Columnist Bemoans Punditry

Syndicated political columnist Kathleen Parker does not consider herself a pundit, she told attendees yesterday at a brown-bag lunch discussion entitled “The Problem With Punditry.”

“I like to think of myself as a columnist,” said Parker, at the Harvard Kennedy School event. “A columnist is first and foremost a journalist.”

Citing her own experiences as a television analyst and columnist, Parker expressed reservations with what she called a “culture of punditry,” in which the purported experts being interviewed are forced to take one side or another “because there has to be a fight.”

In order to offer an opinion on television, “it really isn’t so necessary to know anything” about a particular subject, Parker said, citing several times when she was asked to appear on a show to discuss something she had no knowledge of. In many cases, Parker said, “empty punditry” and entertainment value tend to take the place of insightful opinion.

A columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group whose bi-weekly columns appear in newspapers and magazines around the country, Parker added that she did not see the punditry problem going away anytime soon, simply because appearing on television tends to be such an attractive opportunity.

“For every [one] who says no, there are 100 people who want to be on TV,” she said. “How many people really do have something to say?” she later asked, drawing laughter from the audience. Answering audience questions during the event about why the public continues to tolerate pundits, Parker said that people simply tend to look for affirmations of their beliefs in any speaker, making a nuanced critical response difficult. “People are awfully quick to absorb what they already think,” she said.