Jackson’s New CNN Talk Show Widens Spectrum of Thought

He is . . . somebody!

And as a former--and possibly future--presidential candidate, somebody who is no stranger to hyperbole. In his four-page biography put out by the National Rainbow Coalition that he heads, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is identified as having “led or been part of every major drive for empowerment, peace, racial justice, gender equality, economic and social justice that this nation has seen.”

Even deity needs a forum, however. And there are those who believe Jackson will cynically use his latest one, a weekly discussion program on CNN, to launch his bid for a return appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” His last guest shot was in 1986.

He reaches an older and earlier-to-bed crowd as host and moderator of “Both Sides With Jesse Jackson” (6 p.m. Saturdays). And, arguably, a more politically influential one. Thus, if the oft-verbose Jackson were interviewed about his new series, the dialogue perhaps would go something like this:

Reporter: Why do this show?

Jackson: Every political act has . . . moral consequences . . . and every moral act has political consequences. Every act has a consequence . . . and every consequence . . . has been caused . . . by an act. Our moral commitment . . . does not preclude . . . political consequences, although the act itself may be moral . . . in a political sense.

Reporter: In other words?

Jackson: I wanted the gig.

And, all kidding aside, some gig it is. With the Jan. 4 premiere of “Both Sides” on CNN, Jackson became not merely the first leftist to join Ted Turner since Jane Fonda, but TV’s only true, openly partisan liberal host of a public affairs talk or interview series.

Whether one shares his views isn’t important. What is important is that those views now have a regular advocate in a medium where the range of political opinion in public affairs shows usually ranges from moderate to conservative, almost totally excluding the left.

So Jackson--rebounding from his recent failed syndicated series that was as ragged and ill fitting to him as it was politically fresh--now again adds his voice to TV’s booming right-wing chorus of hosts with mandates to shape their programs in their own reactionary images. The list: William F. Buckley Jr., John McLaughlin, Roland Evans and Robert Novak and, until leaving CNN recently to seek the Republican nomination for President, Pat Buchanan.

Mirroring its host’s unpolished TV presence, however, “Both Sides” is anything but a sleek Rolls Royce.

Jackson’s new show is tightly formatted, deploying him between guests representing opposite sides of an issue. He defines that issue, then narrates a taped package that illustrates it. Then comes the debate, then (after a commercial break) that moment in the half-hour when Jackson and his bickering guests, no matter the philosophical chasms separating them, are supposed to drop their nail-headed clubs and . . .

Seek Common Ground.

The program ends with everyone making a final statement, Jackson naturally getting the last words (which he appears to read from a TelePrompTer). Then, click, as if he were a lamp being turned on, Jackson abruptly switches personalities and delivers the Gracious Host’s Smile. And “Both Sides” is history for another week.

Although he occasionally weighed in with his own strong opinions, Jackson’s first two shows were flat, undistinguished outings whose gentlemanly “inside-the-Beltway” tone--the series is taped in Washington--clashed with his stated goal of speaking for the voiceless. Instead of shaping the discussion, Jackson was mostly a man in a cross-fire watching the rhetoric of his guests graze his nose.

On its third try, however, “Both Sides” began to emerge as a true alternative discussion program, with Jackson aggressively joining Kavan Aslanian, a California welfare rights activist, in debating David Jaye, a Michigan state legislator, and Kate O’Beirne of the Heritage Foundation on the status of welfare in the United States.

Rebutting such statements from Jaye as “nobody is starving in America” and that non-working welfare recipients are automatically scum, Jackson became a vigorous advocate for the underclasses, his passions surging. So vociferous was he at times that his philosophical ally, Aslanian, looked like a wrestler in a tag team match waiting in vain outside the ropes to be tagged.

“Don’t you see the relationship between plants closing, jobs leaving and welfare going up?” Jackson demanded from Jaye and O’Beirne at one point. They didn’t, and so genuinely spirited was Saturday’s show that there was no time even to . . .

Seek Common Ground.

What Jackson should seek if he’s serious about TV, though, is more elocution training. He remains impossible to understand at times, running his words together so horrifically that it would take the Jaws of Life to pry open some of his sentences. Moreover, he does such odd things as addressing some guests by their last names and others by their full names. A one-name memory perhaps?

More important, Jackson doesn’t forget the crucial issues that define America in 1992. Sounding like a campaigner himself, he said Saturday that in this election year he hears “no champions of the poor.”

Except, perhaps, on a certain new CNN public affairs show.