A Media Matters study of Sunday talk shows and 12 cable news programs from January 25 through February 8 found that few economists have been given time on television to talk about the economic recovery plan. During 139 1/2 hours of programming in which the economic recovery legislation was discussed, economists made 25 guest appearances out of a total of 460 -- only 5 percent.
As if that weren't bad enough, Media Matters went on to say:
On cable news channels, economists made a total of 18 guest appearances out of a total of 399 guest appearances in broadcasts that included guest discussions of the stimulus. 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:
That's more than 1/3 of all the economists who appeared on one show--and most of those economists (Ritholtz is the glaring exception) are not the least bit representative of the profession. As a group, they are more accurately described as political activists, impersonating economists, pimping their expertise, such as it may be. The way they are used (and use themselves) is entirely typical of the rightwing approach to expertise--particularly scientific expertise--across a wide range of issues, including global warming, and evolution, just to name two of the most prominent and outrageous examples.
In all three cases--global warming, evolution, and economic recession--there exists a solid professional consensus about the fundamental processes involved, a consensus which the right wing does everything possible to obscure, distort, deny--and even stand on its head. In short, they fight back through a process of mass impersonation. Traditionally, elites were honored, respected and obeyed without question. The triple threat of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment did away with much of that. Now we often trust experts instead-particularly scientists. And so the conservative elitists fight back by impersonating the sorts of experts who have proven themselves over the course of the past 300-700 years.
Here's a chart of all the economists who appeared during this period, with the number of times they appeared, a running total of appearances, and a running total of the percentage of appearances by "economists":
And, by way of comparison, here's a chart of all those who appeared at least three times. There are just two economists on this second chart, both from the Obama Administration:
Almost 1/10th of all appearances (9.8%) came from just 4 guests--three in-house CNN personalities, and GOP Chair Michael "Bling-Bling" Steele, who appears to know less about economics than every child in America who gets an allowance.
Almost 1/5th of all appearances (18.5%) came from the 12 guests who racked up 5 or more appearances. And the next six guests--with 4 appearances each--brought the total close to 1/4th (23.7%). Another 23 guests, with 3 appearances each, added another 15% for just under 2/5th of all guests (38.7%).
This is truly a highly concentrated list of influentials on cable TV, and only two of them--Peter Orszag and Larry Summers--are economists.
Such a makeup could be defensible, one supposes, if:
(1) The principles of economics involved were well understood by all involved, including the public (or, alternatively, those principles were explained to the public in the course of these discussions).
(2) The political debates were all delimited by the conventional economic consensus (a realistic historical understanding of past recessions and depressions, general agreement on the relative effectiveness of different sorts of stimulus measures, etc.)
(3) The nutcases like Amity Shlaes were eliminated.
This is, however, clearly not the case. The above list of guests discussing the stimulus package are clearly incompetent to understand it's potential realworld impacts, and without that, any semblance of an informative discussion is clearly impossible.
In short, what we are seeing here is a discussion by elite minions who are on their face incompetent for the job they are involved in doing. While it is certainly a welcome step forward to be rid of the rank incompetents who ran the Bush Administration for the part 8 years, this sampling of those who dominated the televised discussion of the stimulus package makes it blindingly obvious that our public policy discourse remains dominated by people who simply are not qualified to understand what they are talking about.
This is madness.
The notion that bloggers are somehow inferior to the mainstream media is a thesis that's very difficult to maintain in the face of this sort of evidence to the contrary.
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