The News & TeleGraff

The Stewart-Crossfire entry is still bubbling out there. The Washington Post reports on the latest developments yesterday.

What really bothered me about the Stewart's appearance on Friday was how Tucker Carlson kept interrupting him and not letting him finish a sentence. It seems that that happens how on too many debate shows. It was sort of funny when it was just the McLaughlin Group, but now its basically every political/current events show out there.

Anyway, I wanted to see whether I was right that there's not much room for reasoned debate on "Crossfire"—regardless of the hosts' claims to Stewart. I pulled the last 20 transcripts of Crossfire and counted up the number of the times that the transcript noted [Crosstalk].

"Crosstalk," in case you're not familiar with it, is a term that describes in transcripts spots where more than one person is talking at once, and, thus, the conversation is unintelligible.

Perhaps not surprisingly, crosstalk is a major part of Crossfire. In fact, during the last 20 shows, it occurred an average of 34 times per show—rather astounding given that the show is only 30 minutes long, which minus commercials, intros and news breaks, probably means its running time is closer to 21 or 22 minutes.

That's roughly one distinct interruption of crosstalk every 45 seconds. Not much room for dialogue there.

What was more interesting, though, is that there are significant differences between how the shows run based on which of the four hosts is present. James Carville and Tucker Carlson, Stewart's adversary on Friday, are the two worst hosts in terms of "interruption-ness." Shows with them on it have roughly twenty percent more interruptions than other hosts.

Some other fun stats for you:

# of the 5 shows with the most interruptions that involved Tucker Carlson: 4

# of the 5 shows with the least interruptions that involved Tucker Carlson: 0

Most number of [crosstalk] references in a single show: 76 (Oct. 12, 2004)

Average number of seconds between interruptions on Oct. 12th show: 19

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that perhaps Jon Stewart was saying that he thought America might be better served by a political conversation and debate-style that didn't involve inte[rruptions more than twice a minute.

[Full crosstalk and host-by-host results after the jump.]

Overall Crossfire Crosstalk Quotient: 33.9
Begala Crosstalk Quotient: 31.8
Carville Crosstalk Quotient: 43.0
Novak Crosstalk Quotient: 29.5
Carlson Crosstalk Quotient: 41.3
Right Guest Crosstalk Quotient: 21.0
Left Guest Crosstalk Quotient: 40.0

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