I’m not sure why Nick Kristof is surprised that experts on TV tend to get things wrong, often big things that the media is more than happy to repeatedly defer to them on, regardless of past performance. Academic studies of natural deference to experts really don’t prove anything. Expertise is another extension of authority – a “Dr.” in front of someone’s name is powerful, as is someone wearing a white lab coat (as Milgram showed us). The chyron below a pundit’s name on television is powerful, too.

Kristof brings the column to a faux-admirable close with a push towards journalistic accountability, citing that he was right about the Iraq war but wrong about the surge. But the problem with Iraq wasn’t so much that the experts on TV said stupid things about the war being easily winnable and Iraq being a dangerous threat, and thereby duping the public to support the war. While support was strong, there was a vocal and outspoken section of the public that opposed the war in the face of expert statements. The problem was that journalists took “expert” opinion on their own networks and in their own pages and stopped asking critical questions as a result. The statements from people in authority were not questioned by the press and thus any meaningful public discourse on the path to war was stifled. The media was cowed, not the public. And I certainly don’t see Kristof pushing for any real accountability for a lack of skepticism in the press.

HTML Mencken is right. It may be self-satisfying for Kristof to wax poetic about the public holding media figures accountable, but he knows full well that he and his colleagues will never be held accountable. It’s nice for Kristof to recognize in the pages of the New York Times that *gasp* experts get things wrong on a quite regular basis and People generally shouldn’t be so deferential to them, but it’s absurd for him to suggest that outspoken ideologues are almost always wrong, while conservative (small c) centrists who hem and haw and avoid real judgment of the issues are tops.

Or to put it a different way, it’s patently nuts for Kristof to look at the drumbeat to war in Iraq and the breathless reliance on the financial markets to chart the public policy course and conclude that the problem isn’t just experts, but experts with strong opinions regardless of where on the ideological spectrum they lie, that are the problem.