The Sunday-Morning Sitcom

Our political media become laughable at some point. It happens when we watch Norah O’Donnell batting her eyelashes, Christiane Amanpour being imperious to her guests, George Stephanopoulos launching gotcha questions as he leans almost horizontal from a sniper’s position, or Kristen Welker insisting that her job promotion from MSNBC White House correspondent to Meet the Press anchor is a victory for feminism. These preeners are not scholars; they’re actors, using politics for the comedy of self-satisfaction. If you’re in the right skeptical mood, they turn the Sunday-morning political TV-talk-show format into unscripted sitcoms.

This phenomenon came into focus recently via The Wrap, the far-left website devoted to showbiz gossip, and its recent “red flag” analysis of NBC’S revamped Meet the Press, detailing Welker’s credibility problem. It quoted “media analysts” and “experts” — buzzwords writers use to keep industry sources anonymous while fronting for their personal opinion — a hallmark of Fake News. The Wrap pretends that Welker and her ilk don’t just deliver corporate opinion and that Meet the Press is more serious than showbusiness — which really means that Welker and her political posturing must be reviewed as showbusiness.

It was the late Barbara Walters who changed the TV-anchor designation, preferring the self-aggrandizing title of “journalist.” Venerable Walter Cronkite never needed that and probably regarded his status as “America’s most trusted” TV figure with some modesty. Now that legacy media are no longer trusted to disseminate truth, every TV news announcer boasts that she’s a journalist. That ruse parallels how print journalists so rarely practice objective reporting; many now prefer the narcissistic term “activist” when they’re merely announcing their disapproval or support of an issue. It’s essentially a feckless armchair profession.

Welker’s “journalist” and “activist” breed reject the academic “thinker” and “public intellectual” titles since education, expertise, experience, and hard thinking are not qualifications for what they do. The criteria for their gig include camera-ready affect, demographically checked good looks or youth (interchangeable with some semblance of maturity), and partisan allegiance. These are prerequisites for court jesters, not journalists.

The Wrap’s Jeremy Fuster bought into network hype that Meet the Press, “television’s longest-running program,” is an exceptional carrier of political information, ignoring the ideological slant embodied by Welker’s Barbara Walters impersonation. Still, this TV institution is not above reproach. Its disingenuous act — every interview with a conservative degrades into an argument — demands critique.

When the news itself becomes a pretext for such a show (providing clips to be repeated on rival programs), don’t be distracted by the issues being discussed. But do pay attention to the false-smile, pencil-pointing distraction. Or else what was the excuse for Paddy Chayefsky’s Network?

Welker’s diversity-hire promotion from MSNBC’s junior-varsity team is the latest extension of Obama’s biracial hoodwink. The Wrap obeyed the taboo against addressing this and, instead, cast Welker’s incompetence as a misguided left-wing political tactic: her failure to match wits with President Donald Trump, the same fumble that trips up every corporate media Mata Hari from Lesley Stahl and Savannah Guthrie to Kaitlin Collins. Political showbiz presumes that female opponents bring inherent conviction to a rhetorical competition, but PC network executives overlook a problem that casting agents might easily recognize: These inquisitors can’t resist the habit of rushed, nervous interjections. They mistake petulance for authority. Welker’s attempts at debate (coached by off-screen news directors) became a game-show competition — the kind she never risked at press briefings in the Biden White House.

On MTP, Welker’s anxious demeanor conflates discussion with point-scoring. It’s a type of recreational, political display conducted like sports. (The next day, teams take sides and pundits flaunt their score cards.) According to Fuster, Welker’s performance became the focus of “media analysts . . . highlighting the absence of effective fact-checking.” That’s not a review of, say her gymnastic skills, as a sports reporter might do if Welker were an athlete. It’s an extended partisan effort at one-way judgment about fact-checking the opponent, not the home team. A sport without a referee. That’s how the political game becomes a bad sitcom.

In this news/entertainment hybrid, fact-checking is a method of twisting facts and opinion — ways to censor the subject and influence viewers who are naïve about how media work.

The Sunday political talk shows originally billed themselves as “public affairs” programming, but now that left-wing partisanship dominates what the FCC used to call “public interest” programming, the Sunday shows are best seen as perverse entertainment — escapism from social reality to slanted reality.

The Wrap can’t bring itself to admit that Welker’s left-feminist careerism is used to dress up Meet the Press as serious journalism. It’s as if NBC turned Mary Richards from The Mary Tyler Moore Show into a pussy-hat ideologue. (The sorority mean-girl programming at CBS is a subject for further study.) The Wrap’s critique of Welker’s ascension to the pyrite throne of Meet the Press reveals its editor Sharon Waxman’s own form of left-feminist bias. In sitcom terms, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was never so dishonest, so low-key hostile, or so risible.