The Scary Sunday Morning Talk Shows

For years we have carefully recorded what we regard as the two major Sunday morning talk shows, on NBC and CBS, to catch up on opinions and acquaint ourselves with issues and those who hold them.   In other words, we wanted to be informed.

But a few months ago we started realizing a few things about those shows.  The moderators on both programs were frequently interrupting their interviewees, apparently trying to limit the speakers to very short responses when sometimes another sentence or two would be interesting and illuminating; this was annoying.  Another thing was that both programs tended to have the same guests over and over and over, and some of those guests, particularly one certain senator, were too busy grinding axes, as the old expression goes, rather than providing insight or useful opinion; this was boring.

Finally, and the worst element of these programs for us, was that both the moderators and the guests were all trying to tell us what would happen, what for instance the President was thinking, what the President was going to do, what Congress was going to do, what various heads of state were going to do.  Perhaps we’re wrong, but we got weary of repeated hypotheticals, mostly the same hypotheticals, and the hypothetical effects of the hypothetical events.  And we found this worrying, as if the moderators and the guests were really telling the viewer what to think and feel.

So now we record those two talk shows, sometimes we may watch them for a bit, but mostly, if nothing has happened over the previous Saturday night that means there might be significant programs, we just delete them.  Because we want to know what is happening, not what might be, and we want to form our own opinions, not be told what to think.   But we have a terrible suspicion that the majority of the watchers of these two programs, and other programs on other networks, simply accept hypotheticals and opinions and never take the trouble to form their own.   How very terrifying.