The Question of Expertise

by Cheryl Rofer

The New York Times op-ed page today takes on flying saucers. More properly unidentified flying objects, UFOs, but the Times op-ed page has been more than a bit barmy for the past several months, so one term or the other will do.

But there’s a serious point underlying that article that keeps recurring: what role can expertise play in whom we take seriously?

Nick Pope, the author of the article, notes that some observers have reported “stars and planets, aircraft lights, satellites and meteors” as unidentified, but others have reported things in the sky that genuinely can’t be identified and that may constitute dangers.

Also today, Todd Gitlin points out that an expert currently being cited in newspaper articles on the financial mess was also one of the “most-quoted alarmists warning that Y2K was going to bring the sky crashing down because computers would misread 2000 as 1900.” Gitlin concludes

The same experts are quoted again and again with--so far as I can tell--no regard for their records.

Further, some experts are willing to put their names to newspaper articles others have written for them. Last night on the News Hour we saw a testy Steve Wasserman forced to share the airwaves with (horrors!) an online commentator, Kassia Krozer. The subject was the Los Angeles Times’s decision to discontinue its book review section, of which Wasserman was editor until 2005. It’s worth quoting him at length because he incorporates so intemperately so many of the objections to the Web that so many professional journalists (print variety) make.

Well, to oppose the Internet I suppose would be like to oppose climate change. I have no problem with the vast democracy wall that the Internet provides on which everyone, every crank and every sage can post his or her pronunciamento.

But what's lost here is the discriminatory filter provided by people who have embraced journalism as a craft. What has been lost here is the authority, such as it ever was, of newspaper people trying to do a job well done.

I do not see foreign coverage being replaced by the activity of individuals on the Internet bloviating about this or that.

And despite the robust nature or at least the very excited nature of the conversation on the Internet, the best criticism still being written today is being published, say, in magazines, James Wood in the New Yorker, or Leon Wieseltier in the pages of the New Republic, or Christopher Hitchens in the pages of the Atlantic.

And it will be a long time before the Internet gives us a forum in which such people unsupported by institutions can deliver us that kind of literary criticism. At their best, the newspapers were an exercise in delivering to us that kind of informed criticism, which was the work of professionals who had devoted a lifetime to the consideration of literature.

Note the assumptions: that authority is at least as important as capability, that individuals outside the certified profession are inevitably going to be cranks and bloviators, that only people supported by institutions can deliver quality literary criticism, that “professionals who had devoted a lifetime to the consideration of literature” are not to be found outside those unspecified institutions. And of course there is the snark.

But the problem goes beyond the blogosphere, even though that is the bête noir of the chattering classes. Ordinary people see strange things in the sky, even though they may sometimes find the planets strange. On the other hand, predictions by experts probably have about the same record of accuracy as those by astrologers, but, as Gitlin notes, the professional journalists don’t keep score on such things.*

What we’re talking about here is certification as a substitute for evaluation. Certification is not an infallible guide to quality, although it can serve as a quick (and legally justifiable) check. Its constant and unthinking application leads to the development of in-groups whose justification for existence is no more than that they exist. It is particularly pernicious for journalists to bond in this way with their sources, but that is not the only area in which it does damage.

Repeated rejection of uncertified lay input, I would argue, has been partly responsible for the loss of public interest in public issues. If you keep telling people that they are not competent to contribute, they will stop contributing.

But technology is changing that. If you don’t believe what I saw, here is the photo from my cell phone. And here is a book review by a blogger I read regularly and trust.

Unfortunately, those who have benefited from certification and who feel threatened by today’s explosion of capability they preferred not to know was there will feel the need to command the tide to roll back, as Mr. Wasserman did last night.

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* It doesn’t entirely fit into my argument for this post, but I keep wondering why those professional journalists, whose profession consists in investigating and reporting what is actually happening, spend so much time speculating and trying to dig up clues on who will be picked as the vice-presidential nominees of each party. Surely there are other stories that might be followed up on, like the root causes of the Air Force’s problems or the dangers in our food supply, just to name two.