Posted on 07/19/2003 9:38:43 PM PDT by Pokey78
It wasn't in prime time, and the ratings weren't even on the charts. But in the 24/7 broadcasting arena of political talk, where liberals are on the losing side at least 22/7, they must take whatever scraps they can get. For them, it was a rare red-letter day when Al Franken, appearing on Book TV on C-Span 2, landed a rhetorical uppercut to the jaw of Liberal Nemesis No. 1, Bill O'Reilly, and left him even more senseless than usual.
The setting was a panel at the annual booksellers' convention in Los Angeles last month. Mr. Franken was on hand to hawk his fall book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Mr. O'Reilly, plugging his forthcoming "Who's Looking Out for You?," was not overjoyed to find his face among the lying liars (George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ann Coulter) on Mr. Franken's book jacket. It was downhill from there. After Mr. Franken took the mike to delineate the lies at issue, Mr. O'Reilly started calling his adversary an "idiot" and shouting "Shut up!" Such grace under fire was not so much Reaganesque as Baxteresque, after Ted Baxter, the preening local anchor of the late, great "Mary Tyler Moore Show."
But of course this liberal victory over a conservative blowhard was short-lived. Despite their domination of the entertainment industry, liberals barely have a foothold in the part of show business they are most exercised about. Barbra Streisand may have a contentious Web site, but Rupert Murdoch has an empire. As David Brooks put it recently in Mr. Murdoch's Weekly Standard, Democrats are in "despair that a consortium of conservative think tanks, talk radio hosts and Fox News — Hillary's vast right-wing conspiracy — has cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out." This week brought the news that Rush Limbaugh had even infiltrated ESPN's "Sunday N.F.L. Countdown" as a new cast member. And so liberals plot and dream, with the undying hope that their own Rush or O'Reilly or Hannity might turn up as miraculously as Lana Turner supposedly did at the Schwab's Pharmacy soda fountain.
Even as Mr. Franken was goading Mr. O'Reilly, he was talking with AnShell Media, a $10 million start-up financed by Chicago venture capitalists determined to create liberal talk radio programs for syndication. In late June, Time broke the story that Al Gore was recruiting other money men to help float a cable network that might offer some kind of an alternative to Fox News. Given Mr. Gore's own TV track record during the 2000 debates — wearing more pancake makeup than Milton Berle in drag and talking incessantly about a "lock box" — this mission seems as quixotic as Al Sharpton's presidential campaign, though considerably less entertaining. Sure, Mr. Gore is unlikely to be an on-camera personality in this enterprise, but even so, his show business résumé consists mainly of having not been an inspiration for "Love Story" while at Harvard.
How can Democrats be so ineffectual in the media in which they would seem to have a home-court cultural advantage? The talk-show playing field is littered with liberal casualties: Mario Cuomo, Alan Dershowitz, Phil Donahue. Why waste money on more broadcasting flops? The conventional wisdom has it that liberals will never make it in this arena because they are humorless, their positions are too complicated to explain, and some powerful media companies (whether Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation or the radio giant Clear Channel) want to put up roadblocks.
Others argue that liberals are so down and out that they don't even know what they believe any more. "The reason conservative media outlets work is that they have a mass audience united by a discrete ideology," says Tucker Carlson, who affably represents the right on CNN's "Crossfire" and is one of those I've queried about this topic in recent months. "They believe in nine things. They all know the catechism." In Mr. Carlson's view, Democrats are all over the ideological map in the post-Clinton era, and there can be no effective media without a coherent message.
But the case against liberal talk success isn't a slam-dunk. After all, conservatives have their talk-show fiascos too, as evidenced by MSNBC, the lame would-be Fox clone that, as the comedian Jon Stewart has said, doesn't "deserve all those letters" in its name. MSNBC's just-canceled right-wing star, Michael Savage, drew smaller audiences on the channel than Mr. Donahue did. What's more, there actually are liberals who retain a sense of humor (witness Mr. Franken, Mr. Stewart and Michael Moore), while conservative stars are not infrequently humor-free (witness Mr. O'Reilly).
Norman Lear goes so far as to argue that liberals are intrinsically funnier than conservatives. "Most comedy comes from those who see humor in the human condition," he says. "Most who traffic in the stuff could be called humanists. The far-right talk hosts spew a kind of venom and ridicule that passes for funnybone material with the program executives that hire them."
If humor doesn't bring liberals talk-show success, is the problem that they lack rage? Cal Thomas, the conservative columnist and Fox host, speaks for many when he argues that "liberals don't have the anger" that conservatives have stored up from their years in the political and media wilderness. But this, too, is changing: Pinch most Democrats these days, and they'll vomit vituperation about President Bush as crazed as that of some Clinton haters of a decade ago. The catechism that liberals believe in is arguably more or less as rigid as the conservative catechism, too: a multilateral foreign policy, affordable health care, a progressive tax code, pro-environmental regulation, pro-choice, etc.
