I’m about to date myself, but I can remember when the only political pundits and commentators were the ones who had regular columns in the big regional newspapers – people like Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, David Broder and George Will, who seems to have been around since g-d was a boy. I also remember when network news was the half-hour broadcast after the regional news every evening about 7pm, with two fifteen-minute blurbs on the weekends. Sundays gave us half an hour of Meet the Press, when a politico really did meet the press and get grilled by them, and another half hour of Face the Nation, when a different panel of pressmen (and, occasionally, a woman) did the same to another elected or appointed government official. The only real poltical opinon talk show was another half hour feature entitled Issues and Answers.
If the public wanted to respond to points raised by these various individuals, especially the political journalists who appeared in the print media, their only recourse was the good, old-fashioned Letter to the Editor of the paper in which the offending column appeared. If you were lucky, maybe your letter got published in the appropriate section. If not, you’d had your say and had to live with the assumption that the editorial department conveyed your opinions, along with those of other members of the public who’d taken the time to put pen to paper and write, to the journalist in question. Either way, unless the journalist addressed these opinions in another column, you got no feedback.
