{"id":1377,"date":"2009-04-07T00:13:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T04:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1377"},"modified":"2015-10-23T16:40:04","modified_gmt":"2015-10-23T20:40:04","slug":"in-defense-of-citizen-punditry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1377","title":{"rendered":"In defense of the citizen punditry"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the term-limits movement began, I was initially a big supporter of the idea. Over time, that changed, as it became apparent that the real effect of term limits for politicians is primarily to shift influence from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists; but I’m still a believer in the underlying principle, even if term limits are a bad way to realize it. We should not have a separate class of professional politicians; that undermines the very nature of representative government.<\/p>\n

Our leaders are, in large part, representative of no class and no group but their own; while they retain some connection to the voters who elect them, they have shed any real identification with us, any real sense of belonging to and with us and being a part of us, in favor of their new class, their new group, their new culture. It’s a class and a culture which has some resemblance to the country as a whole, including a roughly similar ideological spectrum from left to right, and so we can select people whose voting patterns are more or less congenial to our beliefs\u2014but this doesn’t mean that they share our cultural referents or that they actually think like the rest of us, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking they do. We should expect most politicians, even those with whom we most agree, to at least occasionally do something we find completely incomprehensible, because they’re operating in a different reality than ours, with different priorities.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how we solve this; I don’t even know that there\u00a0<\/span>is<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>a solution. Happily, however, I believe we’re seeing a solution arising for a linked problem: the hegemony of the professional punditocracy.<\/p>\n

Just as I don’t think there should be professional politicians, so I don’t think we’re better off for having professional pundits; I believe in citizen pundits just as I believe in citizen politicians, and for the same reasons. Living in the echo chamber does bad things to your understanding of the world. You can imagine the effect if the only mirrors you ever saw were funhouse mirrors\u2014it would distort your vision and give you a false view of yourself and the world around you; the effect of becoming entirely a creature of the political inside is similar. Even the best of the pundit class suffer the effects of having no real perspective on the outside world.<\/p>\n

Here, however, the Internet and the rise of the blogosphere is providing a counterweight. While I grant that the blogosphere can’t simply supplant the news media because it is itself dependent on the work of professional reporters, and while Sturgeon’s Law applies here as well as everywhere else (if anything, we might be lucky if as\u00a0<\/span>much<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>as 10% of the stuff out there is worth reading), yet\u00a0<\/span>what Seattle sports blogger John Morgan says about sports media<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>is true on a much broader scale:<\/p>\n

There are two layers of media at work. A nascent shadow media of questionable reputability and standards that, ironically enough, actually pursues the truth, and an established media that reports na\u00efve truth as it’s fed to them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would argue that the best of our online commentators have already rendered most professional columnists and talking heads redundant. The MSM haven’t realized this yet, of course\u2014or they haven’t admitted it if they have\u2014and so folks like David Brooks, David Frum, Ellen Goodman, and Jeff Jarvis continue to wield influence; but at this point, they’re only significant because people are still trained to think they’re significant. They’re already obsolete. The only thing keeping them in service is that their true obsolescence hasn’t registered with most of the media consumers in this country . . . yet.<\/p>\n

In their place we will see the continued rise of the citizen punditry. This is a development with significant downsides, no question, most notably the sort of vicious nastiness we see in the online comments on newspaper websites\u00a0<\/span>like that of the\u00a0<\/span>Anchorage Daily News<\/span><\/a>. We’ve had, thanks in considerable part to the professionalization of the media, a period of relative sanity and civility in our political discourse. That’s been unraveling for a while, though, and the growing deprofessionalization of our political commentary will likely only hasten that unraveling; given the behavior of the MSM in the last election, I don’t see any reason to believe that they would be any better in the end.<\/p>\n

Over against that, I think the proliferation of citizen pundits will in the end bring a sort of Wikipediazation to our political commentary. The free market doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than a command economy; what we currently have is something of a command economy of opinions, and as the free market of the Internet supersedes it, I think we’ll see a more balanced commentariat emerge than what the MSM has given us for generations. Individual pundits may well be less fair and\/or farther from the center (or maybe not, I don’t know), but in the aggregate, I would bet that the result will provide a relatively even portrait of American politics. It’s not that we’ll have a neutral point of view (something which I don’t believe exists anyway), but rather that each point of view will have its equal and opposite, which should make it easier to identify the truth among the competing claims.<\/p>\n

Doing so will of course take work on the part of readers; but then, for readers who are willing to put in that work, this may well be the best part of all. It won’t be as easy as simply believing what the newspapers tell them, but it will be far more satisfying . . . and far more free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the term-limits movement began, I was initially a big supporter of the idea. Over time, that changed, as it became apparent that the real effect of term limits for politicians is primarily to shift influence from elected officials to unelected staff and lobbyists; but I’m still a believer in the underlying principle, even if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[92,75,63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-ordinary-barbarians","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6R3Ax-md","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1395,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1395","url_meta":{"origin":1377,"position":0},"title":"The limits of the merely human","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"28 March 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This from Ray Ortlund:Everything man-made lets us down. Sooner or later, everything man-made reveals its hidden weaknesses. Only Christ will not fail. Only Christ does all things well. I don't. You don't. Christ does. Always. Infallibly. . . .Man-made things go boom. They cannot be trusted. Respected, yes. Honored, yes.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion and theology"","block_context":{"text":"Religion and theology","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=65"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1260,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1260","url_meta":{"origin":1377,"position":1},"title":"Support citizen government; support Sarah Palin","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"14 June 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"It's no secret, of course, that I'm a supporter of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Even if I weren't, though\u2014even if I were one of the Beltway types pulling for Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush, let's say\u2014I would be angry at the way in which Gov. Palin's opponents in Alaska have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Culture and society"","block_context":{"text":"Culture and society","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=62"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1718,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1718","url_meta":{"origin":1377,"position":2},"title":"Put not your trust in princes","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"25 October 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Barack Obama"","block_context":{"text":"Barack Obama","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=74"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/oVi4rUzf-0Q\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1035,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1035","url_meta":{"origin":1377,"position":3},"title":"Short-term stimulus","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"19 October 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"There have been a lot of claims made about jobs \"saved or created\" by the so-called \"stimulus\" (and how you measure a job \"saved\" when you don't know the might-have-beens, I have no idea); but has it occurred to you to wonder how long those jobs have lasted? Apparently, not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Barack Obama"","block_context":{"text":"Barack Obama","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=74"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1317,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1317","url_meta":{"origin":1377,"position":4},"title":"The politics of personal destruction, intra-GOP edition: take 2","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"21 May 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"R. A. Mansour,\u00a0explaining the reason and purpose for the founding of\u00a0Conservatives4Palin, wrote, Sarah Palin wasn't able to return home from the campaign. The campaign continues, and she is forced to fight a war on two fronts\u2014the local and the national. As long as the campaign continues, we'll be here to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=63"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1240,"url":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?p=1240","url_meta":{"origin":1377,"position":5},"title":"H. L. Mencken, Grover Cleveland, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama . . . and leadership","author":"Rob Harrison","date":"25 June 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Of all the blogs I've ever run across, I think\u00a0Heaven Better Have Lightsabers\u00a0has to have the most fun name. Fortunately, Hurley's blog doesn't waste its title. Today, he (?) has a post up called\u00a0\"H. L. Mencken on Leadership\"\u00a0which is a commentary on an extended quotation from a Mencken piece on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "History"","block_context":{"text":"History","link":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/?cat=79"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1377"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5550,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions\/5550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rjaharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}