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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…
