"Will Opine For Food"

And what is so rare as a day in June? Well, with apologies to James Russell Lowell, I’d say this blog praising something from The Nation. Still, there it is, as large as life, a column by Eric Alterman with which I almost entirely agree. Pity the poor pundit, once holder of the best gig in professional journalism. Yeah, right.

The advent of the Internet--particularly the blogosphere--has changed all that. Now, not only are the things pundits say and write preserved for posterity; there are legions of folks who track pundit pronouncements, fact-check their statements and compare them with previous utterances on the same and similar topics. They also demand a degree of transparency about methods of inquiry and the reasoning behind conclusions drawn. While proving pundits wrong--over and over and over--has not yet cost anyone a job, it has contributed to a precipitous decline in pundit prestige. The reaction to this decline varies from pundit to pundit, to be sure, but more often than not, it bespeaks a kind of panic.

Pity, for that matter, the poor reporter, whose copy not so long ago was scrutinized only by his editors and the occasional disgruntled reader. The latter had, at best, an irate Letter to the Editor as his sole opportunity for rejoinder. But now? Why, now anyone with a computer and internet access (take, well, me for example) to have his say literally moments after the professional reporter’s story is published. Hardly seems fair, does it?

Then, too, there’s that whole supply and demand thingie. While we mere amateurs may be ‘inferior goods,’ we’re still flooding the market, driving down prices, or at least demand for opinion and analysis from the boys and girls at the MSM. All you need to play are strong opinions and the sort of cocktail party education anyone with a liberal arts degree is likely to have.

The truth is, being a professional pundit or syndicated columnist of any sort is still a pretty damned good gig. A 700 word column once or twice a week and it’s back to the hot tub. The major players even have assistants to perform such drudgery as fact-checking for them. Sweet, huh? Of course, the pay varies considerably, depending on where you are published and how many other periodicals run your pieces and how popular you are on the talking heads circuit and lecture tour, but we’re still not talking about any heavy lifting, are we? So not only will I reserve the pity for the time being; I'd even be willing (grudgingly, you understand!) to take on a job like that myself.

As the old joke used to go, freedom of the press was freedom only for those who owned the presses. No more. I don’t know that I agree entirely with Alterman’s claim that professional pundits are “in thrall to the specious arguments of the powerful people they are supposed to critique.” (He’s writing at The Nation, after all, so he’d pretty much have to say something like that, wouldn’t he?) Still, how often does one read a New York Times column criticizing how the Ochs-Sulzberger family runs the paper? Far less often than once per F.U. and vastly less often than the Blogosphere takes its shots at the Times, I can tell you that.