Political Journalism Loses One Of Its Best As Mark Shields Hangs Up His Cleats

 Every Friday night around 5:50 I flip my TV dial to "PBS Newshour" for the weekly political analysis from "Shields and Brooks", featuring center-right columnist David Brooks and the elder statesman of left-leaning journalism, Mark Shields.  I followed this decades-long Friday evening ritual this weekend as well, and without any advance notice, at least that I'd been made aware of, got the stunning notification that this would be the final segment for Mark Shields.  I suppose it wasn't a huge surprise as Shields is 83 years old and starting to show the slightest bit of slumping in his cognitive processes in the last couple of years.  Still, it was a punch in the jaw to learn of the farewell literally moments before he signed off.

Shields apparently only broke the news to his colleagues a few weeks ago, unsurprisingly eschewing the spectacle of a long goodbye.  I'm not sure if this was the plan all along--to bow out after the Presidential election--or if his decision was expedited by having to do the segment via Zoom calls rather than in studio for the last nine months due to the pandemic.  Whatever the case, it just won't seem the same to start every weekend without the wit and encyclopedic knowledge of Washington's history and inner workings that Shields has been imparting like nobody else in the business every Friday.

I didn't start watching him with any regularity until my college years in the late 90s, but apparently Shields' tenure on "PBS Newshour" began in 1987.  He had three different sparring partners in the segment over the decades, starting with David Gergen and followed by Paul Gigot.  By 2001, David Brooks came aboard and he had the longest tenure opposite Shields.  The only real conservative of the three was Paul Gigot, the head writer of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.  Gergen and Brooks were at best center-right, but both were thoughtful, worthy complements to Shields, with Brooks undeniably having the best chemistry with Shields.

It's hard to put a finger on just what it was about Shields that made him so much more interesting than your average blow-dried round table pundit.  There was a disarming lack of pretense about his delivery and a rejection of the escalating level of elitist smugness and groupthink that so often comes from today's left.  He came across as exactly what he was....an old-school Democrat with an optimistic take on the role of government balanced with a pragmatic acceptance of his limitations, unafraid to call BS even against his allies when the moment called for it.

Of course, nobody's perfect and Shields had his moments of naivete as well, the most striking being his frequent comments at the dawn of the Obama era that America's original sin was absolved with the election of its first black President.  Shields was sincere in believing that the racism beast had been conquered, and I guess there was a certain charm in his innocence about that, but clearly humanity is going to be tearing itself apart about race for the rest of its existence and it still strikes me as odd that someone as savvy as Shields made it into his late 60s and didn't realize that.

But 99% of the analysis that Shields provided in his more than three decades in the national spotlight was first-rate, raising the bar for his peers in the commentariat, almost none of whom were in his league.  Back in 2013, I bid adieu to the long-running political show "Inside Washington" that I'd watched for more than 20 years.  Far and away the best years of that series came when Shields joined the panel in 2006, elevating the dialogue and bringing a more grounded left-of-center perspective than his more insulated predecessors on the series who were more clearly out of touch with the center of gravity in Middle America.

When "Inside Washington" came to a close seven years ago, it felt like the end of an era, a dependable weekly staple going away and leaving an empty void in its aftermath.  It feels the same way times ten with the ending of Mark Shields' tenure on "PBS Newshour".  I'm sure they'll find another left-leaning commentator to fill Shields' shoes starting next month, but whoever it ends up being has some of the biggest shoes to fill in broadcast history.