My wife and I have taken to watching Countdown every night. I freely admit that I watch it mainly to have my views reinforced. It’s still a refreshing experience to watch anything on television that isn’t skewed to the right.
I’m not necessarily blind to the shows defects, however. I’ve noticed, for instance, that the show has a limited stable of guest “experts”, only one of whom, constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, appears to have real credentials in anything. The rests are journalists, who may be well informed, but they have no more expertise in fields such as economics than I. There’s nothing wrong with generalists, of course, but when you start discussing rather arcane economic issues, it doesn’t hurt to reach out to people with some actual expertise. This is especially so with the bailout and stimulus legislation.
The problem, as Media Matters recently demonstrated, is endemic. It recently documented that only 5% of the guest bloviators on the Cable Shows were economists. Media Matters employed a generous definition of economist to reach that figure.
Rubbing salt in the wound, the guy with the best record, just on the numbers, was Glenn Beck:
The show that featured the most guest appearances by economists was Fox News’ Glenn Beck, which featured seven: Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (who appeared twice), Barry Ritholtz, Amity Shlaes, Thomas Sowell, and Ben Stein.
Laffer, Sowell and Stein are loons. I don’t know anything about the other four, but the group probably constitutes the majority of economists in the country who oppose the concept of economic stimulus. Laffer invented the infamous Laffer curve, which purported to demonstrate that cutting taxes was an economic cure-all. I’ve written about Stein before. Maybe these are the economists John Boehner found when he went trolling on the internet for stimulus skeptics.
There are probably a lot of reasons for this aversion to expertise. One of the main might be that a competent economist can rather quickly expose the ignorance of our discourse leaders. Like this:
Or like this:
It’s particularly fun to see the pompous know it all George Will get his comeuppance.
Now, I’m not complaining all that much about this, because if the networks decided to change their ways, what we would see is a couple of economists, mostly of the right wing variety (except on MSNBC) that would be the go to guy for every show on their network. They would be as unlikely as the bloviators themselves to represent anything other than the standard inside the beltway point of view. Still, it is amazing to think that these networks, straining to blather for 24 hours, would not think to call in some folks who have some claim to know what they are talking about.
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