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Twenty-five years of John McLaughlin.
by Andrew Ferguson

Okay, if he won't mention it, I will: The year just ending marks the 25th anniversary of The McLaughlin Group, the landmark public affairs TV show founded by John McLaughlin. It's odd that McLaughlin himself hasn't made a bigger deal of it. A shameless showman, he's celebrated his earlier anniversaries with full-tilt hoopla--retrospective programs and public commendations and lavish parties held in the gilded ballrooms of downtown hotels.

About the silver anniversary, however, we've heard not a peep. I'm not sure why this is so, but--in tribute to the McLaughlin method of journalism--I will take a wild guess. The show has been in a long decline. Ratings are down, syndication is down, the panelists seem listless, the host himself often distracted or fatigued. The formula is now limp in the hands of the man who invented it. There's nothing to lift McLaughlin's famous bellow above the general riot heard round the clock from Fox, MSNBC, or CNN. Maybe McLaughlin figures that any reminder of the show's age would just invite stories of the "Lion in Winter" variety: The man who started it all fades away, unloved and unacknowledged. Even a publicity hound of McLaughlin's appetites would probably prefer to do without those.

Yet he did start it all, you know. That's why the Group's anniversary deserves some kind of notice. McLaughlin is the most influential figure in televised political journalism since .  .  . well, forever, probably. That he has become lost amidst the army of his imitators merely proves the size of his
achievement. McLaughlin appeared at the dawn of the cable news era, when the orthodoxy of mainstream "consensus journalism" still seemed unassailable. That orthodoxy, as reinforced daily in the major newspapers and on the broadcast networks, was unconsciously liberal, resolutely self-important, and intensely boring. We now know that consensus journalism was an artifact of postwar mass media. Big audiences were needed to sustain the profits of broadcast networks and large-circulation newspapers. The bland, inoffensive journalism of the period was in large part a financial necessity, even if some of its practitioners convinced themselves that it was grounded in metaphysical notions of public service and social uplift.

McLaughlin saw through the consensus to other, richer possibilities. In TV commentary--"news analysis," as it was called--the orthodoxy was asserted in deadly chinwags like Agronsky and Company, which is now gone, and Washington Week in Review, which is still breathing, though barely. McLaughlin designed his Group to subvert the very premises of the Washington political conversation--by being, among other things, bizarrely amusing, even exciting. Droning was forbidden; no topic could occupy more than four minutes' airtime. McLaughlin bellowed at his panelists and the panelists bellowed back; feuds developed among them, alliances were formed and broke apart in a shower of insults. The 24 minutes of an average show zipped by at laser speed. Though the Group never topped the duller shows in the ratings, its reach and power left the others sputtering about a "decline in standards."

They were right about the decline, but they were wrong that the standards were worth preserving. As on Agronsky or Washington Week, the jibber-jabber on McLaughlin was pristinely pointless, but at least McLaughlin made it seem fun. It was gasbaggery unencumbered by pretension; all you needed to appreciate it was a short attention span. By the time cable television became the main supplier of political news, the orthodoxy had suffered a lethal blow. Commentary was demystified, and fact commingled shamelessly with opinion. As McLaughlin and his panelists became celebrities and grew rich from speaking engagements and road shows, punditry replaced reporting as the dearest aspiration of would-be journalists. Perhaps most important, antiestablishment conservatism became unignorable, for alone among the chat shows, the Group declined to treat right-wing ideas as though they were freakish anomalies smuggled into the capital by the Reaganite junta.

Whether this upending of the established order was good for us is, I suppose, a matter of opinion--in fact, thanks in part to the kind of journalism McLaughlin popularized, everything seems to be a matter of opinion these days--but you've got to admit, it was a lot for one man to accomplish. How did he do it? I worked for him once, in the early 1990s, and though my employment lasted slightly less than 24 hours, it was long enough for me to begin to answer the question. Through friends I'd heard McLaughlin was looking for a part-timer to help him research and write the lead-ins to each show's video segments. The money was pretty good and whoever got the job would also get an on-screen credit as an assistant producer. The show was still at its peak of influence and charm. I thought: TV!

In a city famous for tyrannical bosses, from congressmen crazed with drink to bureau chiefs aflame with illicit desire, McLaughlin had become a legend. You heard stories of volcanic rages, unimaginable flights of egomania. Least among his eccentricities was his requirement that all staffers refer to him as "Dr. McLaughlin," because he had once earned a Ph.D. in communications or some other of the lesser academic disciplines. "I can handle that," I said to myself, and after a brief interview I was told to show up early Friday morning to prepare for the show's taping at midday.

he McLaughlin legend, I quickly discovered, had shortchanged the McLaughlin
reality. When I opened the door to his production company's suite, the first words I heard came roaring up in the famous Rhode Island drawl: "This is s--! Unadulterated s--!" From the shadows of a darkened office, behind a desk as vast as the deck of an aircraft carrier, McLaughlin would bellow at his staff through an intercom. His voice ricocheted down hallways, and the epithets burst like ack-ack above the dim cubicles where his assistants cowered and trembled. The abuse was astonishing, unpredictable, and, in several instances, cruel. A single tirade could last for an hour.

He didn't scream at me, though. Part-timers generally, and men in particular, were usually exempt from his outbursts. That didn't mean our newborn relationship was normal. For my first task he told me to work up a lead-in to a segment on some bit of legislative sausage grinding its way through Congress. "Cokie Roberts had an excellent report on the bill on NPR this morning," he said. "I taped it to make it easiah on you. It's all the background resuch you'll need."

I went back to another office carrying Dr. McLaughlin's handheld recorder. He had evidently propped it against his radio speaker to record the tape that morning. "Considerate of the old bastard," I thought, pressing the play button. I heard Cokie's swampy voice explaining the doings on the Hill. And then I heard water rushing, and a clatter of ceramic, and a mysterious release of air, and I realized that the doctor had made the tape in the bathroom. I was hearing his morning ablutions: the gush of faucets running and the honk-honk of nasal passages clearing and the rumble of phlegm rising and .  .  . much worse. Scraps of show tunes hummed off-key competed against every noise the human organism is capable of producing at that hour of the day, and together they threatened to drown out Cokie's report: "The prognosis, critics say, is still a matter of PHLOOOTH!" At times I could barely make out what she was saying. I'd rewind the tape only to hear some new intimate eruption. I shut off the recorder after four or five minutes. I wrote up the lead-in as best I could and walked back to his darkened lair.

He was eating an enormous platter of steak and eggs from the restaurant downstairs. "Did you learn anything, Andrew?" he said from behind his desk, with a half smile. He dabbed his thumb and forefinger on the napkin tucked into his collar.

"It's hazing," one of the assistants told me later that morning. "He's establishing the parameters of your relationship. This way you know who's in the dominant position. He can embarrass you, but you can't embarrass him. That's the key: He refuses to be embarrassed."

I quit after the taping that afternoon, with no hard feelings but with, I've always thought, a special insight into the personality required to do what McLaughlin did: transform the trade of political journalism and establish a new industry that, alas, would accelerate so rapidly it eventually passed him by. When I watch TV I marvel at the personalities who rule public-affairs television today--Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, and all the others in that eager, endless parade of peacocks and posers--and I still wonder how they can do what they do, night after night and week upon week. And then I remember: They're Dr. McLaughlin's children. They refuse to be embarrassed.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.