As a civics teacher presents his/her daily lessons, that
teacher should keep in mind that in those seats in front of him/her are filled
with future adults who will be engaged in a multitude of ways to make a living
and that most of their future day-to-day concerns will not be about what their governmental
officials will be doing. They will be
concerned with family finance, other family matters, jobs, what’s up with their
friends, what’s going on at church, and how their favorite sports team is faring. What a civics teacher should be about is
trying to increase the concern that students have about the privileges and
responsibilities attached to their role as citizens. My attempts in this blog have been to
encourage a theoretical slant to that view, one that holds on to a belief and
an emotional commitment; that is, I would want that student to begin viewing
his/her citizenship as an agreement, an agreement to be a partner with his/her
fellow citizens in this project we call the United States of America. This includes the view of the additional
commitment of being a partner within his/her respective state (which in my case
is the state of Florida).
And as a partner, he or she is concerned generally about what
is going on, what advances that partnership, and what adds to or detracts from
the health of that partnership. While
all this is important, the average citizen can be reasonably pardoned if he/she
cannot or will not engage in hours and hours of research related to those issues. With all that goes on in daily lives, the
amount of effort toward becoming knowledgeable and opinionated over these
concerns – some being quite complex – will be limited. How much time, on a daily basis, is it
reasonable to expect the average citizen to expend on these civic
concerns? An hour or so? That’s the time it takes to watch a round of
the local news – which is mostly worthless in terms of these concerns – and the
national news on TV. We would hope the
average citizen subscribes to the local paper and is able to spend some time at
least skimming it for meaningful stories; you know, the ones that don’t cover
the latest murder or “kitten up a tree” type of story. There is an adage today that people don’t
read the newspaper anymore, but instead “play” it with all the puzzles and
games they print. But there is always
the percentage in the populous that has a heightened interest.
They view and read more than just the minimum I just
described – there is also that portion who views and reads a lot less. But for those who go beyond the minimum but
less than the amount political wonks put in, the function of the pundit is
important. These interested citizens go
a bit beyond the hourly newscasts and skimming the paper; they watch news
related networks like Fox News and MSNBC.
On those networks, there is a continuous stream of pundits.
And in turn, these citizens who watch and read more than the
minimum and less than the “wonk” level, are important. These citizens are important in that they
still speak mostly in the language of the less informed but, being more
informed, they can and do become influential among the general population. People listen to them, if not the pundits,
and how they decide to vote or think about an issue can have an augmented
effect. If you know little or nothing
about a subject but feel compelled to act in relation to that subject, you
might seek advice from someone you think knows more about it than you do. At the same time, you will seek that advice
from someone you can understand and whom you feel is not too different from
where you stand in relation to that subject.
There is a literature associated with these phenomena.[1]
So, if these citizens are influential and they, in turn, are
influenced by pundits, how can we view these pundits? Perhaps one way is to see them as forecasters. We have weather forecasters and now we have
political forecasters. Their
presentations follow a format; either they directly or by innuendo express what
will happen if so and so is allowed to happen.
Their stock and trade is to convince viewers how prescient they are in
warning the audience what will happen if the political universe is foolish
enough not to follow their advice. They
might direct their comments about how good or bad a course of action is or will
be, but the ultimate message is a warning.
For a better America, one should heed their opinion. Of course, this general function can be
extended also to columnists in the papers.
If you want to know about any bias on the part of these pundits, either from
the network they are on or the paper that runs their column, one can guess
quite accurately what side of the political divide they are on – there are
exceptions and they are few in number.
What I want to focus on here is on how good a pundit is in forecasting
and what some of the factors affecting this level of proficiency are.
Philip Tetlock[2] provides
an analysis of these aspects. His overall
judgment about how good these “political analysts” are in predicting is that
they are not so good. He grades them as
poor at predicting beyond a year; they tend to think they know a great deal about
what will happen in the future, a lot more than they actually do know. It turns out that predictions termed as
having eighty or ninety percent accuracy, in actuality are in the neighborhood
of 60 to 70 percent. By the way, I still
feel that that rate is not bad. But, he
goes on, that when confronted with less than anticipated accuracy, these
pundits do not “learn” from their mistakes and hold on to original claims or
derived conclusions. This means, Tetlock
holds, that pundits are predicting only a bit better than chance; they are
overconfident and do not benefit from their mistakes. So right off the top, what the media should
be about is benchmarking these predictions and if this were done, the thinking
is that either these pundits’ modesty would increase or they would become
better at their jobs.
But you might ask why, if the rate of accuracy is so low, does
anyone listen to these people? Well,
this question is based on a faulty assumption.
It is based on the notion that people listen to become informed, to
become educated. No, this is not the
reason. People listen to pundits to have
their already formed prejudices reinforced; they listen to those who already
agree with them on the conclusions – what they
believe to be true or good or bad – and can provide the arguments and selected
facts that bolster those opinions. Add to
this the pundit’s trick to couch predictions in iffy language – such as, “there
could be” statements – and the combination is enough of a hedge to allow the
system to sustain itself. But as we look
into this form of political communication, we find even more layers to it. For example, we find that both pundits and
listeners are highly reluctant to question, much less change, their basic
assumptions. They might be willing to
dabble with the truth or wisdom of those beliefs on the fringes of their belief
structures, but the central tenets are untouchable. They rationalize when confronted with direct
hits on those beliefs. For example, they
might emphasize even greater harm if their advocated position is proven to be
misguided, as in we’d better not tempt an even worse outcome by going down a
particular road (we’d better not negotiate with Iran because it will use its
leverage to bolster terrorists). This is
done when their warnings do not have anything to do with the issue at hand (currently
preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons).
In the next posting, I want to pick up on Tetlock’s treatment
of this question over forecasting and look at what a teacher can emphasize when
instructing students on the role and function of pundits. Such instruction, for example, can point out a
benchmark system that students could utilize and then analyze a set of
political pundits from various positions on the political spectrum over an
amount of time (sounds like a great term paper project). But this area has been understudied by the
general media although there have been some attempts to judge the factual
veracity of what pundits and politicians say in the media. But since pundits play an important role for
our citizenry, civics classrooms need to shine more light on what is going on
with these “experts.”
[1]
See for example Lloren, A. and Wuest, R. (2016).
Are opinion leaders better represented?
Social Science Research Network,
retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2733045
.
[2] Tetlock, P.
(2013). How to win at
forecasting. In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:
The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction
(pp. 18-38). New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
