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February 4, 2008

THE TV WATCH

In Election of Change, TV Gives Voice toInsiders

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

On “Meet the Press” on NBC on Sunday, viewers met the strategists: from left, Mary Matalin, James Carville, Mike Murphy andRobert Shrum with the program’s host, Tim Russert

On Sunday mornings, the choice is between Captain of the Debate Club Tim Russertand George Stephanopoulos, high school’s most diligent lab partner.

There are other talk shows and other networks, and all of them will be all over SuperTuesday. But ABC News and NBC News are the front-runners in the competition tocover electoral politics; the Sunday talk shows are their lodestars.

Mr. Stephanopoulos’s program, “This Week,” on ABC, is a little like Senator HillaryRodham Clinton, serious, hard-working and sometimes joyless, while Mr. Russertprogram, “Meet the Press,” on NBC, has talent and panache, like Senator BarackObama, but sometimes favors eloquence over substance.

Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama say they are the candidate of change; neithernetwork can make any such claim.

What is striking in an election cycle in which all politicians, even the Republicans,seek to distance themselves from the past is how much the best-known televisionpundits who hold them to account are entangled in old partisanship and pastallegiances.

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Even Mrs. Clinton says she wants to move forward and not go back to the Clinton eraof the 1990s; the leading Sunday talk shows never left it.

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, viewers instead met the strategists: Robert Shrum, aDemocratic consultant and Senator John Kerry’s senior strategist in 2004; MikeMurphy, a consultant who worked for Senator John McCain in 2004; Mary Matalin,who worked for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney; and her husband,

James Carville, an adviser to President Bill Clinton. (“I’m for her,” Mr. Carville said of Mrs. Clinton. “I love her to death.”)

Mr. Russert is without question one of television’s smartest, most rigorousinterviewers, and even he once worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the longtimeDemocratic senator from New York who died in 2003.

On ABC on Sunday, Mr. Stephanopoulos, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton’scampaign and worked in his White House, interviewed Mrs. Clinton. He tried to pinher down on policy fine points. He pressed her several times to say whether heruniversal health care proposal would garnish the wages of those who fail to comply,but Mrs. Clinton blew him off, repeating sternly, “We will have enforcementmechanisms.” Mr. Stephanopoulos desisted, but viewers have no idea whether hisdeference was born of good manners or just deference.

And the analysts on Mr. Stephanopoulos’s program had all the same kind of incestuous ties as the ones on NBC: Victoria Clarke, who was a spokeswoman for Mr.McCain before she became the Pentagon spokeswoman under former DefenseSecretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; Dee Dee Myers, a press secretary for the ClintonWhite House; Robert B. Reich, who was President Clinton’s secretary of labor; andGeorge F. Will, a columnist whose wife was a senior adviser to former Senator BobDole in his 1996 presidential race.

Both networks are careful about balance: there are equal numbers of Republicansand Democrats. But they are careless about bias: the experts are supposed to beimpartial, but it is left to viewers to parse their complicated pedigrees and entwinedpolitical obligations. It’s not that they have nothing to say, it’s that what they say isnot accompanied by an asterisk.

On Sunday, Mr. Stephanopoulos dutifully but unmemorably interviewed Mrs. Clintonand Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential hopeful.

Mr. Russert, who has already grilled all the contenders to exhaustion on past shows,chose to look ahead to Super Tuesday relying on a flashy electronic map of primary states and their probable leanings blocked out in Jell-O shades of purple andorange and green.

That left plenty of time to showcase Mr. Carville’s latest venture: a Super Bowl commercial for Coca-Cola in which he and the former Senate majority leader, BillFrist, Republican of Tennessee, put aside their political differences to enjoy a Coke.The commercial is supposed to promote bipartisanship and carbonated soft drinks but it mainly revealed just how deeply Washington pundits are steeped in thecozy, old school status quo. Mr. Carville’s wife, Mrs. Matalin, didn’t seem thrilled bythe ad campaign or the election campaign. She dismissed the Democrats’ messageas “change hoo-ha.”

When she was asked about Mrs. Clinton’s ability to control her husband, Ms. Matalinleaned over and grabbed Mr. Carville’s neck. “The only way you can control ahusband like this,” she said, “is to be right next to him with a leash.”

Fox News is normally the cable news channel of blatant, even blistering opinion, butin contrast, its Sunday talk show, led by Chris Wallace, relies on reporters, not formerstrategists: Brit Hume of Fox News, and Juan Williams and Mara Liasson, both of 

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National Public Radio. (The one exception is William Kristol, a former adviser to DanQuayle, the elder George Bush’s vice president, and a conservative columnist whorecently joined The New York Times’s editorial page.)

And that leaves an opening for “Face the Nation,” the CBS Sunday program thatsince 1991 has been moderated by Bob Schieffer, who has said he plans to retireafter the 2008 election.

Change is in the air, but it is not on the air. Against all odds, CBS could turn out to bethe network of hope.