Agronsky and Company (1974)

If the House goes Democrat in November, Bush will almost certainly be impeached. Wasn’t Clinton, for so much less?

In an earlier era, presidents were impeached for true criminal acts like subverting the constitution and bribing witnesses. Not only the House, but the Senate as well, was safely Democratic in 1974. Still, it wasn’t easy for any of those legislators to take on a sitting president. It was all serious, solemn, and bi-partisan at base, because the point wasn’t just to impeach a president, it was to convict him, and that required two-thirds of the Senate, including many Republicans.

In those serious times in Washington, in the aftermath of a failed war and with a failing presidency, journalists emerged for the first time as players, giving their opinions on television and by so doing, shaping day-to-day events in the nation’s capital. The time was 1974, the place was a local public television show called “Agronsky and Company,” and the stars were host Martin Agronsky, TIME’s chief Washington correspondent Hugh Sidey, a moderate, the moderately liberal Elizabeth Drew, the moderately conservative but pro-impeachment George Will, the conservative James J. Kilpatrick, and the liberal Carl Rowan.

These people had clout. The show had clout. The cast was serious, balanced (taken as a whole), and polite. As with Woodward and Bernstein, who were serious journalists who did their homework guided by first-rate editors, Agronsky and Company were pioneers, and they were careful enough to get it right.

Journalists today long for the day-to-day influence over events that Agronsky and Company journalists had in the mid-1970s. Journalists think today's problem is that Republicans run everything and don’t listen to Democrats. So they are doing what they can to oust the Republicans, and bring in Democrats who will listen.

But is more partisanship the answer to a too-much-partisanship problem? In the long run, influence comes through persuasion, through the hard work of listening, gathering facts, and winning over, the kind of work the Agronsky and Company players understood.