And Who Are They to Teach Us

It occurs to me that the punditry has become more obnoxious in recent years not because of any personal alteration in its make-up--wankers then, wankers now--but for structural reasons, owing specifically to the feedback loop in information transmission. Instead of simply telling us what they happen to think (or feel) about an athletic or political phenomenon, they are now equipped with data indicating how we supposedly think about that same phenomena, whether it comes by way of polls, talk radio, text messaging, blogs etc. And equipped with that data they feel compelled to not just give us their opinion about the phenomena in question, but about our collective or majoritarian opinion of that same phenomena. In other words, instead of telling us what they think, they cross the line and tell us we are wrong to think or feel as we presumably do. AROD is a classic case in point. The ESPN wankers cannot stand the fact that someone they long ago anointed as the "best player in the game" should have come to be regarded by the supporters of his team as the game's most maddening and pathetic choker. And so they fudge, lie, elide, overlook, traduce, all in the name of convincing us that we are somehow wrong in our empirically reliable, statistically verifiable judgement that AROD is to failing under pressure as Jeter is to succeeding. I would never want to advise them on how they would view a given issue if they only had half of the intelligence of most of the people I know personally; they shouldn't put themselves in the position of advising those same people on how things would look if they were as dim as Karl Ravech or Jeff Brantley.