"Karen M., just off the top of my head, William Buckley's show Firing Line ran on PBS for several decades,and more recently Tucker Carlson had a show. Not to mention David Brooks regular appearances on The News Hour(debating the notorious leftist Mark Shields) as well as the usual suspects on Washington Week and McLaughlin, all of whom I read regularly in The Nation."

-- AnonE.Mouse

I agree that all of those people exist, but none of them fit into the same category as Moyers, at least not right now. Buckley comes the closest, and he hasn't done PBS (or any other broadcasting that I know of in some time. (I don't have cable; maybe he's there?) Still, it's one thing to put on a debate and interview format show every week, and something else to produce a high-quality documentary. Moyers seems able to do it all.

None of the others are of the same depth caliber as Moyers, in particular, Carlson and Brooks. (I can only imagine how Brooks would feel be considered in the same company as Carlson! ...who is said to be considering a game show.) My favorite of those you mention is McLaughlin. I watch him religously every Sunday (and the NewsHour during the week, especially on Fridays for Shields & Brooks-- Shields is a fount of historical information).

For my money, The McLaughlin Group on PBS is one of the best of the Sunday political talk shows going. Even though they sometimes yell, they also wrestle an idea to the ground more thoroughly than on any other show. TMG just gets no coverage on the blogs. In fact, did you know that they were among the very few to accurately predict the last election? They did. Both House and Senate (maybe the governorships, too, but I remember that less well). It wasn't that folks like Tony Blankley really knew anything, but the collective wisdom of the entire group told the tale.

If McLaughlin is indeed a conservative, then he is very old school, but I'm not sure that he is. Sometimes, he comes across as independent, other times more liberal. I think he's just able to see things very clearly. Still, as much as I love his show, I would not put his broadcast on the same level as Moyers.

As for the usual suspects on Washington Week, I suspect that many of them (not all) fall into the category of journalists that Moyers' program was about last night. So often, they seem to echo the same talking points, albeit with more subtlety and nuance. (Gwen Ifill's stock just went up with me after her appearance on Meet the Press, after the Imus debacle.)

Wait a minute!

To say that holding the administration accountable is (now) the job (only) of the opposition party... presupposes that BigMedia will also transcribe the opposition party's opinions/press releases etc, as well as the admin.'s, without rolling their eyes, either figuratively or literally, and without resorting to distraction techniques involving hair cuts, lifestyles, etc.

So far, I haven't seen that happening.

I've had this idea for awhile that our casualties in Iraq (and maybe in Afghanistan, too) are really just as much casualties of the War (on the Constitution, etc) being waged over here in Washington and beyond, as they are of what is happening on the ground "over there."

Maybe that's what GWB really means when he says "we must fight them over there, so that we don't have to fight them over here?"

Check out Jonathan Schwarz's very short column at Huffington Post:

First they came for the Bobbleheads, but I did not speak up, because I was not a Bobblehead.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-schwarz/first-they-came-for-the-b_b_46989.html

~ ~ ~

However, if you want something a bit more stringent, there are links aplenty from David Sirota, who conludes his post about the post-Moyers meltdown with these words:

Moyers piece is important not just because it has exposed the entire sham that was pre-war Beltway journalism, but also because he has finally exacted a price - in this case, humiliation - from the reporters whose power-worshiping, must-stay-on-the-cocktail-party-circuit tendencies led them to aggressively push this country into war. And we can hope that fear of future humiliation will help prevent another gross abdication of responsibility next time around.

Can't argue with that.

http://www.workingassetsblog.com/2007/04/in_the_lead_up_to.html