AMERICAN POLITICS AND PUBLIC OPINION
Pundits Versus Scientists
A battle for the soul of America
I’ve been a pundit. I’ve been a scientist. And I can tell you, from personal experience, that the two jobs could not be more different. While some scientists play the role of pundits, it often comes at a cost to their work as scientists. And when some pundits pretend to be scientists, it is a ploy to use the respect that science has earned to advance their own political and personal agendas.
All too often, our public discourse has failed to note the distinction between these roles. It’s related to another failure, which may be unavoidable in a market-oriented media system. There are very few true journalists. These are people dedicated to telling you the truth, often at their own expense, that people in power don’t want you to hear. Most practicing reporters aren’t journalists. They take a press release and call names from their lists of contacts to provide the “expert analysis” that lends an air of objectivity to their work. Given the time pressure built into their job, that’s often the best they can do.
Cable TV has made everything worse. In a 24-hour news cycle, there is a constant need to get faces in front of a camera that will be predictable “experts” and keep the flow coming.
Is it any wonder perceptive people have learned not to trust the press?
Anthropologist-cyberneticist Gregory Bateson is famous for describing information as "a difference that makes a difference." And while information theory is complex, that’s a useful starting point. As we see above, most “news” is selected and biased to the point that one can predict much of the nature of a story by knowing the identity of the media source. These sources offer very little surprise—the “difference that makes a difference"—that is involved in delivering information.
Recent depositions related to the civil suit of Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News demonstrate how some owners, editors, and news presenters have continued to deliver a story they knew to be a lie out of fear that they would lose their audience.
Pundits—on Fox and elsewhere—are not on the air to deliver the truth. Their job is to deliver viewers to…
