The Pointlessness of Punditry

In the wake of the debate the other night, there’s been a lot of talk about the disparity between the way tv pundits “scored” it– most of them thought McCain did well– and post-debate polling of actual voters, which gave a huge edge to Obama. Kevin Drum, Mark Kleiman, and Steve Benen all comment on this, and they have links to other people saying similar things.

None of them take the logical next step, though. The important question isn’t “Why are the pundits so wrong?,” the important question is:

Given that the tv pundits are so far off, why are you watching them?

It’s not like Wednesday’s result was anomalous, after all. The tv commentariat called the first debate a draw, and polls said that viewers thought Obama won by a significant margin, and the second debate was more or less the same. The discrepancy was bigger on Wednesday night, but there was nothing qualitatively different about the results.

I’m not convinced it was really worth my time to watch the actual debate, but I’m absolutely positive that it would’ve been a waste of time to stay up and see what, well, pretty much anybody on CNN or MSNBC had to say about it. The very best you can hope for is some wind-baggery followed by “… but we’ll have to wait to see how the voters feel about it,” which is at least relatively honest. (Though it’s kind of amusing to hear them muse about the mysterious feeling of these elusive “voters” from newsrooms located in the middle of major cities. If only there were some way to find some of these “voters”…)

Few of them have the decency to provide even that minor caveat, though, and hold forth as if they have some direct line to God/ Allah/ the Collective Unconscious that enables them to say definitively who “won.” There’s a certain level of schadenfreude in seeing them look stupid when the poll results come in, but really, that doesn’t justify the air time they get.

There’s a certain irony to the fact that now, at a time when the technology to do immediate snap polls with significant numbers of respondants is in place, the “news” commentariat is more prominent than ever. Thanks to modern telecommunications and the Internet, the various networks have the ability to provide actual relevant information a very short time after the conclusion of one of these sideshows. And yet, polling and real voter reaction gets only a few quick segments, stuffed between ever more useless punditry.

(And don’t get me started on the practice of broadcasting post-debate commentary from people affiliated with either campaign. As little as I care what David Brooks has to say about the results, I care orders of magnitude less about the thoughts of people who are on the payroll of the Obama or McCain campaigns. Seriously, why even bother?)

I suppose on some level, it might be amusing to watch the political news establishment crawling up its own ass. But honestly, is it worth staying up late to watch?

(Of course, the obvious extension of this is “Why are you reading stories about this stuff on the Internet, then, given that they’re not worth much more?” It’s a fair question, and my answer basically comes down to “It takes ten minutes to skim the blogs I follow for their take, compared to an hour of post-debate yakking on CNN.” Also, the blogs provide a wider range of stories than just pundit bloviation, including some actual fact-checking of claims made during the events, which the networks are weirdly reluctant to do.)

12 thoughts on “The Pointlessness of Punditry

  1. The commentariat like to claim that they understand the opinion of the average American. What they really understand is the opinion of the average Washington cocktail party attendee. Which is part of why they have gotten so much wrong in the last ten years. Not just the debates: they thought the Iraq war would be a slam-dunk cakewalk (an idea which could have been refuted by considering the local viewpoint for a minute or two, and I’m being generous here), among other foolish ideas.

    I see that Atrios is not on your blogroll. He started blogging precisely because he noticed that the pundits were getting pretty much everything wrong. I’ve been reading him for a few years, so the vacuousness of the pundit class isn’t news to me. There have been a few others on the case (e.g., Bob Sommerby or the long-defunct Media Horse) as well.

  2. “(And don’t get me started on the practice of broadcasting post-debate commentary from people affiliated with either campaign. As little as I care what David Brooks has to say about the results, I care orders of magnitude less about the thoughts of people who are on the payroll of the Obama or McCain campaigns. Seriously, why even bother?)”

    Amen to that!

  3. I don’t watch these guys very much, but from what I’ve seen it looks to me like they are only pretending to be “analyzing” debates. They are actually trying to exercise power, to make other people think the way they think. They don’t care what the voting public actually thinks – they have fantasies that there is a great void of people out there looking for someone to tell them what to think, and they are happily pouring out opinions for these poor, deprived souls to stuff into their empty little heads. The fact that this is a fantasy, and most of the viewers are looking at them and saying “What a bunch of posturing losers!”, doesn’t seem to bother them a bit.

