THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: If they spread too wide, they really imitate the Daily Show and go after a group that's too broad. My prediction is that it's all going to fizzle out.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Thomas de Zengotita says Progress Media's Mark Walsh has the wrong strategy. Don't pitch to the center. Fill the airwaves with an array of niche programs for gays, blacks, feminists, anti-globalists and so on. Zengotita lays all this out in November's Harper's Magazine and even pitches a show for a particular niche.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:So I've picked a niche that I think is a significant tipping point niche with enormous leverage in the culture as a whole, thinking long term, and that's the niche of people from 19 to 30, they're really well-educated, they know who Foucault is, they've read Derrida, they've read some Nietzsche -- these same people are as immersed in, you know, websites that talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the X-Men and what their super powers stand for -- young people who are, by and large, alienated from politics, too ironic, too fragmented into their various identity groups, too hip to really care about a general progressive resurgence in this country.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So who would host the show? Al Franken?

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:No. You know, Al Franken is a wonderful guy. He's doing a fantastic job with the mean, cruel attack comedy that would be a big part of the show I'm recommending, but I don't think he's young enough, I don't think he's intellectual enough to appeal to the niche I'm talking about. There's two people involved in the show -- you know the sort of host and the second banana --I understand that's what the term is they use. And I, I'm picturing a young guy - maybe 30 -he's been to significant graduate school; he may, might be ABD--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All-But-Dissertation.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:-- all-but-dissertation, right. And he's funny, but, like a lot of people who answer that general profile, he's not that strong on the facts, so he's got this second banana person with him. He or she is a fact person, not only in terms of what they kind of are able to store as a-- individual - but they're on line. They've got a, you know, lap top with them; they've got directories filled with places and references and so on. And this is a person who can bring facts smoothly into a serious political conversation as it unfolds between the host and the guests--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You call that person a PWAK.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:Person Who Actually Knows Stuff. The joke in that being that the people in the niche I've just described, they have a dirty little hidden secret, most of them, that even though they went to the best Ivy League schools in the country, they don't actually know that much, particularly in the area of history and economics.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What would the regular segments on the program be?

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:You got a regular segment that involves correcting misinformation that you happened to broadcast in a previous show -- that's very important - it just demonstrates that you're really serious about what the facts are. You've got segments where you might bring in a serious intellectual to talk about, you know, how everything's a simulation -- somebody like Fredric Jameson. But at the same time that you've got Fredric Jameson in there who's this huge professor that all this - people in my niche have read a little of or heard of - you've got the director of The Matrix or the guy who wrote the script for The Matrix, and they're on there together. And then maybe the host takes a phone call from someone who's actually been on a reality show, who talks about what it's like to be on a reality show, and the host makes that conversation work, and--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I gotta tell you -- this just doesn't sound funny. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:That part's not funny. You, you've got regular parodies. There's a regular segment called The O'Malley Fixture, okay? And you've got a good O'Reilly imitator, okay? And then you do -- I've got an interview written out where he interviews this nun from Africa and just won't let her talk. And I've got Hanratty and Caves -- got them parodied too. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: As, as opposed to Hannity and Colmes.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: Right. Right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I honestly think-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: Yeah--?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- this demographic that you think is so big is actually quite tiny.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: I don't think it's tiny. I think it's half a million. That's -- in cable land these days, that's a group.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, I think about Rush Limbaugh -- how he managed to develop such a broad constituency is because he tapped in to something that was quite universal -- a general feeling among middle-aged white men that they were being screwed.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: Yeah. Exactly.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, you know, can that be duplicated by a network for the left?

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:The good thing about this moment in our history, and the reason we've got these people with serious commitments and money involved in setting up liberal outlets now is because there is a feeling that we're being screwed since Bush got in -- I mean where there's a real outrage about the, the fraud of the Bush administration. But this has to go further. You can learn from what the right wing did, but you can't imitate them. The people who say you can't have left wing versions of the right wing talk shows's because left wing views are so complicated, compared to this kind of spewing anger that the right can do. There's a certain amount of truth to that. A rainbow's not a unified movement. It's just not. The-- We lost all the kids, because it's a big lie, and the kids know it, and when they listen to sort of normal, kind of leftie, progressive panels of people getting up there, everyone taking his turn, saying his thing, and then there's some little thing about this - that this is unified -- the -- it's just not!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so the cure for the apoliticization--

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: Is truth.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- okay.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA:And in two senses: it's truth in terms of self-criticism on the left -- people really coming to terms with the fact that we've lost our rudder; we have no sense of who we are; no sense of direction. And it's truth in the sense of there is such a thing as truth.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Thanks very much.

THOMAS DE ZENGOTITA: My pleasure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Thomas de Zengotita teaches at New York University's Draper Program. His article "Turn On, Tune In" appeared in the November issue of Harper's. [MUSIC]