That headline has been bouncing around in my head quite a bit. Given I happen to be blogging from the momentary center of the interactive punditry universe – a.k.a. SXSW 2011 – it’s even more immediate.

Too often pundits (and the legions of pundit aspirants) spend more time crafting a controversial headline or capitalizing on a popular event, buzzword, or news item than trying to shine any real light on a subject.

It’s not that there isn’t any information on, well, pretty much whatever you want to learn about. And that’s a good thing. What’s not is that too much of what’s out there is not particularly accurate. Or insightful. Or useful. Or honest.

I have no answer to this problem. It’s a problem that doesn’t get written about much online (can’t imagine why!). In that sense it’s an elephant in the room that the concentric social circles of interactive punditry pretends isn’t there.

Why the elephant? A few thoughts:

• Visibility pays. Purchasers of consulting services find security in the idea that the person they hire is well-known and highly visible. But visibility and effectiveness are two different things, aren’t they? Here’s a little truism: in this business, those who focus on self-promotion are seldom very good at execution. The opposite is also usually true.
• Deadline frequency is much higher than “original thought or idea” frequency.
• Writers don’t have time to dig deeply into complex issues and/or do original research…
• …Or maybe they don’t know how… How many writers at the places you follow studied journalism and/or business?
• …Or care. How many even think adding real value is key to long term success? I wonder.
• A lot of authors that dominate the thought landscape aren’t doing much other than speaking, writing, etc. These people inevitably are talking about doing work much more than they are actually working.
• Authors are paid to generate content that gets clickthroughs – not to enlighten us. Readers are lured to content in myriad ways – often only to be disappointed and (occasionally) misinformed. But by the time a reader realizes they’ve been suckered, it’s too late. Time has been wasted, the page has a hit, and the only recourse left is to leave a scathing comment…but in this brave new online media world, that comment can be culled. Later it can be counted, summed with other comments, and put in an “engagement” chart (Twain’s “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” is in full force).

…So, other than personal ethics, there ain’t much incentive to avoid doing unhelpful things like:

• Writing a post that is equivalent to re-posting someone else’s original thoughts.
• Writing a post that doesn’t mention the likely bias of one or more sources because the conclusions derived are assumed to be well-received by readers.
• Writing a post with a headline that has been twisted for “maximum provocation” and has no relation to the article which follows it.
• Writing a post such that anyone remotely educated on the topic would find it so biased as to be worthless.

Not sure there’s an answer to this. Still – with apologies to Michael Stipe and R.E.M. – I feel better having screamed. Don’t you?

Editor’s Note: This post has also been published to the Gage Marketing blog.