CHATTER FROM THE RIGHT
Rosen, Jay
tELEVISION CHATTER FROM THE RIGHT BY JAY ROSEN The great, forgotten fact about American television is that the public owns the airwaves. And the public has a double claim on the frequencies...
...Interruptions come at any point, or McLaughlin may shout, "Let's get out," in the manner of a platoon leader...
...We don't need more food fights...
...None...
...Only if the show were ineptly produced or blatantly one-sided would he risk a fight...
...It, too, is "presented" by WTTW and backed by corporate money...
...But even if he didn't like it, there would be little he could do...
...None...
...The forces working against Chase are formidable...
...Moy-ers has held discussions with PBS about a weekly or even nightly interview program, Chase says, but nothing definite has materialized so far...
...Compared to The McLaughlin Group, Firing Line is positively sedate—or, as Buckley would no doubt prefer it, civilized...
...For balance, McLaughlin provides syndicated columnist Jack Germond, the house liberal whose curious strategy is to remain above it all on a show where all the action is below the belt...
...None...
...an arrangement that allows the show to be aired on five NBC affiliates in major cities and 230 public stations everywhere else...
...A few weeks later, they were kidding him about being a liberal again...
...More time for serious discussion is equally important...
...Hitchens has also been a guest on The McLaughlin Report and Crossfire, an interview show on Cable News Network, where Robert Novak is a fixture...
...he comes prepared and asks tough questions...
...The first is time, the second is interesting people, and the third are the rules of civilized discourse...
...Here's where the corporations come in...
...What's more, the format is conducive to a thorough and thoughtful discussion...
...McLaughlin's other show, One on One, began in 1984...
...Daniel Schorr, Mark Green, Nat Hentoff, and Robert Lekachman are among those who have made recent appearances...
...And the public has a double claim on the frequencies assigned to public stations, which by law exist for the community's benefit...
...Guests sit in chairs and talk for an hour about a single subject...
...say that,' it's your own fault," notes Christopher Hitchens, columnist for The Nation, who has appeared on Firing Line several times...
...It features him interviewing some important person in the news...
...But increasingly, that claim is being usurped by the Right and its corporate benefactors...
...McCarter and McLaughlin worked out Jay Rosen is assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at New York University...
...All the other shows militate against that, either because of the format or just a lack of time...
...But One on One is free to public stations, courtesy of Pepsi-Cola and Metropolitan Life...
...McLaughlin also wants the Right to win, but he's not interested in sustained argument or dialogue...
...Hitchens has said publicly that he was blackballed from these two programs when Novak complained about him...
...Right now, we have an imbalance," says Barry Chase, head of news and public-affairs programming for the Public Broadcasting Service...
...One of the results is that The McLaughlin Group is seen on almost 100 more stations than Firing Line...
...Still, there are limits: When Alexander Haig appeared recently, McLaughlin didn't bother to mention Haig's "I'm-in-charge" gaffe of 1981...
...There happens to be an oversupply of entertaining, glib, right-wing commentators...
...PBS needs to address the obvious rightward slant of its political talk shows...
...The McLaughlin Group is 100 per cent funded by General Electric, which means that public stations receive the show free...
...The list is heavy with Administration officials, members of Congress who serve on important committees, and foreign leaders—the establishment figures who might appear on NBC's Meet the Press...
...PBS doesn't need to suppress progressive viewpoints if the form of the discussion itself prevents ideas from being taken seriously...
...Organized pressure does work, however...
...McLaughlin denies that there is a problem...
...Buckley wants the Right to win the argument, and he enjoys the give and take...
...His colleague McLaughlin is more interested in exploiting television's impatience with intelligent discourse...
...He's right up to a point: Dull minds can be dull for any length of time...
...He decided it ought to be on public television...
...But the pressure cannot be simple-minded...
...McLaughlin is too smart for that...
...Fred Barnes of the increasingly right-of-center New Republic frequently fills one of the open spots, nicknamed the Buchanan chair because it originally belonged to ul-traconservative Pat Buchanan, former communications director for Ronald Reagan...
...How many shows do the editors of The Nation host...
...The editors of Mother Jones'] None...
...It's a sad irony, but Firing Line is the one television forum in which ideas from the Left are given air time...
...Since most of them are strapped for money, they are in no position to turn down the gift...
...The fundamental issue is to make television a forum for sustained and serious debate...
...Buckley is willing to furnish these conditions, at the risk of sometimes hosting a dull show...
