He was not on the list.
By Clarence Page
Back in the early 1990s, when our son was 4 years old and
accustomed to seeing his dad on a certain Washington-based public television
talk show, he'd annoy us by skipping through the house singing, "Bye-bye!
Bye-bye!"
John McLaughlin, creator and host of "The McLaughlin
Group," was delighted to hear that news. "Watch out, Clarence,"
he said in his professorial bellow. "I'm subverting a new
generation."
"Father John," as a few of us regulars on his news
panel sometimes called him backstage, has uttered his last "bye-bye."
The former Roman Catholic priest who became an aide to President Richard Nixon
and later pioneered a pugilistic style of political punditry, died Tuesday at
his home in Washington. He was 89.
I was fortunate enough to be part of the "Group"
for 28 of its 34 years on the air.
McLaughlin invited me to join the panel, he told me later,
on the recommendation of another visionary broadcaster, William McCarter, the
Chicago public TV and radio chief who brought the show to PBS in 1982. McCarter
died in 2011.
My biggest regret when I heard of McLaughlin's death was my
own failure to thank him for the changes his program has brought to my life,
let alone his influence on the way politics are discussed on television.
Before the Group came along, political talk shows tended to
be polite interrogations of politicians, authors and other newsmakers.
McLaughlin changed that. He bypassed the newsmakers to let us commentators
argue about the newsmakers.
He further enlivened the conversation by giving his
panelists too many topics and too little time to make our points without
raising our voices and talking over one another.
And there were his unique McLaughlin-isms. He opened the
show by plunging directly into "Issue one!"
He headlined topics with festive labels like "Political
Potpourri!" and halted responses in midsentence with a resounding
"Wrong!"
He forced us to compress complexities into a tidy scale of
zero-to-10, "zero being absolute impossibility and 10 being metaphysical
certitude."
And he branded his distinguished panel with such nicknames
as Freddy "the Beadle" Barnes, now at The Weekly Standard; Jack
"Germondo" Germond, the late Baltimore Sun columnist; and Eleanor
"You're Swell-a-nor" Clift, now with The Daily Beast.
We knew we had entered pop culture when the show was
lampooned on "Saturday Night Live," once with Dana Carvey playing a
spot-on McLaughlin and another with McLaughlin playing himself — "almost
as well as Carvey did," I later joked.
I missed out on the "SNL" spoof, but I was
included in one of Mad magazine's cartoon depictions of the Group in a late-1990s
edition, enabling me to score some rare cool points with my son's fifth-grade
classmates. Priceless.
The show did have its critics. Chicago Tribune columnist
Mike Royko, another master of nicknames, called it "the McGoofy
Group." Germond called it "TV at its worst" and insisted he was
only sticking around to pay for his daughter's medical school tuition. My
grandmother simply called it "the shouting show." Sounds about right.
A more scholarly critic is best-selling author Deborah
Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor. In her 1998 book
"The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words," she includes
"The McLaughlin Group" among media that have promoted
"agonism," forms of ritualized fighting that use words instead of
fists or weapons.
When the belief that "watching fights can be fun"
enters our public discourse, she said in an email exchange, there is a
"degradation of information." Landing "a good — and entertaining
— blow" becomes more important than getting the facts right, she said, or
getting useful information across.
Donald Trump used that aesthetic in his TV show, "The
Apprentice," with his "belligerent, entertaining, 'You're
fired!'" Tannen said, and in his Republican presidential candidacy that
represents "the inevitable result — of the merging and confusing of
information and entertainment."
Could the Group have played a role in the rise of Trump?
That should give all of us pause.
Yet the worst sin in our business, besides plagiarism and
inaccuracies, is to be boring. If McLaughlin's Group helped to make today's
complicated news and issues a little easier for the public to digest, I hear it
encouraged quite a few to read newspapers, too.
For all that and more, I'll miss you, John. Bye-bye!
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