Eric Alterman on some guy he met at a party:
Why should he bother making sense? If the fellow wants a career sounding clever on American cable and radio talk shows and the like, there is no reason in the world why he should bother making any sense. Making sense takes too long, though not as long as pointing out why someone is not making sense. More often than not, when I do cable TV, the question that is put to me simply does not make any sense. Yet to point this out is to show bad manners and moreover, it gets in the way of the point I wanted to make in the first place. So there's no value whatever in pointing it out. And the thing metastasizes from there, frequently going off into outer space in terms of logic or what we know to be true about the real world. But no one cares because everyone's interest is served.
I sort of enjoy the double challenge of being questioned on television: You both need to make your point, but also frame your answer in such a way that it retroactively makes the question sensical. That's the real trick.
Increasingly, though, the incentives are changing. Assume that the incentive for going on television is to raise your profile (which is about 75 percent correct). If I went on television five years ago, a large part of my incentive would be to make the host like me. After all, these appearances pass in an instant, and most of you would never see the program. So if I want to reach the maximum number of people with my arguments and do the most to increase my visibility, I want to keep coming back.
Now, however, with YouTube and GoogleVideo and online archiving, a single, contentious appearance can be seen on the internet a million times. Everyone, after all, has seen Stewart berate Tucker Carlson on Crossfire, but very few of us had actually tuned in that day. Similarly, my segment on the Kudlow show, replayed on the internet a few thousand times, did much more for my reputation among the audience relevant to my success than have my more friendly, but bland, appearances on other shows.
Making sense often requires you to be disruptive, and not long ago, being disruptive was probably a bad idea. Now it's a good one. And since the channels are wising up and putting their videos online with advertising before them, they also want widespread online dissemination of appearances, and so their incentives are increasingly aligned with mine. Does this mean more folks will be making sense? Not necessarily. But it means their might be more room for sense-making.