Nor is the political complexion of media moguls necessarily an index of what political ideas they promote or stifle. It's Regan Books, an imprint of Mr. Murdoch's HarperCollins, that published Mr. Moore's best seller, "Stupid White Men." Meanwhile, it is a more progressive media gatekeeper, Bill Gates's Microsoft, that is a co-owner of MSNBC, on which Mr. Savage told a "sodomite" caller to "get AIDS and die."
In the end, the line that separates those who succeed and fail in talk TV and radio may have nothing whatsoever to do with ideology and everything to with show business. "It's hard to put a TV show together, let alone 24 hours of programming," Mr. Franken says. "Roger Ailes was a great hire for Fox. You need a showman. Fox had the idea you could do a cable news network that actually had an agenda, and no one had thought of that before."
It's a good point, because while Mr. Ailes is mainly known among political types as a media handler for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he has equally telling roots in show-biz. He helped make a bland entertainment talk-show host, Mike Douglas, into a star in the 1960's, and learned producing under the wing of the legendary Broadway impresario Kermit Bloomgarden, whose musical hit "The Music Man" could be read as the ur-text for the shameless showmanship of Fox News Channel. At Fox, Mr. Ailes invented not only agenda-driven news ingeniously branded "fair and balanced" but also "the whoosh": that sound that announces the arrival of a new headline. The whoosh may be idiotic, but TV wasn't long ago christened the idiot box for nothing. Idiocy can be fun.
If showmen as shrewd as Mr. Ailes are rare, so are performers with the particular star quality suited to broadcast talk, says Harry Shearer, the liberal radio satirist ("Le Show"), "Simpsons" voice and Christopher Guest collaborator (most recently on "A Mighty Wind"). He argues that "based on sheer radio professionalism," even "a tribe of chimpanzees locked in a room would choose Rush Limbaugh over Jim Hightower," the Texas populist whose radio show has been an also-ran on the national charts.
"Hightower has a fine record as a left politician in Texas, which is not easy to do," Mr. Shearer says. "But he has a voice like a cat being wrung through a dryer at slow speed, and he has no show business chops. Rush Limbaugh didn't start in politics. He was Rusty Limbaugh, playing the top-40 hits. He learned the craft of broadcasting first."
Al Franken, like Ann Richards, Molly Ivins and other entertaining liberals, is a polished performer without a deep history on radio. He says that were he to take on the job of talk host, it would take over his life, and even then, he could fill only a few hours of the broadcasting day. It's not clear if any other performing talents are on tap to shoulder the rest. Tipper Gore's past campaign against rock lyrics doesn't augur well for Gore TV luring pre-A.A.R.P. talents or viewers. The best hope may be for Janet Reno to reconvene her "Dance Party" from "Saturday Night Live."
Then again, maybe the only real hope for liberals is just a cyclical change in the political environment. As the press keeps asking what President Bush knew about his own State of the Union speech and when he knew it, his approval rating has started sinking to its pre-9/11 level. The unemployment record on the administration's watch keeps heading into Herbert Hoover territory. This may explain why Mr. Franken's forthcoming book was at 550 in the sales rankings at Amazon.com when I checked it early this week, while Mr. O'Reilly's was languishing at 24,574. Timing is everything in politics, just as it is in show business. Should this realignment continue, Bill O'Reilly might yet have to face down competition from a liberal talk-show host with an equally self-infatuated TV presence. "The Andrew Cuomo Factor," anyone?
I may have to give Harry a try again.
Sundays on SW 7PM EDT, 7415Khz (WBCQ)
He was going off the deep end a couple of months back, and with Summer...
Yeah right!
The liberal establishment has ABCBSNBCCNNMSNBCNBC, to help spread their leftwing agenda across America. Not to mention the vast majority of big city newspapers. The nightly newscasts on the big three broadcast networks still garner about 20-25 million viewers every day.
The GOP and conservatives have talk radio, Fox News and Free Republic.
Nice try Frank Rich, you crybaby liberal a-hole!
If Franken thinks he's hurt conservatives' feelings by attacking O'Reilly, he'd better think again. (If Franken has room in his brain for two thoughts, that is.)
O'Reilly is not a conservative. And I've never liked the way that he has "mis-portrayed" himself as being from "the" Levittown.
I agree with O'Reilly some of the time, and disagree other times. I'm grateful to him that he tackles some issues that others will not touch.
O'Reilly can be obnoxious, and bigger than life. Franken is just a nasty little man.
Barf
Hey lefties....BRING IT ON!!
That line alone made it worth reading for me. I always want to scream when that pretentious hick starts pontificating on AFN.
His politics are bad enough, but when combined with a Gomer-Pyle delivery style, it's enough to make me want to chuck the radio out the window every time.
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