Last week I wrote about CNN's anemic ratings, the various “fixes” that outside observers are prescribing, and how the network, in its quest to find a reinvigorated audience, will have to deal with the tension that often arises between ratings and reportage. So I was interested to see Ross Douthat take up the topic in his New York Times op-ed this morning, but flummoxed by Douthat's suggested fix.

Douthat's prescription is to resurrect Crossfire, the long-since canceled CNN political debate program, but to do so in a way that ensures the program remains “respectful” and “riveting,” two adjectives that could hardly be applied to the show in its previous form, dominated as it was by shouting matches and reflexive partisanship. The goal, according to Douthat, is to recreate the atmosphere of Jon Stewart's Daily Show interviews with conservative commentators, which he praises as being “more substantive than anything on Fox or MSNBC.”

So far so good, but then Douthat goes on to lament the stale “left vs. right” format, and that's where things get confusing:

Even the thrust-and-parry sessions of “The Daily Show,” though, are limited by the left-right binary that divides and dulls our politics. They're better than the competition, but they don't give free rein to eccentricity and unpredictability, or generate arguments that finish somewhere wildly different than where you'd expect them to end up. This is what you find in the riveting television debates of the past: William F. Buckley versus Gore Vidal, Vidal versus Norman Mailer, anything involving Ross Perot. And it's what you get from the mad, compulsively watchable Glenn Beck, who's an extremist without being a knee-jerk partisan: You know he's way out there on the right somewhere, but you don't know what he's going to say next.

Stewart, Buckley, Beck ... none of these are exactly the models that you'd expect “the most trusted name in news” to look to for inspiration. And some CNN suits have probably never even heard of Gore Vidal.

But television is a business. And when you're losing to re-runs, you've got nothing to lose.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. In one paragraph Douthat is arguing for “respectful” debate a la The Daily Show, but just a few sentences later he's saying that CNN should look for a Glenn Beck-type “extremist” to inject some “eccentricity and unpredictability.” Yes, Glenn Beck has proven himself to be “compulsively watchable,” but, as I've written before, that comes with a price: Beck's malignant disregard for the truth. And it strikes me as implausible that an unpredictable extremist of the Beck mold can provide the intelligent and respectful debate Douthat says CNN must offer.

What's more, CNN already tried their hand with a Glenn Beck-like figure -- Glenn Beck. His CNN Headline News program, while nowhere near as madcap as the Fox News show he now hosts, was still noteworthy for its wild conspiracism and factual inaccuracy. And granted, Beck's style is ratings-rich, but adopting it for a revamped Crossfire would not solve the original show's crippling problems of tone and partisanship.

And once again we find ourselves dealing with the tension between ratings and reportage. Douthat's proposal seems to operate without regard to that dynamic, suggesting that CNN can harness a Beck-style ratings bonanza while simultaneously maintaining a dignified and informative stance. Unfortunately, CNN's past failures and Fox News' current ratings successes show that to be unlikely, at best.