Ten Things I Learned at Topic A

3) The most common excuse for guests not being asked to come on show was ?I am taping my own show at that time.? Realized I no longer know anyone who doesn’t have own talk show.

8) The better writers are on the page the worse they sometimes are on the air. What TV requires is not someone who is authoritative but someone who looks authoritative. Genuine articles are often hopelessly out of the demo, with coke bottle glasses or unfortunate predilections for a thoughtful pause. —Tina Brown —Ten Things I Learned at Topic A (The Huffington Post)

I’m not a TV news kind of guy, so I can’t say for sure whether I’ve ever seen her broadcast work, but I know she wasn’t exactly a smashing success as editor of The New Yorker.

Yes, she’s exaggerating, but talk about an echo chamber. Does the world really need yet another way for Tina Brown to share her ideas with the world?

And compare her point #8 with a recent spoof article from The Onion:

“[Canton] went on like that for six… long… minutes,” Salters said. “Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these statistics about megawatts and the nation’s current energy consumption and I don’t know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds.” (“Actual Expert too Boring for TV”, posted 04 May 2005; will expire soon)

When she writes “not being asked to come on show,” does she really mean “not being able to come on show”? Why would “I am taping my own show at that time” be an excuse for not asking someone to be on her show? Or does she mean a person who was not asked to be on her show would use that story to explain the oversight to a third party?

There’s no way to ask that question on the blog and get a clarification, since there’s no way to post a comment. So the world will have to shrug and hit the “go back” button.