...Syndicated columnist Robert Novak represents the far Right at its ugliest...
...Scorecard: rightists with three chairs, Cold War neoliberals one, liberals one, leftists none...
...In These Times...
...and predictions, a tacit acknowledgement of the program's superficiality...
...WTTW is called the "presenter" of the show to public stations, but what McCarter did, in effect, was to make a programming decision for public broadcasting that PBS—the programming arm of the public system—had nothing to do with...
...As a representative of the teleRight, Barnes is better looking and far smoother than the reptilian Novak...
...Short of all-out war, there's no way to stop it," says Chase...
...Champion of the raised eyebrow, of course, is William F. Buckley, the steward of the American Right, who occasionally allows on his program people who don't share his politics...
...Without corporate or foundation funding, it is unlikely that a show hosted by someone from the Left will make it to the air...
...But that doesn't mean that a two-minute treatment is somehow weightier than an hour...
...But it is McLaughlin's choice of guests that tilts the program...
...Conservatives have proven that by getting Chase to look for documentaries from the Right...
...Buckley deploys his bias at the level of content, McLaughlin at the level of form...
...If you walk off the set of Firing Line and say to yourself, 'Damn, I didn't get to On The McLaughlin Group, rightists have three chairs and leftists have none...
...Finally, fretfully, there's Morton Kondracke, also of The New Republic, who comes advertised as a liberal but is often indistinguishable from Novak, Barnes, and McLaughlin...
...McLaughlin seems to realize that no serious analysis can be done, so he asks for a lot of ratings—"What grade would you give Reagan on the summit...
...The Progressive...
...Research for this article was supported by a grant from Essential Information, Inc...
...As an interviewer, McLaughlin is good...
...His role as host is to distribute time equally and puncture a pretension or two wherever it appears...
...Alas, no shows...
...One day William McCarter, the president of WTTW in Chicago, a public station, saw the show and liked its fast-paced style...
...The McLaughlin Group began in 1981 as a local show on a commercial station, WRC in Washington, D.C., an NBC affiliate...
...The McLaughlin Group, hosted by National Review's Washington editor, John McLaughlin, and One on One, McLaughlin's interview program...
...Take The McLaughlin Group, a half-hour blitz of opinion among five journalists that Jody Powell, President Carter's press secretary, once called an "ideological food fight...
...No doubt GE took a look at these numbers and liked them...
...That's the kind of bias that's easy to spot, if not to undo...
...This is his signal for the group to move on...
...Harper's...
...There's McLaughlin, a special assistant to Presidents Nixon and Ford and a defeated Republican candidate for Senator in Rhode Island...
...There's no necessary correlation between depth of insight and length of discussion," he says in WTTW's publicity for The McLaughlin Group...
...Those from the Left whom Buckley invites to appear are given enough time to put their ideas across...
...The conservative biweekly National Review supplies the hosts for three shows on public TV, all of them backed by corporate money: Firing Line, with National Review's editor, William F. Buckley...
...More from the Left is not the only message that needs to be heard...
...Hitchens puts it this way: "Everyone knows what the conditions are that make it possible for worthwhile things to be said...
...McLaughlin told him on a recent show...
...Barry Chase doesn't mind this arrangement...
...You've really become a hawk...
...Buckley and McLaughlin, ideologically similar enough to share an opinion journal's masthead, part company on the form ideology should take...
...The one person who can get backing is Bill Moyers, who left CBS last year...
...Nowhere is this more obvious and pernicious than in the political talk shows on public television...
...Though it appears on two-thirds of the public stations, it is not really a PBS show...
...More subtle are the biases that McLaughlin encourages: the emphasis on brevity, controversy, even nastiness...
...Barry Chase at PBS says he would like to even things out with a new show hosted by someone from the Left, but that doesn't mean it will happen...
...The topics on the show come so quickly and range so widely—from South Korea to the Iowa caucuses, from the trade deficit to the drug problem—that the only way to have an opinion on all of them is to apply an ideological reflex...
...He likes The McLaughlin Group because the talk is quick and biting...
...His program is stacked to the Right but not to the point of toppling...
...It's time for the Left to lobby for a fair shake...
...In fact, there is little that is distinctive about the show other than its host, whose raised eyebrows and falling cadences make talk play well on TV...
...No doubt GE took a look at these numbers and liked them...
Vol. 52 • March 1988 • No. 3
