{"id":3060,"date":"2008-10-17T09:35:49","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T09:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/17\/the-pointlessness-of-punditry\/"},"modified":"2008-10-17T09:35:49","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T09:35:49","slug":"the-pointlessness-of-punditry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/10\/17\/the-pointlessness-of-punditry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pointlessness of Punditry"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>, Mark Kleiman<\/a>, and Steve Benen<\/a> all comment on this, and they have links to other people saying similar things.<\/p>\n

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

\n

Given that the tv pundits are so far off, why are you watching them?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> some of these “voters”…)<\/p>\n

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<\/i> in seeing them look stupid when the poll results come in, but really, that doesn’t justify the air time they get.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(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<\/strong>. Seriously, why even bother?)<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

(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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading The Pointlessness of Punditry<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}