We now turn to our panel of experts
It's the best of times and it's the worst of times, especially for journalists who must report the news as a matter of their own livelihoods.
It's possible that we'll all, journalists included, look back on this time and be able to see clearly the timidity and arrogance of our politics--the timidity of the sort of thinking that's so small, so narrow it's afraid of socialism, invoking once again old Karl Marx as one of the enemies for instance, and the arrogance of truly believing to have answers to questions that have no answers.
The assumption was, for the most part in times past, that we're led by good men and women, the best of the best, when we're now led by the worst of the worst posing as the best of the best. It must be as confusing to journalists as it is to us.
Take for example two of the recent worst best, best worst cases--Brett Kavanaugh the Judge and Mark Meadows the Legislator. As seen on TV and as reported in the daily newspapers, Kavanaugh and Meadows provided two of the most telling journalistic sequences in recent memory. Did no one else see these sad, minor men, one accepting the nomination for his Judgeship from a criminal and then diving far beneath the watertable of the decency and rectitude one would expect of a Judge, and the Legislator parading his racism on national TV, for who they really are? And if they did see the arrogance, why didn't they say something?
Only our Pundits, those semi-quasi journalists, seeking the ultimate truth of the times and able to intepret the nuances of that truth in such a variety of ways, providing us behind-the-scenes glimpses of our social, cultural and political lives, can make sense of either the arrogance of this power or the timidity of our response. All Power to the Pundits, our Panels and Panels of experts who tell us all we need to know.
Unfortunately for us, or fortunately perhaps, reality being far too much to deal with in either in print journalism form or on TV, journalists themselves make a living in the time that's the best of times and the worst of times, and so their stories, such as they are, are made for mass consumption whether they tell us as little as possible or only as much as we can stand.
Somewhere Jean Genet, a journalist himself, speaks of the dramatic movement of his plays as having action that must be rather evasive--but not vague--in order to leave the spectator confronted with himself alone.
Pundit-of-the-Year after announcing the renunciation of his own consumption of mass media in a sparsely attended press conference held somewhere in the closed-captioned wilds of northwest Wyoming, spring, 2018.