AMERICAN JOURNALISM REACHED a landmark of sorts last month, and the moment shouldn’t be allowed to pass without suitable fanfare, however tardy. On Late Edition, CNN’s Sunday-morning political talk show, three of the show’s regular panelists gathered as usual to chew over the week’s news. The problem was, there wasn’t any, or at least no news deemed pundit-worthy. This was July 19, before Monica flipped and the president agreed to testify. So the show’s producers had a brainstorm: The panelists would comment on . . . their comments! The videotape rolled, the panelists watched a clip of themselves from a show months before, and then they were asked what they had to say about what they’d had to say. They were unanimous in their admiration.
This was history. Here, for a brief shining moment on CNN, the political talk show at last achieved a kind of perfection, the ultimate condition of postmodern purity: The pundits’ world folded in on itself and became absolutely self-referential. The news had vanished altogether. Only the commentary remained.
We should have seen it coming, and now that it’s happened once, it will surely happen again. Television’s distorting effect on the delivery of news has been a favorite subject of deep-thinkers for years. One social critic, for example, invented the term “pseudo-event” to describe those manufactured happenings — political demonstrations, press conferences — that are staged solely for the purpose of being broadcast by TV cameras. But pseudo-events are, so to speak, old news. We are now in the age of pseudo-punditry.
The term “pundit” used to have a slightly derisive scent to it, a connotation of gasbaggery and dilettantism that the earliest pundits did their best to avoid. These were the old gents who would appear on shows like Agronsky and Company. The mastodons would gather around a table and summarize the stories they’d reported the week before, while their colleagues nodded approvingly and tried, often without success, to stay awake until it was their turn to disgorge.
In the mid-1980s, The McLaughlin Group injected heat and opinion into the format, but the premise — national political reporters gabbing about national politics — was essentially unchanged. Even so, McLaughlin was scorned by Agronskyists as mere punditry, an “intellectual food-fight.” What fools we were! It is clear now that those were the good old days. In the era of pseudo-punditry, the bitching and hissing of the old McLaughlin Group look like Matins at a Benedictine monastery.
Surf the all-news cable channels if you don’t believe me. I recommend the daylight hours, though early prime time serves the purpose, too. FNC, MSNBC, and the other alphabetized talk channels offer a furious parade of usually young guys and gals who seem never to have wanted anything more from life than to be called a TV pundit. Each of them bears a mysterious job title that raises more questions than it answers: “GOP consultant,” “Democratic pollster,” “former White House aide,” “former [fired?] prosecutor,” “syndicated columnist.” Each, also, has a grave expression and a furrowed brow — sometimes two. And excellent hair.
More important, each speaks with the certitude of a racetrack tout. The certitude is all the odder given the subjects the pseudo-pundits are asked to address. “Cynthia,” the MSNBC moderator might say, “how is Hillary Clinton reacting to the latest revelations?” “Jeff, even without the dress, does Ken Starr have enough corroborative evidence to indict?” “What’s Bill Clinton’s endgame strategy?” “What does the Secret Service know?” “How are the grand jurors holding up?”
Various as they are, the questions have one thing in common. The only possible answer to any of them is: “How the hell should I know?” But this is not the answer that’s given. Being a pseudo-pundit means never, ever, under any circumstances, having to say, “I don’t know.”
It is no coincidence that the rise of pseudo-punditry occurs simultaneously with Bill Clinton’s logorrheic presidency, in which the piling up of words supersedes any consideration of what the words might mean. Pseudo-punditry operates in a world where knowing and not knowing are irrelevant to the matter at hand, for the matter at hand requires only speculation, wishful thinking, pretense — the simulation of knowledge rather than the real thing. All you have to do is keep talking.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
