You couldn't make it up dept. no.33: All Britain is talking about it

[fpb]

And sniggering. A couple of days ago, a BBC TV show invited an expert on internet economics to discuss recent developments. Owing to some sort of mix-up, they showed into the studio, not the expert, but the cabbie who had driven him in. The cabbie had no idea what was going on, but, with years of experience on the road chatting to all sorts of customers, he acquitted himself quite well.

Morale no.1: what with the constant pressure on employees, the privatization, casualization, and increasingly temporary nature of jobs, professional skills are dying out and being replaced by a despair to get the product out no matter what.

Morale no.2: 50% of being an expert is, and has always been, a matter of being able to bullshit your way through a situation. Especially on TV.

Comments

[bufo-viridis.livejournal.com]

Truth is, unless the journalist has really made his homework - very rare case - and the program has a very clearly designed formula - even rarer occurence - the dscussions are so shallo that almost any reasonably intelligent person, who reads newspapers and doesn't forget the words in front of camera, can make a pretty good expert.
I had one occasion to "play an expert" - I was given two hours for preparing, one and three quarters of which I used for extracting the questions from the journalist.
I had five minutes in front of camera and was supposed to describe "developments in PRC foreign politics in the last 10 years". No bloody kidding.
Had they warned me day before I'd be even able to prepare a few interesting facts, but...