No more crazy leftism from Meet the Press.
The news that the late Tim Russert's son Luke will be one of the esteemed panelists on the retooled
Meet the Press is not too surprising; both the political and pundit industries are firm believers in the theory that expertise is a genetic thing, not a learned one, and it is
damn important that the professions comfort themselves with the thought that not everyone could do their job—they have to be of the right social stock. It's all very Fourth Estate.
This, though, is a bit more eyebrow-raising:
Also joining new moderator Chuck Todd’s team will be former Republican congressman and “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough, who sources say “is taking on a larger role within NBC News as a senior political analyst and would be one of the regular Sunday panelists.”
We’re told the move is part of a plan to bring a right-leaning voice to the program to appeal to viewers turned off by the show’s famously left-leaning former hosts including the ousted David Gregory.
The perceived problem with the obsequiously conventional-wisdom-pandering, dull-as-dishwater, thing-your-grandfather-would-leave-on-in-the-background-while-making-toast
Meet The Press is that it was insufficiently conservative? That seems a curious lesson, but like every other thing in the history in punditry the presumed cure for the problem at hand is to intentionally drift farther into the fog of fuzzy pundit rightism. The current formula must not be working because the pundits are not saying the right things; the frustrated pundits then declare that the problem is that viewers are being pelted with too many upsetting left-of-center statements, which upsets their tum tums, so they have to ratchet the whole enterprise a little more rightward in order to cater to an ever-shrinking, ever-more-aged crowd of people who need validation, not knowledge. You know, conservatism.
This is the New York Post, mind you, so they could just be lying outright about the network blaming David Gregory's obvious frothing communism for the ratings slide. On the other hand, refreshing the program with the likes of Joe Scarborough—the network's closest equivalent to a decaffeinated Glenn Beck—does indeed suggest the program seeks to be "edgier" mainly via cookie-cutter ideological prattle. Well sure, who wouldn't want that?
It doesn't sound like the network will be taking Meet the Press too far from the existing stable of pundits saying the existing collection of pundit things, and if conventional wisdom, but louder is all they've got I can tell you how that's going to work out right now. Still, there are necessary limitations to the format, and the pool of people you can be in is necessarily limited to people who can, say, keep a straight face while listening to Sen. Lindsey Graham talk. That's why you and I will never be on the Sunday shows. We don't have that gift.