I remember listening to news programs when I was an adolescent. They featured reports about moon shots, planetary missions, and other NASA matters. The people who were interviewed by news hosts for these reports were NASA command center directors, astronauts, and other folks with firsthand knowledge of the specific missions and the engineering that was involved. I was listening to and learning from the experts.
Later, during the Vietnam war and subsequent military conflicts, newscasters received field reports from embedded journalists – in retrospect, it was not entirely untainted reporting since what they saw was largely what the military allowed them to witness. Still, the news outlets interviewed former generals, joint chiefs, prior NATO commanders, and others who had substantial military backgrounds that endowed them with the knowledge needed in order to explain the military events of the day. I didn’t always like what they said, but then I was listening for understanding rather than entertainment. For entertainment I had the variety shows.
These past three years, I saw a parade of medical and public health authorities explain the COVID pandemic – Vivek Murthy, Tony Fauci, and a host of medical commentators like Sanjay Gupta and Kavita Patel, and Vin Gupta who all did a respectable job of explaining the pandemic to MSNBC’s viewing public. FOX viewers got their pandemic interpretation from non-medical news personalities like Tucker Carlson, The View, Laura Ingraham, and White House propagandists including Dolt-45. Where one group of viewers was listening to the experts whose goal was an informed viewership, the other was listening to entertainment intended to get the highest ratings. Alas, that could have gone better.
These days, with the pandemic smoldering, the news is filled with political and legal news. The current crop of MSNBC experts includes former and current law professors, jurists, prosecutors, US Solicitors General, and other legal experts. I do not watch FOX, and I can only surmise that they are doing their best to capture eyeballs by featuring talking head entertainers rather than actual legal experts. They are giving interview time to conservative politicians, former Trump White House minions, and right-wing pundits.
Who the hell needs actual experts, when there’s money to be made? Right?