Most people go to TV news for information on macroeconomic issues.
So, you’d think it would be really important to have macroeconomists on those shows.
Not!
Media Matters did a study of this and found that only 6% of the pundits on TV discussing the current economic situation and the stimulus package were economists.
Media Matters purposefully used a broad definition of "economist" to be inclusive, coding as an economist any guest who has a master's degree or doctorate in economics or who has served as an economics professor at a university or college, as best as we could determine.
Note that this is economists; macroeconomists is a subset that is no doubt smaller still.
I don’t think you can get those kind of numbers by accident. I think it is useful to ask why it is so important for the legacy media to misrepresent their talking heads as economists.
N.B. If you don’t know the meaning of the word in the title, this is a good time to plug in the keywords “define” and “poseur” into Google.
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