There are obvious discrepancies in real life from TV life. Any casual observer of My Sweet 16, the abominable but delightfully awful show on MTV that is a cross between a reality show and a morality play, knows that an individual’s faults and deprivations is good entertainment and can be significantly profitable for even the most reprehensible characters in our pop culture ecology. Take Flava of Love as an active reminder of this, as well, as too easy a target for critique; there are few better examples of the mass marketability of complete idiocy than Flav. We like our TV sensational.

Political shows are an exercise in this form of celebrity TV under a guise, if not a complete ruse or deception, that the shows themselves are more about information and journalism than they are about entertainment. Though I think the informative aspects of these shows in non-election years are marginal but present, in election years, the shows become forums for watered down analysis from hacks and politician worshipping journalists. The news quality of such shows is suspect.

For years I have been a fan of Hardball as political theater. It has some journalistic elements and has had in the past some really good interviews. It also has, with increasing frequency, theatrics between political figures posturing for each other. The Coulter/Edwards stupidity this week was an example of posturing. The Hitchens/Sharpton “debate” last night was more about the theater, the great men becoming something of a parody of themselves, with little actual content between the two.

The previous debate between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens (found on Slate) was actually very interesting. The moderator did a good job keeping each man limited to his own space on stage and not letting one or the other dominate the program. This is essential with two men who are prone to talking over each other. Last night Chris Matthews stepped back from the two men, by doing so, he ruined the debate by not actually moderating the two blowhards, who just talked over each other for an hour of TV time. Of course, this is a shame, but it is not unexpected.

Matthews presents himself as a real time journalist. Most of the other TV commentators do the same. Though there are journalistic aspects to these shows, they are primarily designed for entertainment, not for information. Nobody watching a “debate” between Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton expects to be better educated by the end of the hour. You are expecting to be entertained by the two personalities at the expense of substance. In this case the substance was the existence of God, but to hear the two debate, it might as well have been anything.

There is nothing wrong with entertainment TV, of course, but the demise of print media, a daily crumbling of the foundation of American print journalism, leaves me skeptical of where people are actually getting their information from. Are we as a now digitalized society getting our information from cable news, if we get it from anywhere at all? If this is the case, what is the news value of TV designed for entertainment posing as news?

I don’t have an answer to these questions but I don’t think I need one either. It is not the answer that is important in this aspect but merely that the question lingers out there, like a bump in the mouth, something to run your tongue over and think about. The issue is not whether Matthews and Company should change their shows but how we digest the content of their shows that matters. If we are taking Hardball as straight news, then there is a danger that the proverbial and inevitable spin of the contestants will become more influential than it should and given more credibility than it deserves. However, if we take it as entertainment, not news, we can admire it for its value thus, and not as something more than what it should be taken as.