Medianatomy: Tucker's World

The Weekly Standard's Tucker Carlson may be poised for Bush-era ubiquity, but his inane CNN talk show is all too reminiscent of a TV phenomenon from an earlier Bush administration. Party time! Excellent!

By Andrew Hearst

January 19, 2001

On Wednesday, January 17, CNN announced a company-wide reorganization intended to consolidate operations and cut costs. The cost-cutting must have started at least as far back as October, however, because that was when the network resurrected a low-budget public-access show that achieved wide renown in the early nineties.

You remember the show, don't you? The star is a confident, sarcastic, dark-haired dude who smiles a lot. His light-haired sidekick is a clumsy, bespectacled dude whose attempts to be cool are often cringe-inducing. The two dudes sit close together on cushioned chairs and engage in banter full of inside jokes and good-natured ribbing. When they're not goofing on each other, they interview a famous or semi-famous guest, who sometimes plays along by poking fun at the hosts. It's all very silly, and not at all edifying.

The show, of course, is Wayne's World. It was a hit during the first Bush administration, so it's somehow fitting that Wayne and Garth have returned now, as Bush's son moves into the White--

Wait. It's not Wayne's World. It's The Spin Room, CNN's new prime-time political chat show. The dark-haired guy is The Weekly Standard's Tucker Carlson, the Washington media's current It Boy; the light-haired sidekick is Bill Press, the longtime house liberal on CNN's own Crossfire. Carlson and Press may not live with their parents or use words like babelicious or asphinctersayswhat, but their Spin Room personas owe a lot more to Wayne and Garth than to Huntley and Brinkley. Starting at 10:30 every weeknight, the Spin Room hosts spend a live half an hour snickering about the day's news, indulging in dopey gimmickry, laughing at their own jokes, and making fun of each other. Wayne's World was frivolous but often very funny; The Spin Room is just frivolous.

Make no mistake: Despite the hosts' equal billing, Press is the sidekick. The higher-ups at CNN have decided that the bow-tied Carlson, a Republican, is the perfect pundit to usher the network into the compassionately conservative George W. Bush years. It's easy to understand CNN's thinking: Carlson is young, telegenic, and articulate, and he bears little resemblance to scowling conservative commentators like Mary Matalin and Bob Novak, who often seem like they're about to pull out a crowbar and brain somebody. On The Spin Room, the most violent act Carlson seems capable of is giving his co-host a noogie.

New York media columnist Michael Wolff recently wrote that Carlson "may be the first star of the new Bush administration." If Carlson sticks with The Spin Room too long, though, he may be forgotten by the time the next election cycle rolls around. The show, which is entirely ad-libbed, is intended to be a freewheeling, lighthearted take on the world of politics and punditry, but it might more accurately be described as a cross between a public-access show, a small-market talk-radio show, and ESPN's SportsCenter. The hosts spend each show discussing the day's news, reading viewer e-mail, conversing via satellite with a relevant guest, and taking the occasional phone call from a viewer. On the desk in front of them is a multicolored top, or some sort of top-like revolving thing; when Press detects disingenuousness in something Carlson or a guest says, he twirls the top and sets it spinning at high speed. (Ha ha, "spin," get it?) Throughout it all, chat-room and e-mail comments from viewers appear on the bottom of the screen.

If Press and Carlson believe deeply in anything--and I have no reason to think they don't--there's no evidence of it on The Spin Room. The hosts spend most of each show reciting boilerplate political opinions and taunting each other. "You've become just this hottest media star, I can't believe it, Tucker!" remarked Press last week, seeming very pleased with himself. Later on in the same show, Press gloated about being right that Linda Chavez would step down as labor secretary nominee; Carlson, feigning confusion, responded, "Bill, what's that noise? Is that the self-congratulation alarm going off?"

Political chat shows of the Crossfire variety tend to be unwatchable, but they have built-in theatricality, and the hosts and guests generally seem to believe in something, anything, even if it's simply that the person they're arguing with is an idiot. On The Spin Room, Carlson and Press don't make even the slightest vestigial attempts to make their opinions sound convincing. Again and again, one of them states a two- or three-sentence opinion, then smiles, waves his arms around, and waits for the other guy to agree or disagree. "Linda Chavez is a woman, and in fact a minority," a grinning Carlson said to Press last week, "and she is toast, thanks to the efforts of Democrats. They're not working for diversity, Bill." Carlson kept the big grin on his face, and it seemed to say to Press: I just said what you expected me to say, and I know what your response is going to be, and I'm too sophisticated to think I can convince you of anything, and this is all just superficial bullshit anyway. Your turn. There's very little actual confrontation on The Spin Room, but when there is mild confrontation, it's treated as an opportunity for more adolescent shenanigans. The day after Chavez stepped down, Press, in a rare serious moment, pressured Republican congressman David Dreier to answer a question. Before Dreier could respond, Carlson roared with laughter and yelled, "Go get 'im, Bill!"

The forced jollity masks the deeply cynical assumptions that underpin the show: Everything that happens in Washington is done purely for the sake of spin; no issue is worth taking seriously for its own sake; the American public is stupid enough to be wowed by ten- or fifteen-word opinions from ACTUAL ORDINARY VIEWERS onscreen; bow ties are an acceptable form of neckwear for men under sixty.

"Turn down your TV!!!" read a chat-room comment that appeared on-screen on Martin Luther King Day, seconds after a peal of feedback interrupted a call from a viewer who was trying to comment on South Carolina's problems with the Confederate flag. The comment disappeared from the screen very quickly, probably yanked by a producer suffering from an unusual bout of restraint. I couldn't help but wonder, though, whether the comment was directed not just at the hapless caller, but at me, and at every Spin Room viewer--a desperate plea from someone, somewhere in America, that we should stop listening to these two dudes, because (and I know you saw this coming):

They're not worthy! They're not worthy!

Andrew Hearst is a writer and editor who lives in New York. He has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Newsday, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications.