Writing for CJR last week Charles Kaiser declared “Sunday show punditry” “stuck in a hopeless time warp.” Kaiser’s focus was on the very limited spectrum of guests who routinely pontificate on the This Weeks and the Meet the Presses, and he quoted a piece Vanity Fair’s James Wallace wrote recently in which Wallace wrote that come Sunday morning, the same old folks “saw away at the same old creaky strophes of received wisdom.”
Is David Zurawik, the Baltimore Sun’s TV critic, watching the same shows as Kaiser and Wallace? Because Zurawik dubs this a “golden age of some exceptionally fine Sunday morning public affairs TV programs.”
Easy. Read Zurawik's piece--all he's looking at are the shows' ratings.
There may or may not be a correlation between meaningful discussion of political news/view and the ratings these shows garner. However, Zurawik never goes there. Kaiser, on the other hand, seems to be addressing the shows' content (or, more accurately, the lack thereof).
#1 Posted by Pete, CJR on Mon 20 Apr 2009 at 11:01 AM
Pete,
Yes, I saw that Zurawik led with ratings and agree that his content analysis comes off rather thin -- David Gregory came "out of his seat" to "press" Larry Summers; George Stephanopoulos self-assesses his show's "intensity and sense of engagement"-- too thin, certainly, to support the "golden age" claim.
Liz
#2 Posted by Liz Cox Barrett, CJR on Mon 20 Apr 2009 at 11:33 AM