Hunter at Daily Kos has a post entitled ‘Post’ Mortem. He discusses the ramifications for mainstream pundits in having been so utterly wrong about Iraq. Reporting, Hunter says, is the life blood of democracy and the product newspapers provide that is not so easily reproducible. Not so much with punditry.
Cynicism on the part of much of the intelligent public, and apparently very justifiable cynicism at that — that’s the problem. The reporting of fact remains vital, but the editorial pages, the punditry — the lifeblood of cable news, as it turns out — those things are made of weaker stuff. They don’t carry much weight, because they are by definition not designed to be very weighty. More to the point, those things are reproducible by others — the only thing the pundit press has going for it is credibility. If the credibility is gone, by, say, being pompously, arrogantly, and window-rattlingly wrong on the major issues of the day for an extended period of years on end, then the rest of it is as good as gone too.
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None of this is meant to be a “the press is obsolete” speech. It isn’t obsolete, and it won’t be, and nobody wants it to be. Reporting is the immune system of a functioning democracy: it is not optional. The country needs it to survive. And there are a lot of good, hardnosed reporters out there demonstrating how it’s done, every day.
But punditry ain’t press. Punditry ain’t reporting, it shouldn’t be treated as such, and it is, as a “class”, deeply and profoundly broken. I’m not sure that it could ever not be broken, if it is designed as a mere outcropping of the political landscape itself, a place for political figures to winter over between government or partisan jobs. The notion of a pundit class, separate from the people but attached at the hip to the very class of power brokers that they cover — it is unsettling. It is corruptive from the get-go. I simply don’t see that as something even slightly worthy of the respect that we should give bona fide reporting, of the sort that has been getting rarer and rarer as the networks and newspapers seek to fill the holes of daily history with the cheapest possible fare: Mouth vs. Mouth, now in the editorial pages of your paper of choice and appearing on a dozen television channels, six times an hour on each.
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