. . . But He Plays One on TV: Ron Silver to Guest-Host 'Crossfire'

AOL Time Warner-owned CNN has asked Ron Silver, who plays a presidential election strategist on "The West Wing," produced by AOL Time Warner-owned Warner Bros., to guest-host "Crossfire" tonight.

Silver, a political activist and one of the founders of the Creative Coalition, will do battle with Bow Tie Boy on the Right.

Poor Bow Tie Boy.

Silver's filling in for real-life presidential election strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, neither of whom could make tonight's live show, said senior executive producer Sam Feist.

Feist insisted that the whole AOL Time Warner you-scratch-my-back-I'll- scratch-yours thing never entered into the conversation when he was deciding to ask Silver to guest.

"It never was a factor," Feist told The TV Column. "He has done 'Crossfire' plenty of times in the past. . . . We love having him on" as guest host.

Actually, the last time Silver was on "Crossfire," according to CNN, was way back in 1992 when the show was debating the merits of Vice President Quayle's attack on the fictitious unmarried woman Murphy Brown, about the fictitious baby she fictitiously conceived in the course of the CBS scripted fiction sitcom "Murphy Brown."

But the "Crossfire" discussion that night quickly devolved into a skirmish between Silver and Charlton Heston, repping the right, over whether Heston should have played Michelangelo in the 1965 film "The Agony and the Ecstasy," since the artist was gay:

Silver: Mr. Heston had a very distinguished career and still does. He starred in a movie called "Michelangelo." Now, I don't know, Chuck, you can tell me. Were you gay in that movie? Because Michelangelo was a gay person. He was serving gay popes, Julius. There was a lot of gay artists in the Renaissance --

Heston: It seems a curious point to be raising in our current debate, Ron, but I --

Silver: Well, Pat Buchanan raises the debate.

Heston: . . . I've studied Michelangelo and I perhaps know more about his life than most people do. The least important thing in his whole life was his sexual orientation. He had no relations with either men or women except on two separate occasions . . . The only thing in the world he cared about was carving marble.

We can only hope that tonight's "Crossfire" is as entertaining.

Asked if "Crossfire" has had any other celebrity guest hosts since it was revamped in April, Feist cited Dee Dee Myers and Ann Coulter. Yes, in Washington, D.C., Myers and Coulter are considered celebrities. Sigh.

Actually, when we later mentioned Feist's comment in a conversation with CNN's Washington publicist, she got back with us to clarify that Feist had thought we'd asked him about guest hosts, not celebrity guest hosts, and that he certainly didn't think that Dee Dee Myers was a celebrity.

On the other hand, the rep noted that when she moved to Washington recently, she had lunch with a bunch of youngish women who pronounced Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld handsome. So there you go.

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Maybe you're wondering why cable news networks are flooding their schedules with coverage of the Washington area sniper shootings.

Because you can't get enough of it.

Tuesday, the day after the latest sniper hit outside a Home Depot store in Fairfax County, was the most watched day of 2002 for Fox News Channel, CNN and CNN Headline News.

Fox News Channel averaged 1.12 million viewers that day, CNN 1.06 million and CNN Headline News just under 300,000.

MSNBC nabbed an average of 413,000 viewers on Tuesday. The network had its most watched day of the calendar year last Saturday, when its coverage went back and forth between the sniper and the bombing in Bali. That day the network averaged 523,000 viewers -- about double its year-to-date average, according to the Associated Press.

Both CNN and Headline News doubled their yearly averages on Tuesday. FNC didn't quite; it is averaging about 642,000 viewers in 2002.

All four news networks did bigger numbers on Tuesday than on the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The most recent sniper shooting occurred at 9:15 p.m Monday -- about 1 1/4 hours into prime time. In prime time that night, CNN averaged 1.2 million viewers, FNC 1.8 million and MSNBC 444,000.

Since the shootings began on Oct. 2, the three cable news networks are all up about 30 percent compared with the previous month.