What Sunday talk can learn from ESPN

January 29, 2008 9:11 AM | | Comments (386) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been watching a lot more ESPN lately. I've also been watching the Sunday talk shows more regularly. It isn't often that your favorite team and presidential candidate are pulling upsets left and right at the same time.

All this time watching talking heads has led me to some conclusions on the strengths and weaknesses of both formats. In many ways, they are the same. In both, people get selected for notoriety rather than prognostication ability. Both use uncertain facts of little predictive value to make predictions driven more by personality and institutional biases than by the record. Both read things into quotes and speeches that really aren't there.

But somehow ESPN is far more widely-watched and better put together. I think this is due to speed and comity. Every ESPN news show moves quickly from game to game, but the political talk shows linger on the top issue, even if it's inane. Insiders get to drive the debate by simply sucking the air out of the room and keeping one thing in the headlines and long-brewing messes like the mortgage crisis creep up on us and explode. If George Stephonopolous had a Pardon the Interruption-style clock, he would be forced to cover down-the-list topics like urban issues or energy.

Political talk could also borrow ESPN's sense of comity and sportsmanship. There are plenty of people out there who hate each other based on what they said and did during the Thomas confirmation. No host or guest on a sports show acts coldly to someone based on whether they thought Pete Rose should have been banned from baseball. In sports news, , disagreements are forgotten as soon as the subject changes. Famous grudge-keeper Bob Novak would not have lasted very long yakking on sports.

Perhaps there are exceptions to these generalizations about both political and sports shows, but I think it holds up in general. If Meet the Press were more like SportsCenter, will politics be as popular as sports? The Matthews Meter says no.

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