Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditcracy and the Collapse of American Politics.

Sound & Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics, by Eric Alterman (Harper-Collins, 352 pp., $23)

POWER Washington does not generally read books," writes Eric Alterman. He should be glad that it at least buys them, since his diatribe against the pundit class (and bid to join it?) is among the bestselling books in the nation's capital. Too many pundits are afflicted, Alterman observes, by "laziness, self-satisfaction, and plain old burnout." Alterman does not merely review the work of the "punditocracy," a clumsy neologism he employs throughout, but contends, as his subtitle does not fully disclose, that mostly right-wing or -leaning pundits are to blame for "our national decline." Pundits don't have as much influence as Alterman thinks, however, and it's a good thing: Alterman for the most part ignores the (left-leaning) news side of the news business--his on-target analysis of the press's love affair with Bill Clinton being a notable exception. Alterman says the American people (meaning Eric Alterman) desire a "progressive domestic revitalization program," but he also says that "we have lost the language we need to discuss the reconstruction of our political culture." Here the anti-pundit pundit, whose understanding of the private sector is very modest indeed, is philosophically confused: How can a person know he desires something when he has no words to discuss that desire?