Somewhere along the road of 24 hour news, and more recently 24 hour sports we have come to accept the idea of intellectual discourse as a contact sport.

If the show titles were not enough - "Crossfire," "Squawk Box," "Hardball" - the scoring system most certianly pushes these shows into the realm of sport. The elevated voices and increasingly jump cuts between participants and b-roll clips come close to emulating the same camera angle tricks used in basketball, football and any number of sports. So why are the pundits just sitting there?

I propose creating punditry as a true contact sport, where the greatest number of points affords the winner the luxury of beating up another pundit with lesser points. By the end of the show black and blues will be a measure of who spoke the loudest, made the most extreme pronouncements. Maybe after a few successive rounds where the same person is not the winner (and has the scars to show for it) we might actually get a more reasoned discourse. One of the responsibilites of a network given a monopoly by we the people in the first place.