Our Idiotic Punditry

I was talking with a colleague at work today about the Arizona shooter.  Both my colleague (PT) and I are mental health professionals with lots of experience with quite mentally ill people.  PT noted that he had seen some television pundits on the air talking about mental illness and what could have or should have been done with Jared Loughner and might have stopped the shooting.

First of all, under current mental health law and practice, being psychotic isn't enough to get someone locked up involuntarily.  A person has to be a danger to self or others, or so impaired that he/she can not take care of him/herself (that's the wording in my state, but I believe they're all similar).  Loughner was acting strangely, but not dangerously; yet talking heads that PT saw were claiming someone should have seen the signs and locked up this guy.  Of course those of us who work in psychiatric settings know that even if an ill person is locked up and medicated properly, there's nothing to stop him from discontinuing his medication as soon as he gets out, and the cycle repeats.  We see it all the time.

So the pundits (whom I didn't see- don't know who), generic TV talking heads, have no idea what they're talking about, as anyone who has worked in mental health could have told them.  That doesn't stop them from spouting off, of course.

But I want to make a larger point about TV punditry.  They don't know much about anything. Except politics and media.  And when I say politics, I mean it very narrowly: they understand how Democrats and Republicans frame arguments and play the games of electoral politics.  But they don't know much about policy.  That's why it's so hard to find out by watching television anything factual about something like the Affordable Care Act.  Since the media only uses their tired formula- "he said, she said", they allow one side to frame the debate with lies or distortions if they so choose.  With health care, that side is the Right of course, but the Left can just as easily benefit.

And the pundits can't really cut through the crap because most of them don't understand or try to understand the intricacies of policies.  They're not wonks, and they're proud of it.

So for all the mainstream media's heckling of basement-dwelling bloggers, the internet is really the place to go to get policy facts and actually learn something about the policies that affect us every day.  Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn and Jonathan Chait and Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman actually know something about policy, not just about politics.  I don't know nearly as much as any of them (hey I only do this in my spare time!), but I think I know a lot more about health care policy than Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, and James Carville.  And it shouldn't be that way- those guys should be learning about policy and telling us about it, but they don't.