I, too, know about wireless broadband issues, by study and experience, and so I know Judy Chevalier's piece in the New York Times today is not quite all there.

Yes, yes, open up the airwaves so that anyone can use any device on them.

BUT DO NOT FOLLOW THE MICROSOFT MODEL.

Microsoft wishes to use a commons model of spectrum usage merely to privilege its own OS and software, which basically, limits the kinds of services that can be used on a broadband network.

It's a false dichotomy to have either the ISM band OR only one service provider per band.

The ISM band was never meant and will never carry truly high end audio/video; it can't, because the market has already decided the lowest common denominator for that is 802.11b (forget all the hype about "n") and Bluetooth.

WiMAX? Probably not much better.

My solution: reform roaming. Seriously reform roaming, and have a single standard worldwide. Which ain't CDMA.

"Why don't all newspapers use folks like Professor Chevalier, a brilliant economist at the Yale School of Management?"

The answer is apparent to all but Mr. Hundt. The answer is RELEVANCE. If the media started using experts who are really relevant and who thought about and understood the problems addressed then that would move discourse to a positions that genuinely require serious changes to the status quo. Since the media have either arrogated to themselves or have been assigned the task of defending the status quo by all means necessary they therefore do not use any (or a few "quaint" ones) experts outside the accepted discourse. They are (as others have coined the phrase "serious" others like your good professor, are provided occasionally for amusement only. So Ms.Coulter, and Bill Kristol, and Bill Bennett and Michael O'Hanlon, and the Kagans and the other fakers and fakirs get serious media time; others are marginalized.She would be used more if she would get serious.

If the standards of NCLB were applied to Broder, Will, et all by testing their readers, they would be demoted rather quickly...

Excellent point. Rather than pundit demotion, extended and stop-lossed tours of duty as correspondents in Iraq might increase the caliber of their essays.

P.S. On Broder's informed choice in doctors. I am covered, so I supposed get the informed choice supposedly taken away by "socialized medicine." But I do what almost everyone does: pick a name out of the HMO's list based on geographic proximity. I've had real losers in the past, a fine gp now, but it's not like how I'd buy a computer. Sure, there is the list of best doctors each year in New York magazine, but that's just one of their "trends for the wealthy" articles.

Ironically, the worst I ever got was by word of mouth from a neighbor. But that's not exactly how I'd shop for a computer either. In any case, it's not informed choice; it's corporately constrained choice, with highly imperfect information, as economists would say. It's not like the system will open things up to better either. 

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Two columns a week?  On whatever strikes their fancy?  George Will alone writes several columns a year on baseball!  Geoge Will, David Broder, Tom Friedman, Ann Coulter, etc are all people who make tons of money to give the masses what they want to hear!  Will (or his unpaid interns) spends (I am guessing here) 30 minutes a week looking up obscure quotes, and then writes a column or two around them.  I would bet he gets most of his writing done in the first 3 days of the month and then takes the rest off.  Broder and Friedman just call Cheney's office for instructions.  Ann just writes about her latest absurd fantasy and it works like a charm because people are so freaking gullible and uninformed.

If current events intervene, they can always cut and paste the latest talking points into their already written, screaming opinions; after all, they all know the formula, don't they?

 As to this:  You try coming up with interesting, well-argued, well-crafted 750-word essays twice a week, week in, week out, on all sorts of topics, not all of which you are well versed in.

So writing well-argued, well-crafted 750-word essays twice a week is too much to expect, although we (the public) are expected to take the time to READ those essays.  Are you saying their jobs are just too hard?  Why are they still on the payroll?  Maybe someone else should take over for them.  Frankly, I would love to have such a sinecure. 

I have a job that requires an enormous amount of effort, originality, and hard work.  If I stopped doing it well and made the excuse that it is JUST TOO HARD TO DO IT WEEK AFTER WEEK  I would not expect to keep my job.

That said, I doubt very seriously that any of the above-mentioned ego-maniacs would agree with you that they are not writing fantastically pithy and informed pieces semiweekly, so you haven't made friends with THEM either!

Jan

The scale of incoming shots taken at these pundits would certainly increase if they were relocated into the newest democracy on earth.

If I were worked to death like they are for their 1.500 words a week on ANY topic of their choosing for contracts like theirs, I'd be all over THAT briar patch. The "academics" that you scorn seem to have a much tougher job- writing cogent, pedagogically correct and relevant works in a "publish or perish" environment.

There's no doubt that being a columnist is a pretty sweet job.  But you're making the common mistake of assuming the word count requirement means their job is not that hard.  You're wrong.  It may not be hard to churn out 1,500 words a week on any topic, but to do it in a well-written, engaging and, most of all, original way is exceedingly hard.  That's why so few do it well.  And why even the best columnists turn in a lot of junk.

I have to laugh at your description of academic publishing as "cogent, pedagogically correct and relevant."  Obviously you've never spent any time reading academic journals.  If you had, you'd be aware that in fact most academic articles and books are, from the standpoint of good writing, disaster zones.  They may be "pedagogically correct", although I'm not even sure I know what that means, but they are most certainly not "cogent".  And as for their relevance, I suppose it depends on whether you mean relevant to the few dozen people who read the average journal article or relevant to anyone else.  In most cases, these articles are exercises in utter trivia.

