Books, Arts & Manners: And the Moral Is . . .

Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture, by S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman (Regnery, 478 pp., $22.95)

IN THE MOVIE Speechless, which claimed unconvincingly to be about two rival political speechwriters who fall in love, one of the two explains to the other how a speech arrives at its payoff: “What is the yaseetimmie?’