John McLaughlin, the host of the long-running political roundtable show “The McLaughlin Group”, died Tuesday at 89. McLaughlin was best known for his Sunday panel show, which he created in 1982 and for which he had not missed a taping in 34 years – until this past Sunday, when he was too ill to appear.
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Another longtime panelist on the show, Eleanor Clift, revealed in The Daily Beast that “the cause of death was prostate cancer that was diagnosed some time ago and that had spread”.
For all its influential qualities, critics scolded the show for treating politics as another form of televised entertainment and setting aside more nuanced examination of current events for heated confrontation among the panelists, who generally reflected the host by skewing white, male and conservative.
Since its debut in April 1982, The McLaughlin Group upended the soft-spoken and non-confrontational style of shows such as Washington Week in Review and Agronsky & Co. with a raucous format that largely dispensed with politicians.
“I began the group as a talk show of the ’90s”, he said, adding that he thought informing an audience could be entertaining: “The acquisition of knowledge need not be like listening to the Gregorian chant”.
“As a former Jesuit priest, teacher, pundit and news host, John touched many lives”, the statement on Facebook from his colleagues read.
Broadcast personalities honored McLaughlin’s legacy on Tuesday evening. “We never found anything we could make fun of easier than your show”, Carvey once told McLaughlin.
McLaughlin also hosted an interview show, John McLaughlin’s One on One, that aired on PBS between 1984 and 2013. In the meantime, you can catch up on some past episodes of The McLaughlin Show here. McLaughlin denied the allegations, and the case was settled out of court in 1989 under undisclosed terms.
“The intensity of the environment is such so that if people are hesitant to say something, they find themselves saying it anyway”, he told Howard Kurtz for Kurtz’s 1996 book “Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time”. He and Dore divorced in 1992, and McLaughlin later was married to Cristina Clara Vidal, an executive with the company that produced The McLaughlin Group, from 1997 until their divorce in 2010.
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McLaughlin was born in Providence in 1927 and later attended theological school at Boston College, where he also received degrees in English and philosophy. “And that’s why people watch this show!” In 1970, he switched parties to run for senator of Rhode Island as a Republican but attracted just 32 percent of the vote in the general election.
