Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics
by By Alterman, Eric
Category: Social Science , Media Studies

Never in our history has the American political system seemed so aimless, so irrelevant, and so downright disgraceful as it does today. Television has become dominant to the point that it now not only serves as the sole viable medium for the debate of issues but has also provided the fodder for political platforms, and even budding presidential candidates. "Objective" reporting in the print media is political double-speak, but, even more important, it deprives us of the context that would allow us to make an informed judgment about a given issue. What we are left with, simply, is the punditocracy: the highly visible, extremely well-paid, and seemingly omnipresent pontificators who make their living offering "inside political opinions and forecasts" in the elite national media. It is their debate, rather than any semblance of a democratic one, that determines the parameters of political discourse in the nation today.In his shrewd, provocative, and entertaining Sound and Fury, journalist and historian Eric Alterman takes the first comprehensive survey of the world of political pundits - their history, their influence, their style and substance. How have the George Wills, the John McLaughlins, the Robert Novaks, the William Safires, the Pat Buchanans, and all the op-ed and opinion makers whom we have come to regard as authoritative voices on the subject of government actually achieved their authority? How do they deploy their power? Who really listens to them, and what does their ascendancy mean for our political future?Sound and Fury opens with a historical overview of punditry, focusing on the greatest of all pundits, Walter Lippmann, avatar of punditry's Golden Age and as close to a philosopher as the popular media has ever produced. Tracing Lippmann's heirs, Alterman presents a series of portraits of the leading pundits of the Reagan/Bush years, a period when the profession came into its own - no more notably than in the person of the jaunty courtier George Will, and no more potently than around the bullyboy roundtables, the weekly pundit sitcoms, led by the likes of punditry's P. T. Barnum, former Watergate priest John McLaughlin. The book closes with an examination of the punditocracy at work in the Bush era, and how it successfully - and dangerously - defined the shape of the United States' response to Mikhail Gorbachev, the end of the Cold War, and that ne plus ultra of pundit adventurism, Operation Desert Storm.One of the most original and witty treatments of American politics in decades, Sound and Fury is a searching look at the diseased American body politic and its blithely hubristic talking heads.