John McLaughlin's Last 'Bye-Bye'
And he branded his distinguished panel with such nicknames as Freddy "the Beadle" Barnes, now at The Weekly Standard, Jack "Germondo" Germond, since-deceased Baltimore Sun columnist, and Eleanor "You're Swell-a-nor" Clift, now with the Daily Beast.
We knew we had entered pop culture when the show was lampooned on Saturday Night Live, once with Dana Carvey playing a spot-on McLaughlin and another with McLaughlin playing himself -- "almost as well as Carvey did," I later joked.
I missed out on the SNL spoof but I was included in one of Mad magazine's cartoon depictions of the Group in the late 1990s edition -- which enabled me to score some rare cool points with my son's fifth-grade classmates. Priceless.
The show did have its critics. Columnist Mike Royko, another master of nicknames, called it "the McGoofy Group." Germond called it "TV at its worst" and insisted he was only sticking around to pay for his daughter's medical school tuition. My grandmother simply called it "the shouting show." Sounds about right.
A more scholarly critic is best-selling author Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor. In her 1998 book "The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words," she includes the McLaughlin Group among media that have promoted "agonism," forms of ritualized fighting that use words instead of fists or weapons.
When the belief that "watching fights can be fun" enters our public discourse," she said in an email exchange, there is a "degradation of information." Landing "a good -- and entertaining -- blow" becomes more important than getting the facts right, she said, or getting useful information across.
Donald Trump used that aesthetic in his TV show, "The Apprentice" with his "belligerent, entertaining, 'You're fired!' " Tannen said, and his Republican presidential candidacy that represents "the inevitable result -- of the merging and confusing of information and entertainment."
Could the Group have played a role in the rise of Trump? That should give all of us pause.
Yet the worst sin in our business, besides plagiarism and inaccuracies, is to be boring. If McLaughlin's Group helped to make today's complicated news and issues a little easier for the public to digest, I hear it encouraged quite a few to read newspapers, too.
For all that and more, I'll miss you, Father John. Bye-bye!
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
