Firing Line at 50
by NEAL B. FREEMAN
It is the contention of liberal scholar Heather Hendershot that Firing Line, the long-running television series hosted by William F. Buckley Jr., was bracing, original, occasionally electric, frequently heuristic, and, all weighty things considered, a major contribution to civilized discourse. Allowing for typical professorial understatement, I think she may be on to something.
Professor Hendershot, who teaches media studies at MIT, has just published a magisterial account not only of a television program, but also, more ambitiously, of the political culture from which it sprang and within which it thrived. She tells this story with style and insight and good humor, some of the latter borrowed from WFB but much of it her own. The gem of her hefty book is a long introduction that limns memorably the narrative line and the leading character, all of it based on what appears to be, as the leading character might have put it, Stakhanovite research.
Read the review here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016-10-24-0100/heather-hendershot-open-to-debate