Broken News: Man discovers he is an expert just because he's on TV

LOS ANGELES—While stirring approximately $400 worth of high-grade cocaine into his sugar-free Red Bull, he said, “I think I knew when I said something completely dishonest and uniformed about the financial crisis. When no one called me out on my gross misappropriation of recorded history and my seeming inability to understand basic economic theory or even third grade math, I knew I was made in the shade. I was officially an expert because I was on TV.”

This was the conclusion that Dick Norsefire, frequent CNN contributor and panel member of the afternoon political show Grunt, came to this morning during an interview session for a New York Times Sunday Magazine article on his meteoric rise to prominence.

“One day I’m yelling over a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the next day I’m feeding CNBC’s own Billy the Money Goat before they loose him into the Dow Field to christen his ‘Pick of the Day’ with a well-timed defecation onto one of the corporate logos lining the floor,” said Norsefire. “Only in America. Well, maybe England.”

Mr. Norsefire’s own anecdotal realizations confirm a recently released study from Stanford University’s Center for Mass Media Research that addressed a four-year look into television commentators and the expertise that viewers ascribe to them. The study, entitled Why We’re Fucked: How the Rise of 24 Hour News and America’s Decline are Inexorably Intertwined, not only found that individuals are considered "experts" in any field so long as their countenance floats above an American flag-backed graphic declaring such, but, more tellingly, that the degree of perceived "expertise" rose or fell depending on several clearly defined variables.

“What we found is that there were three main areas that affected perception of intelligence,” said lead analyst for the study Dr. Fausto Mendes, who privately admitted to weeping for society at the conclusion of the four-year project. "One directly correlated with the volume at which the televised personality spoke. The second had to do with the moral assuredness with which the expert spoke. Finally, the third had to do with how much time the expert spent assuring his audience that he was as close to being a salt-of-the-earth pig farmer as a pampered TV analyst making six figures could possibly be. The more these three areas were emphasized, the more people trusted their words. Accuracy never entered into the equation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pitch myself into a ravine.”

When factoring in a ranking system for moral assuredness, dubbed the Hannity Scale, a commentator raking in the 8’s or 9’s could blithely pass off large-scale falsities to the masses with impunity. In fact, if a TV expert ever reached the level of HS10, convincing their own brain of the accuracy of what they were saying, they could even convince others to disregard simple scientific precepts such as gravity or simple historical facts such as the existence of George Washington. They found similar trends when accounting for voice volume, or, as it has come to be known, "The Cramer Factor."

"I’m inclined to believe that study, even though I didn’t see anything about it on TV,” said a relaxed and reassured Norsefire shortly before his afternoon appearance on Fox Business Network's Noblesse Oblige stock tips program. “I remember when I was yelling at that Dr. Nobel guy or whatever about how the dwarves had over-mined our gold resources and plunged us into a recession. The louder I got and the more I talked over his math talk, the more I was convinced that I was right.”

When presented with the results of the study several of the program directors and booking agents for the major news networks were quick to uniformly dismiss the results of the study. They also attack the perception that basing air time around attractiveness, catch phrases, yelling, moral certainty, treating the world as a black & white place of absolutes, and not keeping track of whether these people were even factually correct or had a track record of success was somehow contributing to a degrading of public debate and news media effectiveness.

One executive producer was even said to have remarked “Why should I believe these so-called scientists? They aren’t even on TV!”

“Swish! Money in the bank,” Norsefire was heard to yell at a mirror while pumping his fist. “Oh sorry, were you saying something? I was just practicing my new catchphrase. This baby’s gonna get me my own show, maybe even on prime time. Thank you TV. Man, I’m so glad I quit my job at that think tank, otherwise people just wouldn’t have taken me seriously.”