The Civility of Civil Discourse

Early on in the Era of the Trump Error, I stopped watching TV network evening news. Truth to tell, I'd been drifting for years as broadcast news became more a vehicle to sell me stuff than a means of telling me what was going on in the world and why it was happening. 

As I grew older and more set in my ways I was unwilling and unable to tolerate the shouting matches masquerading as panel discussions on cable TV news channels and since everything the Cheeto Cheater said and did was bullshit I concluded there was little to no point or gain in watching it on a nightly basis. Except for PBS...

I watched PBS news when it was the MacNeil-Lehrer Report and remained tuned. I was saddened when Gwen Ifill whose smile lit up my living room passed away too soon, leaving Judy Woodruff to soldier on, which she did, and does, to this day, brilliantly.  

There was, to my ears, more speaking with and less yelling at one another and more often a supposition that I, the viewer, might actually have a brain capable of entertaining competing notions on any given subject or that, maybe, just maybe, the telling of a tale might require more than fifty seconds and/or three camera shots with a fifteen-second stand-up lock-out and 'back to you in the studio' that left me dumber than when the report began. 

Most importantly I realized when I wandered around the dial that I missed the presentation and defense of original thoughts and ideas where you could disagree and not be disagreeable and so I came back to PBS as my first and often my only choice for TV news.

I looked forward to Fridays every week for the nine minutes or so of analysis by Shields and Brooks, usually wrangled by Judy Woodruff on the issues of the past week, and was fortunate to catch the very last installment of the pair's conversation this past Friday evening. 

Read David Brooks' NYT column from that morning first. My initial thought was 'wow.' But Shields' reaction to kick off their final session together was an observation so eloquent it took my breath away when I heard it and brings tears to my eye when I read it, "I just regretted that my parents weren't alive to read it and enjoy it, because my father would have enjoyed it, and my mother would have wanted to believe it." 

And there's no one on television news anywhere on the dial that will ever be Shields and Brooks and for that, we are and will be poorer as a nation. 
-bill kenny