Launched on the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network in 1945 before making its television debut two years later, NBC's Meet the Press embarked on a mission to “bridge the democratic divide” (1) between decision-makers and the public; the ways in which those decision-makers have discussed key national issues during appearances on the programme are at the heart of this book's interests. Across its history, the programme has operated as “a barometer of the conventional wisdom” and “an index of arguments that succeed” (5), and it therefore offers “a systematic record of the state of the elite core of national conversation as it was lived rather than as it is remembered” (3), Solon Simmons writes. In making use of Meet the Press to track high-level debate over time, Simmons provides a novel, insightful and thought-provoking account of political change across a turbulent era in US history.

The book's title underlines the key transition at its heart: the decline of equality as a key value in American national debate, as illustrated by seven decades of Meet the Press discussions. During this period, Simmons argues, the Republicans turned to a focus on freedom as the principal value that their agenda promoted, and by contrast their Democratic rivals became the party of tolerance. Equality, another key value of liberalism, lost such advocates. According to Simmons, “ours is a public sphere in which we fight for freedom, inveigh against intolerance, and struggle for security, while we have little of substance to say about surging economic inequality in terms either of outcome or opportunity” (12).

During its history, Meet the Press has devoted more attention to foreign policy than to other issues. While the Cold War's focus on the enemy of Communism permitted Americans to synthesize a focus on national self-interest with concern about global democracy, the aftermath of the Vietnam War fostered a different approach, leading to “an ongoing dialectic between the narratives of human rights and democratic victory that has persisted even through the era of perestroika and 9/11” (70). Simmons's analysis also emphasizes the impact of the civil rights revolution and of the “counterrevolutionary panic” (163) that this revolution fostered, in transforming conversations not only about race, but also about activist government in the New Deal tradition. The Republicans' language of liberty against big government created a coalition between defenders of private enterprise and opponents of civil rights; conservatives gradually developed a case grounded in individual liberty, hostile to group rights, to challenge civil rights advances. Meanwhile, over time, most Democrats edged away from class-based politics and towards concerns of multiculturalism and group rights. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was an outlier in promoting a form of class politics, within the context of problems affecting a new postindustrial middle class, Simmons adds, but his Republican opponents' liberty-grounded focus on low taxation and small government successfully challenged this effort to reframe the dominant narrative of American politics.

A moment when Meet the Press shaped rather than simply reflected debate, Simmons writes, was a 1956 appearance by labour affairs columnist Victor Riesel, recently blinded in an acid attack because of his reports on union corruption. The interview helped spur President Dwight Eisenhower to take action against corruption, action that fed antilabour sentiment. This proved to be a more enduring threat to union influence than the Red Scare of the early Cold War – in which, Simmons notes, Meet the Press “played a powerful and provocative role in exploring the early social dramas of Communist infiltration that turned the country against the state-sponsored egalitarianism that the Democratic Party had only recently embraced” (32). When presented as a force to fear and not to respect, organized labour lost influence. Meet the Press provides a vivid chronicle of labour's decline; five of the first eight editions tackled labour–capital issues, but by the turn of the twenty-first century union questions were almost entirely absent.

According to Simmons, this “eclipse of equality,” together with the interparty conflict between liberty and tolerance that competing politicians employed to frame issues, helps to explain the gridlock and divisiveness that have plagued American politics in recent years. His interdisciplinary use of Meet the Press interviews as a window on elite discourse imaginatively creates a foundation for a persuasive analysis of long-term evolutions in national political debate.