Bloviation Nation: Why are we so ashamed that pundits rule?

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Brief Article

When Nielsen Media Research announced recently that the Fox News Channel had topped rivals CNN and MSNBC in monthly ratings, the news was greeted as the gravest blow to leftist media bias since Bernard Goldberg's imaginatively titled book Bias hit the streets. "We believe that if anybody's point of view is eliminated, that's biased, including conservatives," said syntax-challenged Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes. And more than a million viewers--fed up with the way Peter Jennings advocates nationalizing the stock exchange, Tom Brokaw eviscerates the "fascist pigs" of the World War "" generation, and Dan Rather openly calls for the destruction of Israel--agreed with him.

But Fox News' motto--"We Report, You Decide"--hints at another piety, held in even higher regard than the agon of Republicans and Democrats. This belief, shared even by those who find Fox as reliable as Das Reich, holds that the public is tired of idle punditry, talking-head spin, round-table bloviation. What the people want, goes the song, are facts!

"Citizens intuitively know that the best and most reliable work of the press comes when it is providing independent information," Bill (ovach and Tom Rosenstiel, of something called the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggested in a recent New York Times opted. "We know...that people like information and factualness," Rosenstiel continued, introducing survey results showing increasing public dissatisfaction with the media. "People actually resent the media getting ahead of the facts."

In a recent Pew Center poll, a solid majority said the media "gets in the way of society solving its problems," a third believed media criticism "keeps political leaders from doing their job," nearly half found criticism of the armed forces "weakens defense," and a quarter simply deemed the media "immoral."

All this would make food for thought, if only the public, in undiminished and indeed ever-growing numbers, did not demonstrate its thirst for the very opinion-slinging that is such a blight on the culture. A few hours of viewing the newly triumphant Fox News reveals less investigative journalism than punditry unchained: The O'Reilly Factor (self-pitying superstar Bill O'Reilly's "spinfree" hour), Honnity& Colmes (a lib/con face-off/yawn-fest in the classical mode), The Big Story (mushmouthed banalysis by ghoulish MSNBC retread John Gibson), and so on. Granted, Fox News' chump change ratings--like those of all the cable news channels--is...