Ouch! Slate - "Chris Cillizza Is a Bad Pundit and a Good Sport"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/07/chris_cillizza_s_reddit_ama_went_about_how_you_d_expect.html

His disastrous Reddit AMA revealed how those traits go hand in hand.

By Will Oremus

It stands to reason that someone, somewhere, thinks Chris Cillizza is good at political commentary. The Washington Post kept him on for 12 years, after all, before CNN hired him away this March, apparently on purpose.


That someone, however, was not in evidence on Tuesday afternoon, when Cillizza decided it was a good idea to invite random strangers to ask him questions on Reddit. He got the ball rolling by introducing his newly launched project, the Point With Chris Cillizza, as “a multiplatform brand that helps you cut through the crap,” not bothering to cut through the crap of his own description. It was all downhill from there.


To his credit, Cillizza seemed unfazed as one Redditor after another rightly eviscerated him for his glib approach to political analysis, in which there is no such thing as right and wrong, only winners and losers.

Cillizza largely ignored the barbs, opting to answer softballs such as “How did you get your first job in journalism?” and “Chris, how much do you really make?” (His reassuring answer: definitely less than $10 million per year.)

He did, however, give precisely one illuminating answer, which helped to simultaneously explain what makes him such a bad pundit and why the criticism of his punditry seems to roll off his back. It came when he graciously responded to a question from Fusion’s Libby Watson, which the r/politics moderators had apparently deleted in a misguided and ultimately fruitless effort to stem the flood of brutally critical questions. Cillizza paraphrased Watson’s question as, “Why do so many journalists think you suck?” His answer was essentially a shrug emoji in prose form:

snip - more to read, including all of the posts on Reddit