Tuesday, May 11, 1999 --- New York (APJP) -- The results are in.

And the APJ readership spoke in near unanimity:

"Fire them all!"

Last Monday, American Politics Journal polled its web readership on their attitudes toward the Sunday political loudmouths who prognosticate on the issues of the day. Much to the pleasure of our editors, we received thousands of responses over the period of a week. And as we expected, the majority of readers were displeased with TV's Beltway elite -- calling for a veritable Sunday Morning of the "long knives."

Here are the results, as tabulated and analysed by the APJ editors:

Fox News Sunday: Bad Hair Day for Tony

Tony Snow is the most energetic of the Sunday morning hosts, and the fastest on his feet. Most of the time, he can be more energizing than an espresso jolt on Sunday mornings. Some feel he has the best hair of any DC journalist.

Unfortunately, he is also a hard-right zealot -- in fact, he was the guy who arranged for Linda Tripp to meet Lucianne Goldberg.

And our readers are none too happy with him -- or his hair.

Tony scores a whopping 83.9% negative score -- a number which surprised even the APJ editors. A majority of the respondants -- 51.2% -- want to see the entire Fox News Sunday mafia (Tony plus Brit Hume, Mara Liasson and Juan Williams) fired outright. And more than one out of every six -- 17.3% -- want his salary reduced by a cool million and that head of hair lopped off. A further 14.8% do not like his politics or his hair. A paltry 15.4% of respondents had something nice to say about Tony: 8% don't like his views but dig the coif, 4.9% love Tony and his hair and want him to stay, and 2.5% want Tony but would give Brit, Mara and Juan the heave-ho. 1.3% of our readers think Tony could kick Brit's butt with two hands behind his back. We can't figure out if that's a negative or positive for Tony -- but we'd sure love to see it!

And as if that weren't bad enough -- further analysis indicates that Tony's legendary hair is not popular among respondants, garnering a 28.7% approval rating.

Hey Tony -- time for a visit to Fred Fekkai next time you're in New York to talk with Roger Ailes! Let him know our readers think you could beat Hume to a pulp -- maybe the Fox Network will use it in their upcoming "real-life" Sunday night special, When Pundits Attack.

This Weak: Dump Sam & Cokie

Our web readership is none too happy with ABC's team of Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts either -- in fact, over two-thirds said that they had pretty well had it with the two Georgetown social insider has-beens, whose year of snide and incorrect predictions surrounding the Lewinsky flap and last year's mid-term elections have permanently damaged their credibility and will remain as their legacy to Sunday punditdom.

An astounding 69.7% of respondents say that ABC should get rid of Sam and/or Cokie. 39.4% called for firing one or both, and 31% think they should be traded to a more appropriate network -- the harder-right NBC or Fox -- where they would be in better company. And Sam and Cokie would be if they were on Fox -- believe us, even that trio of losers would be an improvement over the Georges (Will and Stephanopoulos) and Bill Kristol.

Of the remaining 30.3% of viewers who voiced their opinion, more than half (16.2%) said that ABC should keep the two nattering spinmeisters since they are irrelevant, and slightly less (12.1%) replied that Sam and Cokie should stay, but Will, Steph, and Kristol -- the "Three Stooges" of punditdom -- should get the ax. Less than one out of forty respondants -- 2.3% -- felt that Sam and Cokie were so good that they should get a raise.

Face the Nation: A Stealth Hit!

The biggest surprise our respondents gave us was their reaction to Face the Nation -- Bob Scieffer and Gloria Borger are a hit, and a major one at that -- that is, if people are aware that CBS is still running the show on Sundays!

A disconcerting 29.7% of people who replied to the Pundit Poll were not even aware that FTN is still on the air! Perhaps it is because CBS is so shortsighted that they let their fully-owned affiliates run it opposite the far higher-rated Meet the Press in a number of the nation's largest markets.

Bad move. Hint to CBS: roll CBS Sunday Morning back to 8:30, and move FTN to 10 AM in New York City -- when it will be on opposite ranting blowhard John McLaughlin on the NBC affiliate and unquestionably draw viewers away!

And there's good reason to give it a better slot: 51.8% of our viewers like it! 32.8 call it the best of the Sunday political shows, and 19% like it so much they want a full hour of it! Only 8.5% found it "the most boring of the Sunday shows" -- but that may be because Schieffer asks fairer questions and does not allow the show to become a platform for hard-right hatemongering. And only 10% of the respondants had bad things to say about the hosts (9.5 want to keep Bob and dump cohost Gloria, and an amazingly minuscule 0.5% -- actually less than 1 in 200 when we reviewed the results -- want to keep Gloria and dump Schieffer).

The McLaughlin Group: Who's the Fairest Of Them All?

Issue one: Babes Beat Boys! And one of them in particular is the darling of the viewers that responded to our poll -- Eleanor Clift! Eleanor creamed the combined competition by getting a whopping 69.9% of our poll panel's votes. Of course, this should come as no surprise -- she's the sanest one of the lot despite the need to scream at the top of her lungs to be heard over the rantings of such neo-fascist stalwarts as host John McLaughlin and Newt ex-flack Tony Blankley.

But conservative author and columnist Arianna Huffington got a very respectable 20.3% of the votes for the five panelists -- drawing more than twice the votes of the other three male panelists, Lawrence O'Donnell (5.2%), John McLaughlin (2.8%) nd Tony Blankley (1.8%).

Issue two: John, take a hint from our readers -- less bellowing, more women!!

Meet the Press: Fire Russert Now!

Finally, we come to the oldest and once most-respected Sunday political program. The response from our readers begs only one conclusion: Meet the Press is severely damaged goods, and Tim Russert is the reason. A majority of respondents -- 54.1% -- said that Tim Russert should be kicked off the air. Clearly, his unrelenting -- some would say obsessive -- campaign of setting up guests to engage in unwarranted, unfair and cheap-shot attacks on President Clinton and his complicity with Kenneth Starr's campaign to take down the President have taken their toll on the reputation and credibility of the once-promising Russert.

In fact, many of the respondents consider Russert a joke -- 21.5% said he belongs on Comedy Central instead of NBC, and 17.6% called him "too stupid to know what he's doing."

Others voted for alternatives to kicking him off the air: 3.4% said his salary should be reduced by a million dollars and 2.9% said he should be sent to ABC to keep Sam and Cokie company.

Less than one in two hunderd of our readers --just under 0.5% -- said they liked Tim and that he deserved a raise. We have this creepy feeling that they may be campaign workers for Gary Bauer, the marginal and laughable ex-Reagan advisor who fancies himself a presidential contender and turns up on Russert's bash-fest about once a month.

Trouble for the Pundits

The overwhelmingly negative view of the Pundit Poll response is an obvious indication that not only are these programs not an effective venue for politicians to "spin" the issues, but that viewers are sick of the spin -- especially from phony "moderators." In fact, the angry and cynical nature of the responses tends to indicate that the spin is backfiring -- on politicians, on pundits, and on the TV press.

There use to be a time that politicians would explain their ideas between the obviously scripted soundbites in the supposedly "spontaneous and unrehearsed" public affairs programs (which are about as spontaneous and unrehearsed as an early 1950s game show). But the post-Crossfire attitude of the programs has become so adversarial and mean that the shows are no longer a venue for political ideas to be discussed to any extent. And the viewers know it.

And the pundits themselves lash out at the viewers, sometimes castigating them for a "lack of outrage" as readily as they dismiss Clinton for "reading the poll numbers."

Nonsense. Believe us, the outrage is there, but it's aimed at the pundits, not their targets. And the poll numbers show it -- whether they like it or not.

-- The Editors