Director of the Rockefeller Center Linda Fowler told about 15 students last night in Sanborn House that her work during the New Hampshire primary introduced her to the "glitzy" and "ahistorical" world of media punditry.
In the speech, which was sponsored by Voices, a group that sponsors speeches by faculty and students, Fowler said she is tired of being a pundit.
Fowler said that during the primaries she became the "mouth" for the Dartmouth-WMUR polling survey and found herself "sucked" into the public eye.
"I heard from old friends, received indecent proposals from Kentucky, Kansas," she said. "People make no distinction between the commercial bimbo, the news commentator and the professor."
Fowler said the media incorrectly considered her an expert on presidential history.
"I was the keeper of the data. I happened to be in the right place at the right time," she said. In punditry, Fowler said, "It's pretty easy to fake it."
Fowler said her experience as a pundit gave her a cynical view of the news media.
Punditry "denigrates my life," she said. "What we do and what we value count as nothing compared" to the drama the press demands.
"That's a sobering thing," she said.
Fowler said she now realizes her knowledge was unwanted in the game of punditry.
"The research, the hours in the stacks ... meant nothing" to the media, she said. "I asked the question, 'What am I doing here?'"
Because of the media's interest in drama before genuine thought, pundits can seldom be trusted, Fowler said.
"Pundit voices are misleading, ... perilous," she said.
According to Fowler, pundits are interested in highly simplified and dramatic predictions of political change.
"Pundits are unable to deal with complexity," she said. "They see political trends as driven by personalities of individuals."
"For a pundit, what's going on in Russia is happening because Boris [Yeltsin] has a drinking problem," she said.
"The New Hampshire Primary became completely unimportant," Fowler said. "The story was that Bob Dole was in trouble," she said.
Fowler said pundits neglect historical perspectives, relying entirely on prediction. She said pundits' faulty judgment may have harmed the political careers of President Bill Clinton and former Vice-President Dan Quayle.
"With Bill Clinton's election, pundits talked of the end of gridlock. They saw a new era of progressive improvement," she said. Once he failed to meet that unreal expectation they "shot him down."
Fowler said Quayle was the rising star of the Republican Congress in the 1980s. But once he became vice president, it seemed he could not "get his foot out of his mouth," because of his portrayal by pundits.
Responsible political scientists examine deep-seated political and social issues rather than mere personality, Fowler said.
According to Fowler, citizens are interested in political content, rather than the winner or losers.
She said citizens receive useless information and the message that their judgment is faulty when pundits "command a deference out of proportion to their formal position."
Fowler said she concluded she lives in a world with "higher values" than the pundits of the news media.
"I didn't need those people," she said. "I'm glad I'm done with them."
