IP-SO FACTO

I usually ignore "Inside Politics," but it'll be gone from the tube forever when its last hour runs out today, and today I have to concede that I will miss it. It's usually just background for me, but it's less background than "Crossfire" — which is gone for good today as well (but which everyone knows actually died when they moved the studio to the GWU campus). For a true political junkie "Inside Politics" was the essential show. Yes, Judy Woodruff was bland. Yes, Bill Schneider just repeats the conventional wisdom. Yes, Bruce Morton is something less than the poor man's Charles Kuralt. But I still watch it.

And what comes after is surely going to be worse. Patrick Ruffini has it exactly right:

Inside Politics was the only CNN program left that was worth watching. But that's not what really bothers me about all this. It's what they decided to do with the IP time slot: turn it over to quite possibly the most boring personality in television today, Wolf Blitzer -- three hours of him. Good move, going with a guy who makes B-roll of Greenspan testimony look exciting.

Of course, the one person most deserving of criticism here is CNN president Jonathan Klein and — as Mickey Kaus has argued for months (go here and just keep Ctrl-F-ing) — his questionable insistence that storytelling (which sounds to me like hours more Christiane Amanpour visiting remote Central Asian villages) as the ne plus ultra of televison news.

P.S. Am I the only one here under 30 who remembers Charles Kuralt?

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posted by WWB at 3:26 PM |