Thoughts on the first GPS

I was 15 minutes into Fareed Zakaria GPS when something struck me – there was a roundtable talk going on and in that whole time no one had yelled at anyone else! It was as if a group of adults could actually sit around a table and talk about a topic without it turning into some kind of shouting match. Its not a new concept for the cable news channels, but its one that hasn’t been seen in a long time.

I’ll say that GPS is the most intelligent thing I’ve seen on cable news in quite awhile. The first segment featured four guests – including CNN’s long-time foreign correspondent Christiane Amanpour and former Bush administration official Doug Feith (one of the architects of the “War on Terror”), in a roundtable discussion that hit a lot of the world’s hotspots. The other segment was a long interview with former British PM Tony Blair.

And that was it. Big topics talked about at length by intelligent people. It’s definitely something that’s sorely missed in today’s 24-hr news cycle. Watch the news channel of your choice: international news sadly only seems to make it on when something blows up or blows away – wars and disasters – and every two years, the Olympics. So I give Fareed a lot of credit for doing a show that tries to talk about what’s happening around the world the other 98% of the time.

That said I worry that GPS won’t be around long if this is the formula. No on-air catfights, no fluff pieces, and segments that run longer than three minutes, it just doesn’t fit the cable news mold. But let’s hope that CNN can spare an hour a week for some intelligent talk.