I heard a great quote the other day on Squawk box. It was said by one of their guest hosts, whose name I couldn’t find. But he said:
“As the value of information falls to zero, the value of expertise rises to infinity”.
If I were the producers and content decision makers at CNBC, it’s a quote like that which would give me chills and keep me awake at night. Because if there is one thing that’s becoming painfully apparent, it’s that the folks at CNBC, even the most informed of them, are journalists far more then business people. They are allowing themselves to become much more a source of nothing but ‘information’ and eliminating all but the tiniest portion of actual expertise. That’s a tragic shame.
A journalist isn’t an expert, but they get to play one on TV. In fact, in the world of modern journalism, even a journalist who actually knows something is forced to ‘un-know’ it in the interest of seeming non-partisan, or in not being too confrontational with the person being interviewed. Take for example a guy like Steve Liesman, who is not a stupid guy, but still finds himself forced to say truly idiotic things when wearing his ‘journalist’ hat. He knows that as a journalist, he needs to continue to get access to powerful people and that will only happen if he ingratiates himself. In the age of Obama, the powerful people all believe in rainbows and unicorns, so in order not to offend them, Liesman has to ask about the effect that rainbows and unicorns will have on the unemployment index or the value of the dollar, even though he knows that it’s all pretend.
The decay of the news media is sort of the first derivative of the Orwellian doublespeak currently being emitted by the ton from the Whitehouse and the halls of government. Guys like Tim Geithner go on TV carefully misrepresenting the facts in order to support policy decisions. Fair enough… it’s his job. But in order to stay on the good side of powerful people, the media tone’s down the content of their reporting. The result is tha they're able to generate more reporting, but less of it has any value. And you can see it most clearly in a case like CNBC where there is actually expertise some days and nothing but useless pabulum the next.
Can you think of any reason a Marxist hack like Valerie Jarrett shouldn’t be challenged when she claims that the stimulus created between 600,000 and 1.2 million jobs when everyone with a brain knows that isn’t so? But on CNBC they still gave her a pass both on that, and every other piece of public policy fiction she talked up. what's even worse is, instead of yelling at the TV like I normally would I simply laughed... because by now I've come to expect no better from them.
To you folks over at squawk box, you should really be more careful with your credibility. You all look like a bunch of puffed up overpaid fools when you let them say things like that. I’ve heard you say that you know it isn’t actually so…. You should have said so to her. Even on your best day you look more like journalists than business people, but that doesn’t mean you need to look like particularly stupid journalists as well.
Everyone has an opinion, but a great many of those opinions are obvious falsehoods so you shouldn't treat them all as equivalent. Logic, reason, and empirically observed cause and effect should hold greater sway with you than political spin, or PC equivalent nonsense. If you call a cloudless day sunny, you will still offend Indian rain dancers or whoever. But if you pander to them and call it something else, then it's you who looks like the fool instead of them.
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