It's not my fault. I didn't actively seek it out. I put Helena to bed between 7:30 and 8, there's a sink full of dirty kid-dishes to be dealt with and dinner, usually, to be made.

Since working away serenely in a meditative silence is not something I can manage at the end of the day, on goes the kitchen radio in search of news. And these days, given my schedule, I'm too late for Fresh Air and too early for the BBC World Service. It's always time for On Point, a call-in program on (generally) politics or "current affairs" from WBUR in Boston.

One of the things that is most tantalizing about On Point is its clear progenitor -- Christopher Lydon's long-running The Connection, one of the few news-interview-chat programs that managed to balance intelligent and widely diverse interviews with lively give-and-takes with callers. (Lydon left WBUR and the program when the station wouldn't give him and his producer an ownership stake in the show.) It managed to attract the largest percentage of articulate callers-in to a radio show ever gathered by any talk-show, ever.

A lot of people, I know, found Lydon -- who is well-read and often a bit garrulous as an interviewer -- an overbearing host. But he never failed to have the most interesting guests on any NPR/PRI show, and consistently created a conversation in which his interviewees could really shine.

On Point's discussions are clearly meant to fill the enormous gap left by Lydon's departure, but -- whether through the predilections of host Tom Ashbrook or some larger strategy, it's instead developed an alarmingly consistent M.O.:

1. Invite on intelligent, articulate, informed guests to share their insights. Maybe a Nobel Prize-winner.

2. Ask a breathless, leading question generated from, say, a headline in a publication with which you have ties.

3. When these aforementioned guests quickly move past the ill-informed premise of the question, ignore them.

4. Ask the question again, more loudly. Intimate that when you bring on another guest, the alarming proposition in your initial question will be examined from a more...alarmed viewpoint.

5. When your new guest also fails to take the bait, consider that perhaps your presumptions about how this conversation was going to play out were completely groundless.

6. Ignore these considerations and move on. Take calls. Twist every caller's question into an "a-ha" challenge to the complacency of the experts.

7. Thank everyone quickly, sum up by characterizing your initial, debunked scenario as the subject of debate, and move on to the amusing segment that ties in to a big movie in current release.

Tonight's version was particularly noxious, as the aforementioned Nobelist made a brilliant case that blame for American economic problems -- caused, he said, largely by the Bush administration's tax policy, and compounded by our own refusal to fund education and the sciences as fully as other first-world nations -- was being wrongly assigned to a fictional Chinese threat.

I don't know that he was right, but he was backed up, more or less, by this guy, and the right-winger brought on later in the program didn't say anything to refute his case. Yet, as the show proceeded, the host all but mocked his interviewees, asking them repeatedly to join him in the jingoistic fantasy of inevitable clash-of-the-superpowers which they were insistent on -- and articulate about --debunking.

Ashbrook's journalistic creditials are impressive enough that I hesitated before snarking off in the above fashion, but I've been listening to this show for a good while now, and it's taken me some time to realize that this kind of thing is happening night after night. The guests are good, the subject offers promise, but the premise of the questions is rendered for more flash than substance, and there's no turning aside from its flattening presumptions. There's a sense that the guests must be herded back to it as a preset talking point, and an overall atmosphere of frustration sets in -- all ideas must compete with the host's endless return to a soundbite-level of understanding.

It's desperately sad to think that this is WBUR's replacement for Lydon's elevated but thoroughly democratic style.