Bruce Bartlett on Think Tank Politicisation | and think tanks and the media

4 February 2011

Bruce Bartlett comments on an article by Mark Thoma  on Think Tank Politicization. He highlights a couple of excellent points/ideas/recommendations in the way that think tanks engage with the media:

First:

Conservatives understand–better than liberals, I think–that most stories are lucky to last one news cycle. If the reporter later decides that the liberal study was really worthwhile and the conservative one was worthless, he isn’t going to go back and do another article on the subject. It’s water over the dam.

Second:

One consequence of Heritage’s breakthrough in developing short, readable, time-sensitive policy analyses is that they were just as useful to the media as they were on Capitol Hill. Reporters had the same need for predigested studies written in plain English, as opposed to the sorts of books written in academese that were the stock-in-trade of traditional think tanks like Brookings.
Unfortunately, nothing is an island. Choices made by individual organisations, in the context of a more polarised political and media climate as well as increased competition in the marketplace of ideas, can lead to changes in the whole system

Bartlett suggests that as a consequence:

the talking head approach to policy debate on the cable news channels reinforces all the negative aspects of this development. Once upon a time, I used to do a lot of cable interviews. At first, I was often paired with people I knew at other think tanks who were slightly more liberal than I am. But because we both shared common facts and knew the limits of what could be demonstrated through serious academic research, we naturally tended to agree with each quite a bit.

Having two guests who agree with each other is the last thing cable channels want; they want their guests to be 180 degree polar opposites. So gradually I noticed that I was no longer being paired with peers from liberal think tanks, but people I had never heard of who were identified as “Democratic consultant” or something like that. Such people clearly knew virtually nothing about the subject we were discussing and were just there to endlessly repeat talking points that someone gave them.

That was bad enough, but over time it got worse. I could see that I was going up against people who had media training. They knew how to filibuster by using more than their share of air time and forced me to use my time responding to their charges at the expense of making my own points. Eventually, I pretty much stopped either doing cable interviews or watching cable news at all.