Ryan budget is doing to House GOP re-election chances. Gingrich could find that his racially coded attacks on Obama backfire as well. Both the poverty rate and the unemployment rate for white Americans have doubled since the start of this recession. Maybe Republican policies will succeed in uniting Americans across racial lines for a change, as more people see them as favoring one minority — the super-rich — over the rest of us.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 15, 2011
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