Whenever a high profile case hits the airwaves, as it did yesterday with Bernie Madoff’s sentencing, the news outlets trot out purported “experts” to fill the time.  I spent a few minutes watching shortly after sentence was imposed, and was, well, underwhelmed.  At first, I thought that the “experts” just had little to offer; they were not illuminating, interesting, or controversial.  Heck, they weren’t even informative.

But after some reflection, I realized that the experts weren’t at fault.  It was the interviewers, primarily the anchors who were reading their parts as they are so well-qualified to do.  The problem was that the question, usually a long, often meandering query with numerous predicate phrases that veered without segue into a statement of the flagrantly obvious, concluded with the query, “so what do was Judge Chin thinking?”

Of course, we have no clue what Judge Chin was thinking.  We only know what he was saying, but it really didn’t matter at that point since the anchor already stated the obvious and left little to do but agree with the anchor’s brilliance.  “Oh yes, you are so right; that’s exactly what happened.”  And we need to hear this from an expert?

The shame is that there was much to discuss following sentence, as there tends to be following any sort of legal action.  It’s just that no one wants to let it happen.  So why bother to get an expert?  Window dressing; it makes the report appear legitimate and knowledgeable, and gives the viewer the comfort of believing that he too, now, has an expert understanding of events and the law.

The reason for doing this is multifold.  First, TV people are scared to death that if you put someone in front of the camera and leave them to their own devices, they will blow it big time.  Either they will freeze, and stare at the camera like a deer in the headlights, or they will fumble and mumble and make no sense at all, undermining the erudition of the news program itself.  Worse still, they are afraid the expert will start talking like a lawyer and bore the living crap out of the audience or, worst of all, use multisyllabic words that will make viewers change to the Fox News Network.  Trust me, they despise any word with more than two syllables, and greatly prefer words with just one.

The upshot is that the expert may well be an expert, and have great things to say about the subject at hand.  You would just never know from the manner of the interview, which is designed to control the expert, aggrandize the anchor (hey, it is their show, ya know), and not piss off the viewers.  The talking heads are just window dressing, there to provide the imprimatur of credibility to statements so painfully obvious that they have already occurred to every viewer watching.  Viewers love confirmation bias, of course, which reminds them why they love watching the news, where it is proven that they know as much as everyone else about everything that matters.

In contrast, the blawgosphere has a few people who are willing to go out on a limb, actually offer some insight or an opinion, stare controversy in the eye and speak their mind.  It also has plenty of stiff shirts who offer nothing worthwhile, for fear that they would be viewed as too strident or undignified.  Maybe they are afraid that if they actually do something to illuminate the issues in a case, they won’t be asked to do a gig on TV as a talking head.