The Big City

I listened to the interview with the unreal Guy Kewney again and I realised that there’s something quite scary about it. At the start of the first answer the confused guest is clearly out of his depth. By the end of the third answer the presenter has managed to adapt her tone and questions to make it sound a little bit like he knows what he’s talking about.

Expert interviewees have a strange status in broadcast media. Presenters rarely challenge what they are saying, partly because the presenter doesn’t know anything about the subject but also because the network’s credibility depends on the experts credibility. If you demonstrate on air that your pundit is wrong then the audience will wonder why on earth you chose that particular person in the first place. The unfortunate consequence is that ‘experts’ frequently get away with the most absurd views and the audience has only a shadowy doubt in their mind about what they just heard.

Guy Kewney had a lot to say about the Apple vs Apple case. He said on his blog that Apple Corps (The Beatles) would probably win. He said that Apple Computer would probably have to remove the Apple logo from iTunes and iPods. After the judgement he said that he thought that the judge got it wrong. But he’s not a lawyer, he’s a technology writer who predicted the wrong outcome, why should we care what he thinks? Maybe what the cab driver said in his interview, that people are keen on downloading music and they like choice, was actually no less substantial and incisive than what Mr Kewney would have said. And at least he didn’t try to sound authoritative about things he didn’t really know about.

Mr Kewney also makes a great deal of fuss about the fact that he is white, very white he says, while the cab driver who took his place on the air was black. In fact, in his blog it sounds like he thinks that they should have noticed the mistake not because of what the accidental guest said but because of what he looked like. I think he’s completely wrong about that as well.