Television
Punditpalooza: Why I’ve Had It With “Expert” Opinions on the News
Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Pundit — noun
A person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media.
I blame Ted Turner, founder of CNN and the 24-hour news cycle. If he hadn’t discovered that people were willing to watch the news from dusk to dawn for entertainment, Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity would be doing what God intended instead of playing significant roles in the emotional lives of Americans. (I see Rachel as a university president and Sean selling used cars.) The world would be a better place.
The 24-hour news cycle made Ted Turner a rich man for the simple reason that we humans are a nosy bunch, always craning our necks, twitching the blinds, and standing on tiptoe to see what’s going on. The problem is, there’s rarely anything going on worth looking at or listening to 24-hours a day.
So, CNN and its imitators hired first a few, and eventually, legions (CNN has over 100) of pundits to fill the empty hours by expressing their “informed” opinions ad nauseam. No matter how trivial a news item is, the pundits on Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are happy to talk about it for hours, speculating why it happened and what’s going to happen next.
It used to be that most people got their news in the morning on the radio as they made breakfast or drove to work, and in a half-hour network television broadcast after dinner. Night owls caught the evening broadcast at 10 pm, and that was it. If you got a better signal from NBC, you were a Huntley-Brinkley family, if CBS came in clearer, Walter Cronkite was your man. Politically, these guys were ciphers. Nobody had any idea what they thought, and nobody was interested.
These “talking heads” actually reported the news. They told us how many soldiers were killed in Vietnam that day or who stepped down from the top spot at the Pentagon. They didn’t discuss it. There was no lively banter, none. They might smile once in a while, and that was about it.
In those golden days, opinion had no place in a newscast. The newscaster’s job was to report newsworthy items, and the bar for what was newsworthy was pretty high. You didn’t get any heart-warming stories about heroes who rescue cats stuck in trees.
If they didn’t have at least two sources to back up any story, they didn’t report it. The FCC fairness doctrine demanded that they treat controversial issues of public importance in an honest, equitable, and balanced manner. It was simple, straightforward, and sufficient.
Now we have a carnival that lurches between raucous discourse and bone-aching banality, and it’s useless. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, many of us have wasted untold hours listening to people express opinions that are no more valuable than our own.
The Washington Post counted 602 individual pundit appearances on FOX, CNN, and MSNBC combined over eight days in April 2016. There was a fair amount of crossover with some appearing on all three networks, yet the only person who thought Trump would win was filmmaker Michael Moore. So the American public was subjected to the opinions of 601 people who didn’t know anything.
I guess if you like to watch people argue, pundits can be entertaining, but they frequently have less insight than you could get from the wags at the corner bar. They allow the cable news networks to make money around the clock, so we’re stuck with them. Our only other option is to change the channel or, better yet, shut off the TV. Happy Hour starts at 5:00 pm. Cheers!
©2020, Denise Shelton. All rights reserved.
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