Hot Air: All Talk, All The Time

Talk has never been cheaper in political journalism. On radio and TV, cable and network, there are now dozens of political talk shows. They range from the calm and ego-less Brian Lamb conducting a C-Span roundtable to the vein-popping G. Gordon Liddy telling his listeners exactly where to shoot federal agents. For this book, Howard Kurtz, a Washington Post media reporter and sometime talk show guest himself, interviewed nearly everyone associated with the genre. Frequently, the interviewees put their finger on what's wrong. "It's gotten to be a game," Sam Donaldson says of the guests on ABC's This Week. "They come on with one thing in mind--to put forward their view on a particular topic or two, but make certain they don't give us anything else. . . . They'll lie as part of their game plan. I can't immediately disprove what they're saying. . . . We're just an extension of the PR mechanism." According to Michael Kinsley of Slate (and former Crossfire cohost), what television wants is "jovial disagreement. We're all pals here, just joshing around in the locker room, when I think they're (expletive) liars."