Conservative Peggy Noonan takes a page or two from liberal Bill Moyers tonight in the launch of a new three-part PBS interview series, "On Values: Talking With Peggy Noonan" at 9 on MPT (Channels 22 and 67).
But while the former Reagan and Bush speechwriter mimics the formula of Moyers' past chatfests with intellectuals on PBS, she has neither Moyers' easy camera presence nor his skill at playing student to the guest's wisdom.
To be blunt, Noonan is a lousy television interviewer. She never gets out of the way of her guest and, at times, she actually seems to be trying to hog the spotlight. It's as if we are watching a child who's saying, "Mom, see who I'm talking to! And I'm keeping up with him intellectually, too!"
Noonan speaks and acts as an equal with the three guests she has on tonight: Father Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic scholar; Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish magazine Tikkun; and Moyers.
The topic for all three is, in the words of Noonan, "faith itself and its place in public life." Everybody agrees that God has somehow been pushed out of public life in America, and that we are poorer for it as a nation. But because Noonan never focuses the conversations on specifics, or forces her guests to crystallize their thoughts, much of it is too vague to generate a reaction.
Neuhaus blames the Supreme Court and its decisions separating church and state for God's disappearance from the public arena.
Lerner blames, in part, the capitalistic, free-enterprise system, which places material wealth above all else. "Marketplace values" is the term he uses.
Moyers is less sure of the answer. His part of the program is by far the most interesting as he talks about his personal search for values, the effects of having heart bypass surgery last year, and recently turning 60.
Say what you will about Moyers, the man, but he has brilliantly crafted a television persona as someone constantly in search of answers, listening to America, seeking to find its soul. To many PBS viewers, he's become Pilgrim Moyers on the Great American Quest.
Noonan seems not to be seeking answers as much as echoes of her own thoughts from the people she interviews.
That's a mistake common to many rookie interviewers.
For all the publicity surrounding her, Noonan made her name not as a journalist but as a propagandist for Reagan and Bush. Her greatest fame came from the book "What I Saw at the Revolution -- A Political Life in the Reagan Years."
And while she keeps referring tonight to the years she and Moyers spent together at CBS News, as if they arrived right after Ed Murrow, she was only at CBS six years. Most of it was spent at CBS Radio, where she wrote and produced Dan Rather's radio commentaries -- again, more the stuff of propaganda than journalism.
The worst failing of tonight's show is a journalistic one -- Noonan never considers any opposing points of view to her thesis that we have chased God away from the public arena and are now paying for it.
What Noonan seems to be mourning the loss of (indeed, if it ever existed in post-Colonial America) is a kind of fundamentalism, a religious conviction that informs our every waking and sleeping moment.
A better journalist would have at least asked whether such fundamentalism -- be it Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Islamic -- is compatible with governing a multicultural, free society that was founded in part on principles of religious tolerance.
In recent months, PBS president Ervin Duggan has been calling Noonan "the Katharine Hepburn of public television" in an attempt to use "On Values" to blunt the criticism of conservatives in Congress who say PBS is too liberal.
If this is the new, best hope of PBS, heaven help public television.