There are of course academics who are true stars, and whose work is vital for understanding policy issues.  But I just have a problem with blanket statements saying that academics are worth more than journalists in understanding policy.  Both play a role and while there may be some overlap, that overlap isn't very large.

ize it may not sound intuitive, but writing

But what about ye olde division in academia where those who like to teach and are mass-student pleasing are secondary to those ivory tower types who like to publish, and how textbooks are therefore at the bottom of the hierarchy of "published," unless one has already had a long tenured career publishing more "serious" work? Aren't textbooks sort of looked upon similarly as doing journalistic pieces for a mass audience?

Is it possible that one reason that when academics want to speak out on something in the political sphere, you see them as signatories to an "op-ed" in the form of "letter to the world," written by someone else? There is safety in numbers, they are not jumping into the journalistic world all by their lonesome, to the derision of colleagues.

Brad, it's actually a brilliant post.

Who cares how hard the job of a journalist is, or how purportedly few academics would make good columnists? The job of a newspaper editor is supposed to be to seek the truth, and they just have to keep firing columnists who write insane, obviously false things such as such as "...government officials...should [not] be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off" (Richard Cohen) until they get a crew that can add to the public discourse instead of poisoning it. And if an editor cannot figure out which academic to hire by reading some of their work intended for lay audiences, the editor should be replaced. Even if only 1% of academics could write well for lay audiences, that would still leave a huge selection given how few columnists there are.

Publishers want dangerously ignorant, misinformed, verbally dull columnists because they are dangerously ignorant, misinformed, verbally dull publishers.

ArtA, you're misinterpreting me. Now, the division between teachers and ivory tower types is misleading, since everyone has to publish to get tenure (and since student ratings are, alas, increasingly factored into some department decisions, which adds to grade inflation, as student ratings turn too often on grading). But regardless, my point wasn't that textbooks are highly valued, representative academic publications. 

Sure, they're written for money, by profs who already have a reputation as both teachers and scholars, not to mention by profs who can find the time and thus are tenured. (It also goes into the publisher decision: a junior prof won't have a name that sells books.) But the point is that top professors can write engagingly, and I am forced to live what that fact for at least eight hours a day, alas.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Chomsky writes well, he is a brilliant academic, he thinks outside the box, is certainly less "extreme" than most of the far-right lunatics who dominate public discourse. He is a pariah. Krugman writes fairly well and even has his column at NYT. But seriously is he used one-tenth of the time that the buffoon, Tommy Friedman, is say on broadcast media? Does your reply even slightly address this discrepancy?

Publishers and their business advisers don't want to rock the boat, that's for sure, but I seem to remember a time when the NYT had better columnists -- Russell Baker, James Reston, Tom Wicker.

The editorial staff who choose what to print must bear most of the responsibility for the current abysmal quality of what appears in their pages.

If you think Noam Chomsky is "less extreme" than most of the far-right lunatics, then there's little hope for you.  And I hardly think Chomsky is a "pariah". He's one of the best-known academics in the world.  But he's ferociously anti-American and an apologist for practically every genocidal maniac in the last 50 years.  Feh! Who needs him?

Now Tom Friedman is an interesting case.  I happen to like Tom Friedman, you'll not be surprised to hear, but I can see why he drives the left bonkers.  It took him too long to call out the Bushies on Iraq.  His writing is in the tradition of Walter Lippman and James Reston - columnists who become newsmakers and bigshots in their own right and whose writing reflects their super-inflated egos, ("As I was saying to the Prime Minister the other day...")  Friedman's writing can be uneven and his mixing of metaphors is legendary.  But what separates him from other pundits is that he thinks in terms of big ideas and tries to go beyond simple analyses.  For example, I like his arguments about how green solutions need to scale, which is something you don't hear a lot of discussion on.  He was on to outsourcing before the vast majority of people had heard of it.  While it's true he got Iraq horribly wrong - although he's hardly the only one - he gets Israel/Palestine and the Arab world in general consistently right, and that's over 25 years (and yes, I know you'll probably disagree.)

Not exactly the totality of what I was trying to say. Yes, one point was that the NYTimes pundit columnists in particular do not seem in danger of being thrown out on their asses because many liberal bloggers never stopped taking their columns as something to write about. You don't, on the other hand, see many liberal bloggers talk about what the syndicated columnists in "flyover" newspapers are saying.

But in addition to that, I am saying that I think the most popular bloggers furnish exactly the same kind of product that those columnists do, and encourage that kind of product further. They are not rejecting the mold, but taking on the same job of interpreting recent news for people who don't want to read in depth from original sources. That's because people like what pundits do, and those pundits now include bloggers. People look for someone they "know" to tell them a version of what's going on, they may read further after that on their own, but they like to start with an individual's spin on it. The blogosphere is just increasing this, what used to be the group that turned to the op-ed page of a newspaper first thing--rather than going first for the hard news headlines stories, and commentary afterwards, it's commentary first from your favorite bloggers, then follow up with the links to the actual hard data if you have time. The bloggers with their "circle jerks" of linkage also contribute to this, it's all about secondary reaction.

