Talk show hosts stand accused of being politically biased, but are they? It is more than possible that they are simply uninformed, ignorant and lazy. If you don’t do your homework you don’t know the hard questions to ask politicians and pundits. On of the good things about the BBC is they way that British talk show hosts harry their prey. Sometimes they are plain rude and don’t even give the poor interviewees time to answer. But at least the questions are asked. American interviewers let the politicians off too lightly, lobbing gentle balls at them, then having no supplementaries with which to pin them down.
The problem many people have in government and politics is, as Susan Sontag put it, “vertigo before power.” In the US the need for access to the politicians means that journalists are terrified of putting the interviewees on the spot. If they do it’s the last time they get a one-on-one interview.
At the gym I regularly exercise next to a very prominent national talk show host, who shall be nameless, but who hosts political programs. He has a huge pile of (American) newspapers, which he gets through, so it seems, in about an hour. He might be a speed-reader, or he might know what he is looking for and is able to skim the rest (in a sense , he would have to). But the impression he gives is of someone doing a superficial job and taking in very little. Who knows? I am unqualified to say. But it isn’t very reassuring, all the same. Speaking for myself, I couldn’t even start assembling a list of penetrating questions, given the amount of time he appears to give his research.