| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Enough already about the Sunday shows! "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," and "This Week" have been on for decades, and I can't look at my Twitter feed on the weekend without seeing complaints about them and their cable-news counterparts. To which I have only one response: Who cares? Are the Sunday shows bad? Yes. Do they tend to attract some of the worst habits of TV journalism — the belief that both sides of any issue need to be aired; a "gotcha" interview style; a tendency to feign neutrality but actually treat some policy choices as self-evidently correct? Again, yes. I don't care. You shouldn't care. No one should care. The Sunday shows are a relic from the three-network days of the 1950s through the 1970s, in which news was restricted to fairly small windows on a small number of channels, and most of it consisted of just reading the day's stories. Especially early in that period, even sound bites from politicians were relatively rare, and extended interviews had hardly any place on the TV dial. The Sunday shows were one of the few places for politicians and other political actors to explain their positions in their own words, directly to the audience. They therefore became a good place for political actors to communicate with each other indirectly — a place for trial balloons to be launched or shot down, for administration policy to be firmly stated or fudged, and for senators or cabinet secretaries to actually be seen and heard by a national audience that didn't have other options. None of that has been true for decades. The cable-news networks have live interviews with politicians on all the time. The C-SPAN channels have live coverage of all sorts of political events. Social media allows politicians to get their views out directly, without any need for the traditional press at all. The Sunday shows ceased being useful sometime in the 1980s. In fact, much of the interviewing style that critics dislike was adopted precisely because the shows lost their original purpose. The good news is that all of this doesn't really cause much harm, because relatively few people watch these shows to begin with. They're neither unusually bad nor particularly damaging, and reforming them wouldn't change anything. That they still retain some of their old mystique is purely a function of people pretending that they're still important. If you don't like them, then, the best strategy isn't to complain about them; it's to ignore them. Or just treat them the way we all treat the rest of televised news: Ignore most of it, and then see any clips that are worth watching online. Which works out just fine. 1. Dave Hopkins on Biden and 2024. Exactly correct. As I've said, even if Biden was certain he wasn't going to run for re-election he's best off pretending otherwise for now. 2. Michele L. Swers and Kelly L. Rolfes-Haase at the Monkey Cage on the Hyde Amendment. 3. Josh Putnam on why it's difficult to change the presidential nomination process. 4. Amanda Terkel, Igor Bobic and Jennifer Bendery on what senators do during disasters in their states (when they're not vacationing in Cancun). 5. Jessie Bur on fights over the federal workforce. 6. Ross Douthat on the end of the pandemic, and why Biden could be more optimistic about it. 7. Andrew Sprung on Jonathan Cohn's new book about Obamacare. 8. And Maya King on diversity — or not — among Hill staff. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
Post a Comment