"Extremism in the pursuit of ratings is no vice." So runs one of the guiding tenets of modern broadcast media, and in Hot Air, Howard Kurtz presents an eye-opening exploration of the new talk-show culture, where a sharp tongue and the ability to shock have replaced insight and substance, and where celebrity reporters and commentators have become bigger than the stories they report. Kurtz, the award-winning media critic for the Washington Post, chronicles the rise of today's most visible media personalities, from Larry King and Ted Koppel to Don Imus and Geraldo Rivera, offering a guided tour to our new electronic democracy, in which everyone has an opinion, and everyone gets to hear about it. The result, Kurtz believes, is a cheapening of the national discourse into a witch's brew of sound bites and bile, where strange theories are spouted without fear of contradiction, accusations hurled without rebuttal and conspiracies conjured without evidence. Surprising, powerful and insightful, Hot Air reveals how talk shows are polluting the political process and, in a new afterword, Kurtz lays bare its sorry results in the 1996 presidential campaign.