  4. tceisele has it precisely right. The claim to analysis is nonsense. Almost without exception every one of these pundits is aggressively pushing a political agenda and spinning events in a way that is most beneficial to their ideology. Saying they are always wrong would be irrelevant even were it true, because factual accuracy isn’t even a tertiary goal. Shaping public opinion and boosting their ratings are the only things they have in mind.

  5. “The fact that this is a fantasy, and most of the viewers are looking at them and saying “What a bunch of posturing losers!”, doesn’t seem to bother them a bit.”

    Maybe it doesn’t bother them because that’s the whole point. They draw in viewers by presenting controversial statements for those viewers to despise. I’ve heard of die hard liberals watching Fox and yelling back at the TV, and I’ve seen my conservative parents do the same with CNN. The more annoying the pundit, the more specious the argument, the fatter the target presented to the audience, the more audience they bring in.

    We’ve all met that kid who does annoying things just to get attention. The pundits are those kids grown up. We’ve become a nation of haters and the MSM is just waving its arms in front of us saying “Hate me, and by the way, buy a Lexus while you’re at it.”

  6. @tceisele: The fact that this is a fantasy, and most of the viewers are looking at them and saying “What a bunch of posturing losers!”, doesn’t seem to bother them a bit.

    I suspect the reason this doesn’t bother them a bit is because they don’t understand that this has happened. Our elite pundits developed in the days before blogging and Google, when they really did have such an influence because there was no effective way to challenge or verify what they were saying (in those days, the only people in a position to do so were the people publishing these guys). That Bush was even competitive in 2000 was largely due to the hatred of pundits and political reporters for Gore (see Sommerby’s archives at the Daily Howler for details); for example, real-time opinion of the Bush-Gore debates was that Gore won them, but the pundits established a conventional wisdom that Bush had won them. Back then, Sommerby was completely obscure, and Atrios and Josh Marshall had not yet started their web sites, so there was no significant pushback against the received conventional wisdom. Now Atrios and Marshall are well known non-MSM commentators, and can (with more than a little help from Google) demonstrate to their substantial readership that the traditional pundits are and always have been either idiots or tools.

  7. I think the problem has nothing to do with the “cocktail party circuit” and everything to do with what neighborhood they live in and the insistence on “balance”. The former means they only hang out with people in their income (high) and professional (lawyer / politician) demographic. The latter means that many (most? all?) of them are partisans paid by the network rather than partisans paid by the campaign. This last detail is easily spotted, and probably 90% responsible for bad “analysis”. (How often do you see “independent” commentators, even on different networks, merely repeating talking points from campaigns or the administration? Fairly often.) The rest reflects the odds that their average income is five times the national median income.

    Consider: If half of your commentariot consists of former professional Republicans and the other half are former professional Democrats, then you will have a 50-50 split of opinion on the debate. Obvious to me, but apparently not so obvious to them. You also have terrible statistics. The sampling error for 6 people, even if they were drawn at random (they aren’t) is probably over 50%. All noise, no signal.

    All of this is enhanced by the out-shout, last-word, sound-bite approach with a non-moderating “moderator”. I dream of the day that something like the mute button used on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” appears on a news network. After someone got hit with the mute button fifteen times for not answering the question or talking too long, while the responsible responsive person gets full air time, the discussion might become more to the point.

  8. Retrodiction is easier than prediction.

    When the New York Stock exchange closes each weekday, econopundits opine: “Stock moved sideways today due to the Beige Book results, unemployment figures in the rural South, and the battlefield conditions around cobalt mines in the Congo” or whatever. If they knew what they were talking about, they’d be very very rich, and not bother being on TV.

  9. @DrugMonkey,

    That’s a bit glib. It’s not like Chad is a professional political blogger, he’s a professor who also blogs. Seems much more like a citizen just expressing his opinion. Even if you count this as a second job, the blog is mostly about physics, not politics. Maybe “pundit” is a fair assessment of other ScienceBloggers, but it doesn’t fit here.

  10. “Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit,” Albert Einstein, 1901. Two decades later Einstein disavowed quantum theory in favor of classical physics.

  11. Listening to the pundits discuss the debate is (potentially) fun in the same way chatting with friends about the debate is fun. The good pundits are smart and knowledgeable. They notice things that slip by me, and are able to make connections with current and past political events that I am not well-informed enough to make.

    Of course they have no direct line to God telling them what the voters think, or who will win the election, or who would make a better president, or even really what kind of president either one would be. But it’s hard to stop worrying about these things, and the pundits often have a lot of interesting things to say, even if they are sometimes pompous and partisan. I especially like Shields and Brooks: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec08/sbcampaign_10-17.html

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