Sometimes I’ll ask my (almost) 4 year twin boys a difficult question. They’ll think about the question, and if they don’t know the answer, they simply respond by saying, “Daddy, I don’t know the answer to that question.” I wish Mr. Robinson could respond to a question he doesn’t know like my sons (excluding the Daddy part of course). Here’s the exchange between Eugene Robinson (columnist for the Washington Post) and David Gregory on Meet the Press last week:
MR. GREGORY: Here’s a question. On the economy overall…how are we going to know if it’s working, and how much time does Obama really have?MR. ROBINSON: It’s a, it’s a good question. I think there’s a realization in the country that this doesn’t happen overnight, that you—that, that we’ve dug such a deep hole and it’s taken so long to do it that, that, you know, I think if, if things are perceived to have stopped getting worse in, in—within six months, say…
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
MR. ROBINSON: …or, or, or nine months, and, and if, if we can—think we can see a bottom then, you know, I think people’ll give him some more time…
Thank you Mr. Robinson for letting us know that we’ll know if the stimulus is working if “we can see a bottom.” Why can’t journalist (or maybe it’s more accurate to say columnists) who have no expertise in a particular field, just respond by saying “I don’t know, you should ask an expert.”
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“Why can’t journalist (or maybe it’s more accurate to say columnists) who have no expertise in a particular field, just respond by saying ‘I don’t know, you should ask an expert.’”
But will the expert have the answer? If economists are the experts on what to do in this crisis, their views differ so much that perhaps there is no answer.
I had a renowned Constitutional Law Professor back in 1952 who would often give the same answer as your 4-year olds when asked how the Supreme Court might rule on a particular matter. Today’s experts in ConLaw unhesitatingly seem to have the answers.
Dear Shag from Brookline,
I think a more appropriate answer would have been, “Well Summers, Stiglitz say this, or Hubbard, Feldstein say this.”
I guess that’s why they’re called “talking heads” but sometimes they should be called “talking (air)heads.”
It seems to me the real problem is that Gregory asked a fellow journalist a question that most “experts” couldn’t answer.
Ask a stupid question and you will generally get a stupid answer.
Many of them (most?) indeed are airheads. But the suggested answer might reveal the airhead’s ideological bent. I would not expect Robinson could explain the bases for the positions of any of the economists named, at least in the few minutes afforded him. Many pick a side based upon personal politics. Some, too few perhaps, spend the time to examine the reasoning of the expert.
I taught a federal tax course in a graduate program for 7 years. When a student asked a question that I did not have a clear answer to, I would say I did not know and get back to the student at the next class, which I did. Unfortunately TV and cable time restraints require instantaneous sound bites, and “I don’t know” is not acceptable to the networks, etc.
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