Hot Air

All Talk, All the Time

By Howard Kurtz
Times Books, $25

ISBN 0-8129-2624-2

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Review by Roger Miller

Everybody's talking; should anybody listen?

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, Thomas Babington Macaulay said, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Critics of talk shows are purer Puritans than their ancestors: They deplore both the pain that television and radio talk shows inflict on our culture and the pleasure they give to the slack-jawed multitudes who watch and listen.

The trouble is, you usually canÕt separate the bears from the Puritans from the spectators in the tutti-frutti world of talk shows. At one time or another someone or another seems to be the Puritan bewailing the depravity of lesser mortals, while at the same time grabbing for more money. This hypocritical babble of sanctimony, revealed in Howard Kurtz's entertaining and informative Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, should draw a malicious smile from any reader who has ever wanted to throw a shoe at George Will's or Sam Donaldson's self-righteous and patronizing mug. This industry is all nutty, all the time.

Kurtz, who reports on the media for The Washington Post, shows that our society has become all but synonymous with television: We are what we watch, and we want to be watched. In this he could have taken his cue from Florence King, the acerbic critic and essayist (who refuses to appear on TV), who has said that "I saw you on television" has replaced "E pluribus unum" as the national motto. Or from the movie To Die For, in which Nicole Kidman portrays an ambitious, murderous small-town TV reporter who argues, "WhatÕs the point of doing anything if nobody's watching?"

But Kurtz has a comment almost as good from Clarence Page, The Chicago Tribune columnist who regularly appears on talk shows. Page tells Kurtz: "In modern society, you only exist if youÕre on television." There actually is a national registry of talk-show wannabes, with 2,400 signed up at the time of Kurtz's writing, some of whom have already appeared on more than one program, and sometimes more than once. We are not in Kansas any more. You can't tell the politicians from the journalists who are supposed to be covering them. They appear together, all hail-fellow-well-met, on the same programs, and increasingly they swap roles. There is "no longer much difference between the talk show world and the political battlefield," Kurtz writes, and the best example of the blurring of the lines is Pat Buchanan, columnist/talk show figure/presidential candidate.

The author finds little to admire in this "unholy union of journalism and televised entertainment." The honest participants admit they take part for fame and fortune, and make little pretense that it advances social and political discourse in this country; they are simply shouting heads engaged in televised food fights. The dishonest, like Larry King and John McLaughlin, try to maintain that it is journalism.

It is insidiously seductive: An academic critic of the talk-show phenomenon succumbed, and now has her own show. Even the author admits to turning into a "media slut" on occasion, in a chapter, "A Personal Odyssey," the moral of which would seem to be that when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas.

As far as Kurtz is concerned, pretty much all of "trash TV"--from Geraldo to Ricki Lake--is utterly without redeeming social value, though he does manage to croak half a cheer for some talk radio. He believes it offers a way to disseminate news and views dissenting from what the chattering classes get across in the traditional media. The popularity of people like Rush Limbaugh, Kurtz says, is not entirely a conservative impulse but rather "reflects a legitimate frustration with the way the press slices and dices the words of politicians."

In particular he is impressed by the outrageousness of Don Imus, who does "what most journalists could only dream of doing, ridiculing the high and mighty while exploiting them for ratings." He comes to partial defense of Howard Stern, for illuminating the hypocrisy and back-scratching of Washington and Hollywood and for denouncing the celebrity culture of which he is a part.

Kurtz has a good handle on the problem but no solution. The problem is "there's so much damn time to fill"; everybody's talking, but no one has the faintest idea, so they fill the airwaves with insults, invective, and trash. The solution might be to talk to each other instead of to the red light, but in this nation of strangers, that doesn't seem likely. Where's the profit, and who would know?

Roger K. Miller, a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin, was a newspaperman for more than a quarter of a century. He has never appeared on television.