Pundit follies: Hey, don't look at me!

Posted 26 weeks 6 days ago by Ben

Joel and I don't do a lot of horse race-style political analysis around here. For one thing, it's boring. (Gallup has McCain up five points! But Rasmussen shows Huckabee in the lead by three points! And, by the way, nobody cares!) But it's fair to say we're less interested in the day-to-day fluctuations of the polls and more interested in what the candidates are saying and pledging to do about actual issues.

But there's another good reason for eschewing the horserace stuff: it's generally wrong, or insipid, or insipidly wrong. Yet with the proliferation of blogs and other new media, there is much more of it.

Steven Stark of the Boston Phoenix examines the proliferation of Internet analysis and finds it wanting. I'm sure his conclusion will cut some pundits -- professional or otherwise -- close to the bone:

Smug, snide, and self-congratulatory to a fault, the vast Internet "mediacracy" have created a largely imaginary political world that has made the quality of our civic discourse not better but worse. Despite what you read, the politics of 2008 isn't surprising or confusing -- it's members of the media who are surprised and confused. Not that you'll ever hear that from them.

Ouch.

But here's the odd thing. As down as Stark is on the democratization of media, his essay is awfully long on generalities and -- with the exception of the obligatory shot at Fox News -- short on specifics. I would have liked Stark to have named names. Instead, Stark seems to be a just a little smug himself.