There's no danger to the business of punditry, just the opposite, there's the blogosphere greatly increasing the punditry profession, including punditry on punditry. It's not common to see Friedman start out a column saying "Maureen Dowd says in her last piece...." but it is quite common to see a blogger to start out a piece with "Ezra Klein says...." with link.

Not liking the quality of the punditry offered by the major print media is one thing. Bemoaning that "the media" is becoming all punditry, no reporting, is another, especially when one is supporting the growth of that by reading blogs over news. For example, by reading Reed Hundt's thoughts on someone's article before reading that article itself or just passing on the article and going on Reed Hundt's interpretation alone. The vast majority using the blogosphere vote with their mouse that they want celebrity punditry, they want to know their news providers and they want his/her take on the news, they are not as interested in various papers by academics they never heard of. Just like fans of Dowd or Friedman that turn to their pieces first thing. Most of us using the blogosphere are no different.

"If you think Noam Chomsky is "less extreme" than most of the far-right lunatics, then there's little hope for you. And I hardly think Chomsky is a "pariah"."

Whenever I have a political argument with someone who is incapable of giving a real answer they use dismissive language like you do. Chomsky is not a "pariah" politically, because he is recognized in the international academy. A wee bit dishonest, I think. Then you say he is "ferociously anti-American"; probably in his opposition to the Vietnam War or the Iraq war. But did he oppose sanctions on the Apartheid regime in South Africa when the US finally applied them? No. So what does your right-wing talking-points refer to. Ahh criticism of Israel. Of course. Not only anti-Semitic but "ferociously anti-American" too.

Thank you for sending me to the Wikipedia article Brad. I knew we would eventually get to the right-wing talking points underlying your great knowledge of this subject.

In the section entitled "The threat of a good example" the article states:

"Chomsky has argued that an important explanation for US interventions in countries is fear that otherwise these nations may become good examples as alternatives to an exploitative US hegemony.
Critics such as David Horowitz respond that there are many examples of socialist nations but none have been good examples. Instead all have failed economically and have been repressive politically. "Chomsky seems to have missed this most basic fact of twentieth-century history: socialism doesn't work, and to the extent it does work, its results are horrific."
Chomsky has used the coup in Chile on September 11th 1973 on Salvador Allende as an example of this threat of a good example policy."

Now Brad you may not agree, (probably you like David Horowitz), but I find him an odious, McCarthy-like character, far WORSE than Chomsky, despite your defense of him. Come to think of it Brad, he calls people anti-American and bad Americans, or traitors almost as easily as you sling around the McCarthy epithets.But you can and do distinguish pro-Americans (like Cheney, Bush, theKagans, Kristol) from anti-Americans (like Chomsky) and you certainly do not hesitate to state your prescient opinions. I think we are a stronger nation having you sifting through the citizenry. Would that we had you as judge, jury and executioner.

In the section entitled "Criticism of Views on Israel and Palestine" the section begins with "Although Chomsky is himself Jewish, he has been accused of antisemitism by people such as critic Werner Cohn . " As you undoubtedly know Brad, Chomsky answered Cohn in his reply in

http://www.chomsky.info/letters/19890601.htm

Now I have to admit I have not pursued this in detail. Clearly you (who label those you dislike as ferociously anti-American) have. Maybe in your next reply you can tell us what you actually KNOW, rather than use your penchant for dismissing what you do not like as anti-American.

The section in the article you recommend then continues:
"Alan Dershowitz has criticized Chomsky's endorsement of Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist whose work Dershowitz considers to be anti-Semitic"
Now I guess you are also a fan of Alan Dershowitz who hounded Finkelstein into denial of tenure at DePaul. A great victory for you Brad and the other pro-Americans. Mr.Torture is known for his inability to tolerate any criticism of Israel and his need to viciously and personally attack any critic. In my opinion Dershowitz, who appears frequently on American television and in the media, is an intolerant and dangerous purveyor of Israeli neocon thought. He is much worse and much more extreme than Chomsky

In the section of your article entitled "Vietnam War" we have some criticism of Chomsky's defense of the National Liberation Front by Keith Windschuttle, the right-wing Australian who has made his mark by denying the massacres of aborigines and whose writings are part of a systematic attempt to deny the racist treatment of aboriginal people's in Australia. The actual criticism leveled by your right-wing hero Windschuttle has to do with GDP per head in communist Vietnam and by comparison in American supported and dominated (for about a century i believe) Philippines. The State Department's own figures show at present a greater per capita income in Vietnam than in the Philippines, but hey,who cares whether Windschuttle's charges make sense. The improtance is always in the smear, right Brad?

I do not want to be put in the position of defending every one of Chomsky's positions. I don't agree with them all. I found nothing in the article to justify calling Chomsky "anti-American". Instead I found it a rehash of right-wing talking-points. I think people like you who use this terminology and use it so easily to describe views and people they do not like, as reprehensible and disgraceful as their intellectual mentors in the far right lunatic fringe. It is why we have such a distorted public discourse and much of the reason this country finds itself in the present dire straits.