The August Harper’s ran a long attack on The Mac Neil/ Lehrer Report by Alexander Cockburn, the leftest leftist now afoot. Since Cockburn brings a truly Leninist clarity of purpose to everything he writes, I was curious as to why M/ L got his dander up. His grievance, it turns out, is that M/ L assumes that in every controversy there are two sides. He postulates that the show is boring, which it isn’t, and he complains that the range of opinion it presents is all right-to-center, which it isn’t. (I vividly remember a show on which a Cuba specialist from the Institute for Policy Studies argued that the Cuban refugees were greedy and criminal. That should have satisfied even Cockburn’s taste.)
M/L is actually very informative and often dramatic. Its controversialists are usually politicians and lobbyists, which naturally imposes limits on how radical their views are likely to be. But it offers plenty of light and heat. I don’t know of a better nightly show on the air.
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