News Anchors and Game Theory

People on TV tend to be very opinionated. Sure, many of those guys are idiots, but is it also a problem created by the restrictions of the forum? What Tim Kreider described as:
“…in a thousand-word essay you can’t include every qualification or second thought that occurs to you or you’d expend your allotted space refuting your own argument instead of making it.”
Replace “thousand-word essay” with “30 second voice clip” and the point would hold good again.

And then there are the news anchors who yell, interrupt and talk garbage. (There’s that Facebook joke that asks “What is common between Google and Arnab Goswamy?” Answer: Neither lets you finish your sentence!) Is there any reason for that insanity beyond the obvious one that they are morons? Or is Kreidman right when he says:
“The one thing no editorialist or commentator in any media is ever supposed to say is I don’t know: that they’re too ignorant about the science of climate change to have an informed opinion; that they frankly have no idea what to do about gun violence in this country; or that they’ve just never quite understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in all honesty they’re sick of hearing about it. To admit to ignorance, uncertainty or ambivalence is to cede your place on the masthead, your slot on the program…”

If one anchor is willing to acknowledge his lack of info on a topic, does he win credibility or respect? Of course not. Game theory and the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma come into play. Because by saying he doesn’t know, that anchor risks:
“(allowing) all the coveted eyeballs to turn instead to the next hack who’s more than happy to sell them all the answers.”

So the next time you curse Rajdeep Sardesai or Arnab Mukherjee, remember the solution is not that simple. After all, Kreidman’s comments are about the US, where anchors are much, much better than ours. Of course, that doesn’t mean our anchors can’t or shouldn’t rise to the (imperfect but still vastly better than ours) American or British levels…

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