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Grand Central Political Magazine
MSM, LOL, IMHO: The Strange Death Of Punditry (Part I)
By Robert Stacy McCain
When Rachel Marsden sent me a message suggesting I contribute to GrandCentralPolitical.com, my immediate reaction was, "What does it pay?"
Her reply began with the acronym "LOL," which perfectly expresses the fate of punditry in the New Media age. If you think you're going to get rich sharing your opinions online, pal, LOL.
The Great Blog Bubble of the past five years was dependent on a mythology of easy money and instant success. According to the myth, any half-bright clown with a laptop, an attitude and a rudimentary knowledge of HTML could throw up a Blogspot site and, in no more than six weeks, have a syndicated column, a book deal and his own half-hour weekend gig on MSNBC. Just quit your day job, add ".com" to your name, and by the time the rent came due, you'd be the next Ann Coulter.
Good luck with that career plan. It's never really worked that way, and it never will, because it can't. The illusion of overnight fame and fortune for writing mere political opinion is a cruel lie. It is possible that someone might have made a reasonable living that way once upon a time, and it is possible to argue that some people -- Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Richard Cohen -- still do. But the (apparently widespread) belief that there is some huge and lucrative market for political opinion is just a lie.
To start with, let's examine the Sunday opinion section of your typical major metropolitan paper. Here is a weighty 1,500-word think piece about the economy written by ...? Yes, that's right, a tenured professor of economics at the nearby state university. Maybe he gets 20 cents a word, or maybe he's happy to do it for the prestige of being published in a mass-circulation newspaper. Either way, the point is the same: Writing think pieces is not his full-time gig; being a tenured professor is.
Now, look over at that 700-word column about the glories of ethanol written by ...? Why yes, indeed, it was written by a "senior research fellow" at a think tank. And if you scratched around a bit on the Internet, you might well discover that this think tank has received a generous grant from a major agribusiness concern that stands to profit handsomely from increased government subsidies for ethanol production. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the senior research fellow's argument, but it does tell you who's paying his bills, and it sure ain't the newspaper.
Ah, you say, but what about the staff columnists? At the typical metro daily, most columnists have the word "editor" somewhere in their job title. Editing is what they get paid for; the Sunday column is just icing on the cake. There are a few megapapers -- the New York Times, for example -- that pay a few people full-time salaries to write columns, but these MSM uber-pundits are a dying breed. If you'll check their biographies, most of them bring long years of impressive experience to their gigs.
"Nationally syndicated columnist" sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, of the top 10 syndicated columnists, three are from the Washington Post (George Will, 66, David Broder, 78, and Charles Krauthammer, 57) and three from the New York Times (Thomas Friedman, 53, Maureen Dowd, 55, and David Brooks, 46). Ellen Goodman, 67, is from the Boston Globe, Leonard Pitts, 49, is from the Miami Herald and Kathleen Parker, 56, is from the Orlando Sentinel. So, 60 percent of the top 10 are employed by two megapapers, three others are from other large dailies, and the only "lone wolf" on the top 10 list -- Cal Thomas, 66 -- spent about 15 years as an NBC News reporter.
The average age of a Top 10 columnist is 59. So if you're willing to toil away at the pundit game until you're eligible for AARP membership, perhaps you, too, can become a Top 10 nationally syndicated columnist. Good luck with that.
OK, you say, what about the sub-Top 10 columnists? Well, whatever Ann Coulter's total annual revenue from all sources, I'm willing to bet her syndication royalties don't make much of a dent on the payments for her house in Palm Beach. Two other relevant points: She's 46 and she is Ann Coulter, which you -- Mr. Would-Be Pundit -- are not.
The example of Ann Coulter points toward a major source of the illusion that one can get rich from spouting political opinion, namely cable TV news networks. People who appear regularly on TV are famous. Being famous, however, is not the same as being rich. In Washington, I hang out a good bit with journalists and think-tank operatives who've done their share of MSNBC/Fox/CNN appearances, and I haven't noticed any of them driving Porsches or lighting their cigars with $100 bills.
By now, you should have some inkling that (a) the number of professional full-time opinion-mongers is relatively small, (b) most of those have toiled two or three decades to get where they are, and (c) the fact that someone is a syndicated columnist or appears frequently on cable TV doesn't mean that they're rich. So basing your career plan on the goal of becoming the next Ann Coulter is kind of like aiming for a career in the NBA, except maybe that you're less likely to be implicated in a drug-related shootout on your way to a major disappointment.
Another similarity between playing in the NBA and being Ann Coulter: Neither is as easy as it looks. Ann Coulter was a lawyer and Senate staffer before she started appearing regularly on MSNBC in the mid-1990s, and was 36 when she published her first book. She was an honors graduate of an Ivy League school, a law review editor at Michigan, and clerked for a federal judge. In other words, she's super-smart and had a 15-year trail of heavyweight credentials before she zoomed into the national consciousness via cable TV news. Coulter makes the punditry racket look easy, but even in her exceptional case, it wasn't just handed to her on a silver platter.
Well, you might protest, that business of being a columnist and a TV talking-head, that's the MSM approach. Everything is different here on the freewheeling New Media frontier, right? To quote Rachel once more, LOL.
NEXT: Living on blog-o-bucks.
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Journalist and blogger Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of "Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party." He blogs at The Other McCain ( http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/ ) and his e-mail address is r.s.mccain@att.net.