When George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley was asked by an MSNBC anchorman last week to identify the winners and losers of the past year, there was one name conspicuously absent from Turley’s list: Jonathan Turley. For of all the pundits who have achieved talk-show celebrity since the scandal broke, Turley–a liberal academic with anti-Clintonian views and a background in environmental law and constitutional criminal procedure–was the biggest winner. During one gravity-defying stretch, he appeared on at least one of the influential Sunday-morning shows for 10 straight weeks. He was a guest at various times on no fewer than 11 other programs. He was to the other talking heads what David Byrne was to the other Talking Heads. Which raises a question: What will Turley–and the rest of the Monicorps–do now?
“You may see us roaming Capitol Hill [trying] to find tourists with video cameras,” Turley says. “There is a fear that many of us will become pundit mercenaries and travel to other countries as impeachment commentators for hire.” Wisecracks aside, he knows his 15th minute is nigh; he must soon return to the quotidian life of teaching and writing. “I can find something to occupy my time,” he sighs.
Having shot to the top of the commentariat, Turley and the other upstart impeachment specialists may now come tumbling down, casualties of the scandal’s end. Not just pundits but also entire cable-news networks would seem to need new identities. Yet the three networks that lashed themselves tightest to the mast of this story–CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel–won’t let it go gently. “It’s been a very good 12 months for us,” says Erik Sorenson, vice president and general manager of MSNBC, perhaps the most Monicamaniacal of all. Sorenson says the network has “already started drifting away” from its all-Monica lineup, and viewers have responded: prime-time ratings are down 20% since December.
Somehow, Social Security reform doesn’t attract the same audience. “This was our national soap opera,” says neoconservative pundit Laura Ingraham. “It was our Days of Our Lives.” So expect to hear more from people like Geraldo Rivera, host of a nightly CNBC talk show, who bashes Ken Starr the way he used to bash O.J. Simpson. Rivera has fed viewers an all-impeachment diet for months. Asked whether he will ever move on, he responds, “I have just begun the fight. I’m going to be talking about this next week. You have the Linda Tripp grand jury in Maryland. You have Julie Hiatt Steele. You have the whole Kathleen Willey situation. You have the President’s possible civil and criminal liabilities. You have the various investigations into Ken Starr. You have Webb Hubbell’s tax evasion…” You have the idea.
There’s another reason why it’s too early to bid farewell to the Monicorps. With three all-news networks slugging it out to deliver constant, inexpensive infotainment, talk shows populated by manic commentators are bound to proliferate. (MSNBC has started airing a version of NBC’s McLaughlin Group–leather-lunged punditry distilled to its essence–four nights a week.) As with the O.J. trials, Monica has turned sometime “expert” analysts into full-time TV personalities: cybergossip Matt Drudge got a show on Fox News; flaxen-haired lawyer Cynthia Alksne now anchors MSNBC’s Equal Time next to Oliver North.
In truth, no one ever strays far from the cameras. “It was relatively difficult to get into the Rolodexes of producers and bookers,” says Michael Zeldin, a coveted impeachment commentator, “and impossible to get out.” Ingraham, who burst onto the scene in the mid-’90s as a blond, brash conservative in a miniskirt–and who was gleefully ubiquitous during the Lewinsky affair– now hosts Watch It!, a snappy MSNBC talk show. Last Wednesday the network cut away from the program to broadcast a press conference given by Senator Tom Harkin; but within seconds the cameras cut back to Watch It!’s living-room studio–a triumph of talking-head blather over real news. “Haven’t we heard enough from Tom Harkin?” Ingraham said. Some might say the same about her. But pundits, not politicians, get their own shows.
–With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York
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