When I first read TBogg‘s summary of Ross Douthat‘s latest column, I really thought he was kidding:
CNN should develop potentially “riveting” television programming that offers respectful and thoughtful debate that rises above petty and obvious partisanship. You know, like Glenn Beck…
Then I read Ross Douthat’s latest column:
Even the thrust-and-parry sessions of “The Daily Show,” though, are limited by the left-right binary that divides and dulls our politics. They’re better than the competition, but they don’t give free rein to eccentricity and unpredictability, or generate arguments that finish somewhere wildly different than where you’d expect them to end up. This is what you find in the riveting television debates of the past: William F. Buckley versus Gore Vidal, Vidal versus Norman Mailer, anything involving Ross Perot. And it’s what you get from the mad, compulsively watchable Glenn Beck, who’s an extremist without being a knee-jerk partisan: You know he’s way out there on the right somewhere, but you don’t know what he’s going to say next.
When you’re just making things up, it’s pretty easy to ad-lib. I don’t really have an opinion on CNN in particular, but I when I watch cable television, the thought that the networks are focusing too much on policy details at the expense of “interesting debate” doesn’t occur to me. My beef with American political coverage on cable isn’t that it’s “dull,” it’s that it’s often so bad.
Douthat gave some examples from what he sees as the “good old days” of political debate above, if you’re wondering what Douthat thinks a “substantive” argument looks like in the present, well here you go:
[Jon] Stewart’s series of debates on torture and interrogation policy, in particular — featuring John Yoo and Marc Thiessen, among others — have been more substantive than anything on Fox or MSNBC.
In other words, Douthat thinks political debates are “substantive” when conservatives win them because the other guy is unprepared.
— A. Serwer
