Not that we've got any chance of getting it, mind you, but this is what pundits given a platform by networks and major newspapers should be providing.
My list's really pretty short: they should have a sense of the big picture, and have a sense of where the issue du jour fits into it; they should demonstrate awareness of at least the basic facts relating to the issues they write about; they should provide genuine insight, rather than stale, warmed-over conventional wisdom; they should ask themselves good questions; and they should be willing to rebut the strongest counterarguments to their positions, rather than knocking down strawmen or ignoring those arguments entirely.
That doesn't seem like a lot to ask. But Salon's Hack 30 list that Sir Charles kindly brought to our attention points up the tremendous distance between the pundits the big papers and the Sunday talk shows inflict on us, and the pundits we ought to have. It was quite the reminder that most of them - especially the most influential - are hacks, bringing nothing new to our understanding of anything, and often making us more confused and ignorant than we would have been if we hadn't read them.
For instance, on the matter of the big picture, I would guess that the crew of center-right pundits at the WaPo (like Broder, Hiatt, Marcus, Ignatius, Samuelson, etc., as opposed to nowhere-near-center conservative pundits like Will, Krauthammer, Gerson, Thiessen, etc.) aren't global-warming deniers, or even climate change skeptics, really. But it doesn't inform their perspective on American politics in the least that this is the biggest issue of the 21st century, bigger than the deficit or rising Medicare costs or the GWoT, and that we've got less time to deal with climate change than we have time to deal with the deficit or the Social Security shortfall or anything else they get worked up about.
And climate change deniers such as Will should take on the strongest arguments in favor of climate change, rather than beating up on strawmen, or finding excuses to avoid the argument entirely (e.g. the pathetic 'back in the 1970s, scientists believed that global cooling was what we should be worried about' shtick).
Pundits are free, if they wish, to be as heartless as they want, and to regard 9.6% unemployment (and U-6 at 17%) as a nonproblem, but the crew of center-right pundits that, for whatever reasons, believe that the deficit rather than unemployment is the problem that must be dealt with right now should at least do their basic reading on where the deficit comes from, and ask themselves good questions about how it might most easily be fixed.
For instance, they ought to be aware that spending by government at all levels hasn't gone up any faster during and 'after' (if you can call this 'after') the recession than it did in the rest of the past decade - but on the other hand, revenue has crashed through the floor. So they might should ask themselves what went wrong with revenue - that would be (a) the Bush tax cuts, (b) unemployment at 9.6% and unemployment/underemployment combined at 17% mean a whole bunch of people aren't paying taxes because they have no income, and (c) many businesses are paying less in taxes because they have less income because the unemployed and underemployed don't buy nearly as much stuff from them.
Then they might think, "maybe the best way to go is to put people back to work and repeal the Bush tax cuts." If they'd gotten this far, you'd expect them to be rooting for Congressional gridlock to block a deal on extension of the tax cuts (I haven't seen anything like that), and you might expect them to ask whether America had any work that desperately needed doing that might put people back to work, in which case they might notice that we have a large pile of unmet infrastructure needs, as a slew of people (including our old friend Ezra Klein in the print version of the WaPo) have pointed out.
And if there's a useful contribution that deficit-hawk-style pundits really could make to the dialogue, it's about infrastructure. After all, it takes no insight at all to say, "Deficits bad - cutting spending for non-rich people good." Infrastructure deficits are in the same unglamorous eat-your-spinach category of issues, except that they're mostly swept under the rug. Nobody's demagoguing about our aging water and sewer systems, or about the gaps in our freight rail system, because nobody's talking about them at all - which is exactly why some pundit attention to such issues might be useful.
But instead, we've got the pundit corps that we've got. Too bad there isn't a drug we could slip them all that would leave them exactly as they are, minus the desire to say anything to the larger public about the issues of the day. Because if there were...
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