[单项选择]In the days before preschool academies were all but mandatory for kids under 5, I stayed home and got my early education from Mike Douglas. His TV talk show was one of my mother"s favorite programs, and because I looked up to my mother, it became one of my favorites too. Yet I quickly developed my own fascination with Douglas, who died last week. Maybe it was the plain set—a couple of chairs and little else—or maybe it was the sound of people talking about ideas and events rather than telling stories. Whatever it was, to my 4-year-old mind it was all terribly adult, like my mother"s morning coffee. It was—relatively. The grown-up world I live in now is another matter. Thanks in part to the proliferation and polarization of talk shows in the last 20 years or so—the generation after Douglas and his big-tent gentility went off the air—public conversations have become scary monsters indeed. Like other forms of entertainment, the programming of commercial talk shows today has moved beyond niche to hermetic. The idea of a host booking guests as varied as Jerry Rubin, Malcolm X and Richard Nixon—and treating them all with a certain deference, as Douglas did—is unheard of. Equally a-mazing is to consider that Douglas was a moderate; though he didn"t always share his guests" views, he nonetheless insisted on everybody having his or her say. What he did, in other words, was more important than who he was. That was probably an easy dictate for an old-school, modest guy such as Douglas to follow. And now Oprah Winfrey is sincere e-nough, but her viewership is a cult of personality, not of people or issues. Like her contemporaries, O-prah chooses her guests and issues to suit her show, rather than allowing guests and issues to be the show. She prefers uplift and empowerment, which is more palatable than name-calling, the hallmark of Bill O"Reilly or Howard Stem. But spin is spin, and in her own way Oprah gets as tiresome as those guys. Ultimately, these shows fail to convey the fullness of the conversation, the sense that America is one place—or one host—with many voices at equal volume. That doesn"t mean everybody"s right. But to have everybody engaged and feeling a stake in the outcome of the discussion is priceless. Engagement is nothing less than national security: I felt that as a preschooler, watching Mike Douglas on TV, and I feel it now. The age of irony, they would say, fueled by information that moves at the speed of light, demands a different approach.It can be inferred from Paragraph 1 that the author
A. was influenced by his mother.
B. didn"t like preschool academies.
C. enjoyed self-taught programs.
D. was smart in his childhood.