‘Crossfire’ Misses Shot at Political Balance

The noise from the TV set is CNN’s “Crossfire,” the live, brawling public-affairs series where guests are confronted by co-hosts advertised as representing opposite ends of the political spectrum.

“From the right,” it will continue to be Pat Buchanan. “From the left,” it will now be . . . Michael Kinsley ?

So much for truth in labeling.

Buchanan is “right,” all right. And Kinsley is politically to Buchanan’s left (who wouldn’t be?). But thereafter, reality and the show’s billing part.

Kinsley, editor and columnist for The New Republic, has the face of a kid who buries himself in his chemistry set. Yet the bespectacled, scrawny-looking, 38-year-old Kinsley is not only bright but cute and funny. And it’s not that he can’t be feisty, as evidenced by Monday’s program when he and substitute right-wing host Robert Novak battled about a Capitol Hill political scandal with their guests, Democratic activist Anthony Podesta and Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Calif.), who could make a gutter-level shouting match out of “Swan Lake.”

But no wonder some special interest groups are furious about Kinsley being named this week to replace the recently fired Tom Braden as the show’s liberal counterpart to arch-conservative Buchanan, who worked in the White House under both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

By his own description, Kinsley is “unreliably left wing.”

Not much of a liberal himself, Braden generally clung to the center position like someone hanging on to a log in the middle of the Pacific, often not opposing Buchanan’s attempts to sink guests who were left of center.

“Sometimes I’d have them both against me,” occasional “Crossfire” guest Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, said about the co-hosts Monday from her office in the Washington, D.C. area.

Even when he tried to put up a fight on “Crossfire” (which airs weekdays at 4:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.), Braden was a patsy for the bullying, keen-minded Buchanan and other conservatives who have filled in for Buchanan during the show’s seven years on the air.

Some “Crossfire” observers assumed that when CNN finally did decide to replace Braden, his successor would be someone as far left as Buchanan was right, and just as partisan. But as Kinsley acknowledged by phone Monday from Washington, where “Crossfire” originates: “Buchanan is much further to the right than I am to the left.”

The “Crossfire”/Kinsley issue isn’t frivolous, for it reflects mainstream television’s general reluctance to accommodate diverse political points of view.

The hiring of Kinsley is a blow to liberal activists who had counted on a post-Braden “Crossfire” giving them a regular voice--their only one--on national TV. Liberals have argued for years--with justification--that public-affairs discussion shows range from those firmly in the political center to the far-right crowd of “The McLaughlin Group,” Buchanan’s own “The Capital Gang” on CNN and, in effect, “Crossfire.” Hence, the perspective of the left is inevitably excluded, for panelists designated as liberals on these right-tilted shows are almost always centrists.

“I wish they would cut the charade,” Jeff Cohen, executive director of the self-described “progressive” media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, said Monday from New York. “It’s a little like journalistic blackface, making these people come out and pretend they represent the left. And now representing the left, Michael Kinsley? I think it’s absurd.”

In a way, so does Kinsley.

“I think that groups that complain that these political talk shows are tilted to the right have a point,” said Kinsley, whose “TRB” column in The New Republic was once described by media critic Edwin Diamond as saving its “longest needles” for the left. “I’m not an advocate for the left the way Pat Buchanan is for the right,” Kinsley said.

Ideological independence is an admirable quality in any commentator--except on “Crossfire,” whose hosts are cast as rigidly partisan ideologues, and whose conservative host, Buchanan, is just that.

“Crossfire” executive producer Randy Douthit acknowledged from Washington that “some people” at CNN preferred Democratic political activist Mark Green, who, like Kinsley, had been an occasional substitute for Braden on the show.

An aggressive advocate of left-liberal and Democratic Party causes and a former political candidate, Green is a forceful debater who proved a match for Buchanan in his appearances on “Crossfire.” Others from the left could have filled that role too.

Douthit denied a report that Buchanan himself had vetoed Green. “Green was my second choice,” Douthit said. “I like the chemistry between Kinsley and Buchanan, and Michael has a little more wit than Mark.”

But does “cute and funny” counteract Buchanan’s relentlessly hostile partisanship?

There is more at stake here than left vs. right, moreover, for in choosing Kinsley, “Crossfire” also missed a chance to pick a minority member or a woman and thereby help diversify a genre of programs whose talking-head regulars are overwhelmingly white males as well as conservatives.

“Pat Buchanan is an activist against the progressive feminist view,” Smeal said. At best, Kinsley will be “a more moderate voice,” she added.

“According to my contract, CNN can fire me at will,” Kinsley said. “So if they think I’m not liberal enough, they can always get get rid of me.” But the odds are long.

Meanwhile, “Crossfire” should at least get the labling right: Pat Buchanan from the far right and Michael Kinsley from slightly left of center.