Crossfail

Well, well, the CNN pundit screamfest Crossfire is being canceled. I'd say its about time. What was once a unique, confrontational forum for discussion of issues has degenerated into a heated spectator sport.

See, I remember when Crossfire began in 1982. I liked it then. It featured Tom Braden (playing the liberal) and Pat Buchanan (playing himself) interviewing usually one guest and gently sparing over the issue at hand. There really wasn't anything else like it, at least not a daily half hour program. This Week with David Brinkley began about this time and it featured a group of pundits hashing things out for the last quarter of the show and I think PBS may have had a weekly program like Washington Week in Review, but Crossfire was the new aggressive child of the emerging cable news world.

As the years went by, the level of political noise on the airwaves became more an more shrill, dominated by the rightwing talk shows populating the AM radio stations that became otherwise useless in the 1980s (music had completely migrated to FM). As the political discourse became more divisive, Crossfire began to turn up the conflict factor as well. Yelling past each other became the order of the day. And its still that way.

So, I say good riddance. The fewer of these things the better. Whereas it was possible to actually learn something from Crossfire in its early days, now its just a political cage match where opponents care less about informing and much, much more about zinging the other guy with demagogary.

I'd like to think that Jon Stewart's appearance on the show a few months ago where he lunched into a well deserved attack on the show and its ilk was partly responsible for its demise, but I doubt it had much to do with it. It would be nice if CNN management stopped for a moment and thought, "Hey, he's right. We are doing a disservice to the public."

The cancellation of Crossfire may actually be the start of CNN moving back into the realm of credible news programming rather than trying to be Fox News Also. Its interesting that when major news breaks (the tsunami disaster being the latest example) , CNN's ratings go up while Fox's numbers stay flat. I think this demonstrates that CNN is still seen as providing news while Fox is seen as the propaganda tool it is.