As Brooks noted, Tim Russert also had a religion-pundit panel on Meet the Press, and blew it by inviting the “bozos” Falwell and Sharpton. NBC looked like they were booking a segment on the old Geraldo CNBC show with these two worn-out spokesmen. Richard Land and Jim Wallis were fine, less boisterous guests. But ABC’s bookers clearly looked smarter than NBC’s on Sunday, picking Flake instead of Sharpton if the goal were some racial balance, and picking a Catholic scholar (Weigel) to match with Gary Bauer.

Actually Falwell had some great lines slamming the leftist panelist Wallis for being a peacenik, but it’s clear that he is the cartoon the media love to book most, and not the figure that most of the religious right — evangelical, and also Catholic and Jewish — would pick first. TV bookers are often lazy and dread new guests, who might after all be dreadful television performers. They prefer old TV reliables from a yellowed Rolodex, even if the whole show sounds like a repeat of a hundred other shows.

The real issue of the Russert panel, though, is Russert. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6601018/ The transcript shows that Russert threw text-panel hardballs at Falwell and Land, using past (quite dated) comments that were wildly controversial, such as Falwell’s declaration two days after 9-11 that gays and lesbians and feminists brought this attack from the Almighty.

So why didn’t Russert have anything controversial from the past of Al Sharpton? Start with Sharpton at the NARAL dinner as a presidential candidate in 2003, drawing big cheers by proclaiming that the “Christian right” ought to meet the “right Christians” who favor abortion. He also claimed abortion promoters were the “real patriots” because they favored “freedom for all Americans.” (That’s not even getting into Sharpton’s real forgotten past as a racist agitator.) For Wallis, Russert only quoted from his own newspaper advertisements, and not any quote found controversial by his ideological opponents. That’s probably due to liberal bias — NBC surely reported on controversial Falwell statements, but not Wallis statements. And Wallis has never been a televangelist, whom the TV news types prefer when choosing their religious stereotypes.