Most successful pundits are selected for being opinionated, because it's interesting, and the penalties for incorrect predictions are negligible. You can make predictions, and a year later people won't remember them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There used to be that you only had four or five critics that you would look to for intelligent conversation, but now there are millions of people who can just press 'send,' and everyone's got an opinion even if no one cares what they say. It makes things a little bit tougher.
I know the pundits don't agree with me.
The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.
The critics tend to forget their own answers after a while.
There's one thing I know for sure: When I'm most opinionated, my writing sucks.
People are so opinionated about things, and they don't even know what they're talking about, or can't even do it themselves.
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.
Let there be a special place in Hell for pundits who make predictions.
I feel no compulsion to be a pundit. As a matter of fact, I really don't have that much to say about most things. Working with hard news satisfies me completely.
If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.