COMMENTARY: What came first, the idiot or the idiot box?

TELEVISION, LIKE POLITICS, is something we all think we could do better than how it's being done. Lewis Lapham, the patrician editor of Harper's magazine, dared to try. Lapham once arranged a meeting with the then president of CBS, Larry Tisch, to propose a new public affairs program that took a big-picture, historical look at current events. As Lapham relates in an interview that appeared in Wild Duck Review: He listened politely to the pitch and then waved it off by asking whether I ever watched television, or whether anyone I knew ever watched television. Not often, I said, not...