Those TV Terrorism Experts

More and more television networks now keep in-house “experts” to whom they can refer anytime a major terrorist attack occurs. The credibility of these “experts,” on the other hand, is rapidly deteriorating.


In the past, whenever a person was introduced as an “expert” on a television news program or talk show, that was usually a kind of advance apology on the part of the network. It generally meant, here is someone who isn’t good looking enough to be on-screen all the time because he looks like he just woke up; somebody who gets bogged down in uninteresting details and who can only be brought back to the interesting stuff if there’s someone there to keep him focused, and when he’s finished, we think all he did was babble some kind of un-intelligible junk. No matter. He was giving us the benefit of knowledge none of us would have otherwise had; he’s an authority on the subject, and that’s why he appears as a foreign object in the body of our program.

That kind of expert still exists, but he’s gotten tremendous competition lately. More and more TV networks, starting in the USA but now increasingly in Germany as well, have taken to keeping their own in-house “terrorism experts,” their status and identities signified by a hyphen. After every major terrorist attack, our TV screens announce “John Doe – Terrorism Expert.”

We get “CNN Terrorism Analyst” Peter Bergen, “ZDF Terrorism Expert” Elmar Thevessen. ARD has, at a bare minimum, Joachim Wagner, Holger Schmidt, and on and on. These folks look, by and large, quite presentable; like completely normal TV journalists. They speak fluently and distinctly just as they were taught in TV-journalist school. In short, they’re just garden-variety television journalists. The fact that they’re packaged as “experts” for us is simply a symptom of the fact that we’ve lost confidence in the truth of what’s being reported.

Truthfully, every journalist employed by the major media for a specific area is clearly already an expert. Without a good knowledge of their specialties, they wouldn’t be employable. It’s been that way for a long time. Reporters specialize, for example, in the automobile industry, or genetic technology or classical music. The more influential a specific author becomes in his or her field, the less necessary it is to attach the label “expert” to the name. Well, at least up until now . . .

As soon as one of those reporters gives up his day job in the media to try his luck as an author, he’s then eligible to pop up as a guest “expert” back in the media again – like Peter Scholl-Latour, who recently appeared on Anne Will’s show insisting he shouldn’t be designated a “terrorism expert.”

Why this boom in in-house experts? It’s basically an expression of helplessness. In the aftermath of 9/11, television networks also felt the need to arm themselves and invented the ever-ready terrorism expert: Elmar Thevessen, ZDF’s answer to Osama bin Laden.

Far too many journalists who had to deal with critical information concerning investigative agencies and intelligence services exposed themselves as clueless with their senseless babbling about “The War On Terror.” In the final analysis, not only were Saddam’s WMD nowhere to found, the credibility of those who reported the story had also dried up.

George Bush’s sleight-of-hand was, in retrospect, actually enlightening – namely because we learned not to pay so much attention to so-called “insiders.” The story wasn’t much different for the media’s sister discipline, the military experts, who succeeded in being wrong on just about every prediction they made concerning the Iraq war.

Since then, our eyes begin to droop with fatigue whenever Mr. Thevessen says “according to information from military intelligence sources” or Mr. Wagner talks of anything being “denied by official sources.”

What goes through our minds is: “Guys, you don’t have the first clue. No wonder you have to call yourselves experts.”