The Barbershop That Never Changes
Imagine walking into a barbershop where men sit in the same chairs, trading the same stories daily. You know the rhythm by heart, who speaks first, who interrupts second, and where it ends. There’s no haircut, no new faces, just a daily noise ritual. Now imagine that barbershop is broadcast nationwide and branded as informed political analysis.
Welcome to American Roundtable Television.
The Perpetual Roundtable
For over a decade, a familiar group of “contributors” has hopscotched from CNN to MSNBC, from Fox News to PBS, offering the same commentary regardless of the network or the news cycle. Names like Donna Brazile, David Brooks, Ana Navarro, Michael Steele, Jonathan Capehart, and Peggy Noonan appear exhaustively. Their titles vary, from analyst to strategist to columnist, but their message rarely does.
These aren’t journalists on the front lines or scholars revising their understanding. They’re performers of predictability. They deliver recycled outrage, predictable partisan defenses, and the occasional sigh of “we’re better than this” for gravitas.
Even when the network changes, the script doesn’t. Symone Sanders may leave a White House comms job, but she lands squarely on MSNBC. Navarro might rail against her own party, but does so with the cadence of someone who knows the cameras love the conflict more than the content. And David Brooks could host an entire series titled “Why I’m Still Thinking the Same Way After All These Years.”
The Bubble Problem
Step behind the curtain of cable news and you’ll find a world hermetically sealed from the one it claims to cover. Most political pundits live in the same four ZIP codes: Manhattan, D.C., Los Angeles, and Northern Virginia. They don’t just share studios; they share drivers, dinner tables, agents, and vacation rentals in Nantucket. It’s not a panel. It’s a club.
This bubble is not ideological so much as institutional. It doesn’t matter whether a pundit leans right or left. The greater loyalty is to their professional habitat and its unspoken rule: don’t upset the cocktail circuit. Don’t challenge your own side too sharply, and never stray too far from the Overton window of your booking producer.
When an insider makes a bold statement, it’s rarely a risk. It’s usually a signal of shifting groupthink, not independent thought. And if that signal is off? They get ghosted. The bookers stop calling. They lose their seat at the Sunday brunch roundtable that decides “what America is feeling this week.”
This is the bubble problem: our national discourse is being shaped not by those who’ve walked the streets of Youngstown, Toledo, or Kenosha, but by people who talk about those places while sipping $19 Pinot at Le Diplomate.
We’re not governed by the informed. We’re managed by the insulated.
The Illusion of Diversity
Modern television panels look diverse. The visuals are deliberate; a mosaic of skin tones, ages, genders, and supposed ideologies. But when the conversation starts, it becomes clear: the diversity is only skin deep.
We’re told Ana Navarro and Michael Steele represent Republican thought. But in truth, they serve as counterweights not to the left, but to conservatism itself. Their roles are often cast to represent dissent, not principle, safe critics who challenge the GOP from a studio desk, never from within its base.
Panels often stage a progressive voice beside a “center-right” figure who has long since renounced actual conservatism. The resulting debates are rarely about truth. They’re about contrast. One side insists America is structurally flawed and in need of reinvention. The other agrees, but quibbles over tactics.
This is a curated consensus, not an argument.
And so, the actual spectrum of thought is gone. There’s little room for, say, a traditional conservative who believes in religious liberty and federalism but rejects both political parties. There’s no voice for the anti-war leftist who distrusts global corporations and identity politics in equal measure. Those people exist. They just don’t have contracts.
Instead, viewers receive a high-production game of verbal dodgeball, ideas lobbed, never caught, never held. It’s not dialogue. It’s performative opposition within approved boundaries.
The panel table may be round, but the opinions are squared off, filed down, and focus-grouped until they no longer offend anyone or enlighten anyone.
What’s Missing
These panels do not include the people who live with the consequences of the policies debated. Where is the foreman from the Midwest who sees EPA rules gutting his industry? Where is the teacher watching DEI mandates override classroom authority? Where is the immigrant business owner trying to make payroll during tax season?
Where are the Salena Zitos? The small-town columnists, the long-haul truckers with more wisdom in their logbooks than most Georgetown roundtables have in their teleprompters? These people don’t just write tweets or wait in green rooms. They listen. They report. They live.
This absence isn’t just regrettable. It’s destructive. By locking panels into a 30-person carousel of recycled opinion, we’re excluding 330 million Americans from the national conversation.
Under What Authority?
At the heart of the problem is this uncomfortable question:
Why do these people get to define the national narrative?
They aren’t elected. They aren’t scholars updating peer-reviewed work. They’re not historians, journalists breaking new ground, or even regional voices with local credibility.
Most haven’t worked in public service or private industry in decades. And yet, they speak with the authority of Roman senators, as though the average American is simply awaiting their learned commentary to know what to think.
When Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow spoke, they did so with earned gravity because they had reported from war zones, challenged power, and risked real consequences. Today’s pundit class risks nothing but a smaller following.
They’ve grown famous not for changing minds, but for staying in place.
Familiarity has become a credential.
Seniority is confused with wisdom.
Repetition is mistaken for relevance.
And producers defend it. Why? Because these pundits “test well.” They’re not controversial enough to lose viewers. Not radical enough to break the mold. They’ve become the perfect infotainment product: provocative enough to trend on X, but polished enough for prime time.
So here we are: a democratic republic whose soul is being dissected daily by a closed guild of unaccountable narrators.
When a society allows a handful of well-lit, unchallenged personalities to interpret its every crisis, scandal, and election without rotation and review, it loses the very thing democracy demands: fresh judgment.
The Remedy
We don’t need to cancel anyone; we must rotate them out. America could benefit from a concept borrowed from Congress but too rarely applied to media: term limits. Not enforced by law, but by courage. Producers must stop favoring the familiar and start broadcasting the unheard.
Feature a rotating panel of real people: a nurse from Tulsa, a mayor from rural Ohio, a Gen Z factory supervisor from Pennsylvania, a veteran now teaching high school civics. Put a mic in front of someone who’s not been coached for cable news but who’s lived consequences, not just commented on them.
Reward networks that seek novelty not in graphics, but in perspective. Spotlight the thinkers who surprise us, who say something that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. And give airtime to regional columnists, emerging historians, blue-collar professionals, and even the stubborn, thoughtful contrarians who still read footnotes.
Final Word
The problem isn’t that today’s pundits are wrong. It’s that they’re done. Their commentary is reheated leftovers served as fresh debate. Their loyalty is not to truth but to tenure.
If we continue to turn to the same 30 people to explain a country of 330 million, we will continue mistaking consensus for clarity and repetition for wisdom.
And the nation, badly in need of both, will suffer.
