The Go-To Guy

When you read a newspaper or watch TV and the "experts" are identified by political affiliation, take it with a large grain of salt and assume that the press is lying. It's the safe bet.

Andrew Ferguson in Press Man: The Prisoner of Zandi

Here’s how the go-to guy works. Let’s say you’re a reporter on a deadline and you need a quote right this minute about how Republicans have rendered Congress dysfunctional. Well then, your go-to guy is Norman Ornstein​, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps you want to give readers a little historical perspective, something eggheady about, say, how smoothly leaders of both parties used to work together before the lunatics (you know who they are) started running the asylum on Capitol Hill? Quick: get “presidential historian” Douglas Brinkley on the phone before he goes live on the NewsHour! He’ll be sure to tell you, with a wistful air, that Tip O’Neill and President Reagan were always friends after five o’clock.

If it’s the economy you’re writing about, it’s Mark Zandi. He has all the qualities that go into making a go-to guy of the very first rank. He is fluent on television and keeps his sentences short. His demeanor is pleasant. He uses the word “narrative” with abandon—“narrative” being the hottest word in journalism since “transparency”; it’s this year’s “accountability.” And he’s a liberal. All go-to guys are liberals. They can’t be identified as such, lest their authority as disinterested observers be undermined and the reader or viewer begin to get ideas. Ideological fuzziness is good; ideological hermaphroditism is better.

All of which is boring and complicated and none of which makes it into the stories of reporters who rely on go-to guys. The job of the go-to guy transcends accuracy. It is instead to confirm the circular reasoning that underlies so much of modern liberalism. A stimulus will create jobs because that’s what a stimulus does. In a budget standoff, Republicans and not Democrats are stubborn and unyielding, because stubborn and unyielding is how Republicans are. Ask Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Ask Mark Zandi, a Republican economist. The go-to guys are here to help. Always.

Read the whole thing.