For a couple years, I've used the generic term "the press" or "journalists" as a lazy way of defining one of my chief complaints with our current public discourse. ER has chastised me on many occasions, and rightly so, I might add. The problem isn't "the press", or "journalists" as practitioners of a particular profession. Rather, it is the eruption in the past decade and a half of a professional pundit class that, for want of a better way of describing things, would dearly love to have it both ways. On the one hand, they wish to be taken seriously as commentators on whatever issue has our national attention; on the other hand, they want to be treated as just journalists who have a particular set of practical and ethical standards unavailable to those outside the profession, when criticized by outsiders.
Part of the problem with this should be obvious. Even the best political reporters and commentators - and I would include David Broder, Thomas Friedman, Eugene Robinson, and the late Robert Novak as among the very best - are (or were) just that. Political reporters. They are not experts on policy; they aren't really knowledgeable about social science data on the relationship between various interest groups and the powers that be. What makes especially this group so frustrating to read is the belief they all seem to share that an understanding of certain realities of power in our nation's capital translates in to an understanding of broader social and political forces.
Perhaps the most egregious offender on this level - the pundit who pretends he is a public intellectual a la Walter Lippmann or Reinhold Niebuhr or Arthur Schlesinger - is George Will (although David Brooks certainly seems to be making a run at the title). Will's problem is not that he is ignorant, like Jonah Goldberg is ignorant, or the ultimate insider who considers questions of policy irrelevant, the way Robert Novak would. Rather, Will's problem is quite simply that he believes he is smarter than he actually is.
Like Will, and Brooks, and other lesser lights who seem to be multiplying like athlete's foot fungus in a high school locker room, the professionalization of political and social commentary is probably the worst thing to happen to this country in many a year. What makes this professionalization so bad is the unstated belief that anyone who is not a professional in this regard - we bloggers, say - simply "doesn't understand". Our further complaints about the phony high-mindedness of many pundits usually results in the accusation that we are all secretly harboring a desire to become like they are.
The truth, which for some reason seems beyond their ken, is that we have no such desire. Rather, opening up political commentary to the masses has created a far more lively, politically productive, and ideologically shifting public discourse than at any time in my own living memory. Even the best pundits are offering no more than their own view, based on knowledge of events, and persons, perhaps a private conversation or two as a way of setting the stage or "background" as it were. I can only speak for myself when I say that the democratization of political and social commentary, as evidenced on the internets, is a great thing; rather than attempting to dismiss or even silence we bloggers, to snidely wave a hand and insist we can't possibly understand what we are talking about is belied quite simply by the record of the past four or so years. Professional pundits, for all their access, for all their understanding of the inside-baseball kind of stuff they find all important, have been incredibly, almost comically wrong. If you want to stretch your mind back a bit further, just remember the split between elite and public opinion at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
While I believe there is certainly a role for professionals to discuss politics, political and social issues, and various cultural trends that effect them, the way they have overrun our discourse, marginalized the opinions of large numbers, even the majority, of the American people is staggering in its arrogance and small-mindedness. That there are many bloggers who seem to be able to see and understand and explain what is going on, why, and make pretty accurate predictions based on these more distant observations should be a huge clue as to why it is the punditry is held in such disdain.
We Americans aren't ignorant, or stupid, or sheeplike, needing the words from the various oracles to guide us in our political opinions. We are feisty, occasionally insane, quite often funny, at our best irreverent, at our worst obsequious and blind to our own hypocrisy. These qualities exist across the political spectrum (although spectra would be a far better way to describe it) and there is abundant evidence that the current liveliness of our public dialogue on issues such as cap-and-trade, health care reform, and financial services regulation would be far more stilted, truncated, and less well-informed than it currently is if not for the very hard work of bloggers and citizen-journalists who are doing the grunt-work of getting the word out, starting arguments, making their case.
In the future, I will be sure to specify that it isn't the press or journalists that drive me crazy. Rather, it is the elitism, an elitism often combined with a staggering ignorance barely disguised as insouciance toward policy detail, of the professional pundit class that make me crazy.
May a thousand blogs bloom!
